Our Commitment

Read all about our commitment to provide you with the highest-quality dinanche and Guam's best jerky, using only locally-sourced ingredients — all from our veteran-owned small business.

Absolute highest quality. Period.

When it comes to quality, we're not willing to budge at all.

Inspected. Each vegetable that makes its way into our hands is inspected by us to ensure that it meets our very high standards. If it doesn't, we don't use it. It's as simple as that.

Cleaned. Every vegetable is sanitized and soaked. Anything that doesn't belong in the food we make will rise to the surface and be removed. After that, our vegetables are washed and ready for cutting.

Hand-cut. This one takes a lot of time. Every ingredient that goes into our food is hand-cut. Onions? Often we cut 300 pounds at a time. And we cry. Oh, believe us, we cry. But we cut them anyway. All 300 pounds of them. By hand. Because we care enough to do that.

Not blended. Some other dinanches on the market are blended. Our dinanche is not. Why? 3 reasons. First, our grandparents didn't blend theirs, and it matters to us to keep that traditional way of doing things. Second, we want you to know what you're eating. In our dinanche, you can clearly see what you're putting into your body... and you can clearly see the quality. Third, when you blend your dinanche, you can skimp out on the good stuff, or use lesser-quality ingredients, and nobody will ever know. Well, we don't do that. Like we said, in our dinanche, you can clearly see the quality you're eating.

Jerky = nice.

Our jerky may have the word "jerk" in the name, but it's actually very nice.

Marinated. All the beef we use in our jerky is marinated in our own dinanche for at least 24 hours. Sometimes it's marinated for more — but never less.

De-fatted. We want our meat to be fat-free, because fat and other water content in any jerky causes it to spoil faster. That's why we don't use a meat cutter. Instead, we cut all the meat by hand so we can make sure we're getting all the fat out. We de-fat the whole chunk of meat, inside and out, and then we can start to slice it.

Dehydrated. This step is what makes jerky jerky. We monitor this process very carefully. The less water content there is in our jerky, the longer the jerky will last, but the harder the jerky will be. We want our product to have a good shelf life, but we don't want to eat something so dry that it feels like it used to be a belt.

Preservative-free. Some other jerkys have a high fat content, but they make it work by hiding it under a casing, drying it, and loading it with preservatives. We, on the other hand, don't want to compromise on quality like that. Our jerky is 100% preservative-free, so you know exactly what you're putting... or rather, what you're not putting into your body. And despite not using preservatives, our jerky still lasts 3 months from the time you open the package.

Hand-cut... again. When we first started selling our jerky, it was in larger slices. Often we'd see someone take a bite, and if they thought it was too spicy, they'd toss out the rest of the piece. We learned, and we adapted. Today, we hand-cut each piece of beef down to bite-size pieces. This helps keep waste to a minimum. And it means you can take as much or as little as you want, and leave the rest for later, or to share.

Locally-sourced everything.
Even the jars.

When it comes to our products, we source as much of it locally as possible. Each and every vegetable we use — all our donne sali, eggplant, wing beans, long beans, and more — 100% of the vegetables we use are grown on Guam by our farmer friends. In the case that the farmers are out of stock, we scour every last local market until we find whatever remaining supply they have from the same local farmers. That is how commitmed we are to using only grown-on-Guam vegetables.

Some things, however, like the beef in our beef jerky, do not originate on Guam, since there are no cow farmers on Guam. In those cases, we buy all our beef from local sources.

Even our packaging is locally-sourced. We could save a lot of money by importing glass jars ourselves, but instead, we buy jars and lids from a local vendor. We even get our labels printed by a local print shop. Our t-shirts, aprons, even on down to the bags we use — everything is locally-sourced and locally-printed. Everything.

Veteran-owned.

This is very, very important to us. Local Jerk is a locally-owned and veteran-owned small business. Marvin and Christina Crisostomo are proud to bring their family tradition of homemade dinanche to your family, and Marvin is proud to have spent 14 years in the United States Army National Guard.

When he was on deployment, Marvin and his close-knit squad would come back from missions with high adrenaline, and they would each go off and do their own thing to try to release that energy. Some would hit the gym, others would shower, run, or rest. Everyone was scattered. But one thing changed all that: eating. Food was the one thing that not only brought everyone together... it also helped them de-stress together.