With snackmaker Pork King Good, Lauren Koston (along with her co-founder and husband, Rick), is building a pork rind empire and having a good time doing it. What started in the basement of a wee Ohio home is now housed in a sizeable Wisconsin facility—and looking to move into even bigger digs. Here’s the story.

Courtesy of Pork King Good

Meat cute

Rick and I actually met online in South Florida in 2009. I was born and raised in Miami and was working in marketing and revenue management for a group of hotels in South Beach. Rick, originally from Cleveland, was living in West Palm Beach, where he worked in graphic design and web development. We had our first date on Hollywood Beach and somehow, during that very first date, decided we should probably just become boyfriend and girlfriend. A month later I moved in with him, three years later we got married, and now—17 years later—we’re still doing life (and pork rinds) together.

Courtesy of Pork King Good

In 2013, I made the decision to completely give up carbs and sugar for good. In the process, I reversed my pre-diabetes and lost over 120 pounds. At the time, there weren’t many products on the market that made a low-carb lifestyle sustainable—but there were pork rinds. The problem was, the ones on the market were, to put it politely, not great. There were basically no flavor options, and the texture reminded me of chewing on packing peanuts. Still, I kept buying them because I needed something to snack on. One day, I realized that I could crush them up and use them as zero-carb breading so I could still eat comfort foods I missed like chicken fingers and mozzarella sticks. This led to a moment where I thought, “If I’m doing this, other people probably are, too”—and more importantly, “What if we could actually reinvent pork rinds?

I never saw myself as an entrepreneur. Running a company never felt like something I was capable of. Rick, on the other hand, has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. He came up with the hilariously edgy name Pork King Good, which still makes people laugh out loud when they get it, and he designed all of our branding, packaging, and website himself. We gave up our careers, sold our home, moved to his hometown of Cleveland to lower our expenses, and went all-in on the idea.

In 2018, Pork King Good launched out of the basement of our 900-square-foot house. Looking back, that decision was either incredibly brave… or incredibly stupid. Probably a little bit of both.

Growing wild

Crazy growth is an understatement! We’ve basically been pedal to the metal since day one, working as hard as humanly possible to make sure we didn’t just blow up our previous lives for nothing. Here’s what the last seven and a half years have looked like:

• August 2018: We launched out of our basement. Our manufacturer was the Porkie Company of Wisconsin, a 75-year-old family business and the only pork rind manufacturer in the country willing to take a chance on us and our crazy ideas.
• December 2018: We had launched entirely online because we knew absolutely nothing about retail. In our first four months we brought in $150,000 in sales and started thinking, “Okay… maybe we’ve actually got something here.”
• December 2019: By the end of our first full year, we hit $900,000 in sales. We were shipping so many packages from our house that a USPS rep literally showed up at our door to see what was going on. We brought him down to our tiny basement and said, “This is Pork King Good!”
• Spring 2021: We became the Porkie Company’s biggest customer, helping them achieve the best revenue year in their history. The owner was 81 and ready to retire. Rather than sell to a big corporation, he offered us the chance to buy the entire company—because he trusted we’d treat it and his employees with the same care he had.
• May 2022: We officially acquired the Porkie Company. That meant selling our home in Ohio and moving to Milwaukee. We went from six employees to nearly thirty overnight and suddenly had to figure out how to run a 42,000-square-foot USDA manufacturing plant. Rick likes to say this was the moment we went from “two idiots with a Shopify account” to actual manufacturers.
• August 2022: We acquired a competing brand—Bacon’s Heir—and their Pork Panko product line. Now we were merging three companies at once. At the same time, Rick became very ill and had to undergo seven emergency surgeries over three and a half years. Rick says now, “I figured if we were going to build a pork rind empire, I probably shouldn’t die halfway through it.” Thankfully, he’s doing great now.
• December 2025: What started as a basement idea grew into a company doing $12 million in sales with products in over 7,000 retail locations, while still maintaining a massive direct-to-consumer business—including hitting the Top 10 in Grocery on TikTok Shop.

Blasting off and having fun

Honestly, we’re just being ourselves. We’re both as quirky and goofy as it gets, and we decided early on that our brand was going to reflect that same energy. Apparently people enjoy a snack company that doesn’t take itself too seriously. We have a truck wrap that says “Go Pork Yourself!” across the back, and we wear “Your Mom Eats Pork Rinds” shirts at trade shows. Rick always says if we’re going to make pork rinds for a living, we might as well have some fun with it. No shame in our pork game.

Pork King Good has officially achieved its mission of reinventing pork rinds. We’ve become a multi-award-winning brand with 16 pork rind flavors and counting, our best-selling Pork Rind “Bread” Crumbs, a line of wildly popular seasonings, a Wisconsin-favorite line of pickled eggs and sausages, and our newest product—a first-of-its-kind Pork Rind Breaded Frozen Chicken Nugget, which we’ve trademarked as Chicken Puggets.

Courtesy of Pork King Good

Our beloved Puggets were incredibly challenging to bring to life—a three-year endeavor that started during COVID—but boy, were they worth the wait. Puggets pack 17 g of protein per serving, are completely gluten-free, and have about half the carbs of America’s leading nugget.

The seasoning line we mentioned started as a side hustle because customers kept asking for our pork rind seasoning as a standalone product. Then it went viral; our Dill Pickle and Salt & Vinegar seasonings sold 90,000 units online in three weeks.

Why has Pork King Good has been so successful? Honestly, because we’ve had a complete and total refusal to fail. These seven and a half years have been the hardest and most terrifying work of our lives—but building something from absolutely nothing and creating products that people genuinely love has been the most rewarding experience we could have imagined.

Courtesy of Pork King Good

There’s an indescribable level of pride that comes from seeing a random customer in a grocery store grab your product off the shelf and knowing it all started in a tiny basement with a crazy idea and endless late nights. We’re extremely humble people and definitely deal with a bit of imposter syndrome on a regular basis. When we hear a stranger say, “I love this brand,” we sometimes look at each other and quietly wonder if they’re mistaking us for a much larger national company.

Or maybe the real key to our success is that all along we’ve just been making the foods that we personally want to eat. We’ve never introduced a product to market that we weren’t obsessed with ourselves. Well, maybe with the exception of our Stupid Hot flavor of pork rinds, that is. Props to all of our customers who can handle that level of spice.

Courtesy of Pork King Good

We always look at each other and laugh when we get comments at tradeshows like “This is seriously the best pork rind I’ve ever tried—kudos to your product development team!” Rick and I are the product development team!

What’s next

Between inventory needs and repacks for our D2C and QVC business, we’re completely out of warehouse space in our 80-year-old building—we’re bursting at the seams. We’re in that messy middle where we’re trying to decide whether we attempt to move our entire production plant to a new facility or leave production where it is and move warehouse and distribution elsewhere. Ideally, we’re looking for 80,000+ square feet somewhere in the Milwaukee area with room to expand down the road. We’re trying to get ahead of the problem before things get even busier this year.

Courtesy of Pork King Good

We’re making a massive push into the convenience store channel this year, continuing hyper-growth in grocery, launching into Dot Foods and foodservice for the first time, releasing a second SKU of our frozen Chicken Puggets, and working on a top-secret project that will open pork rinds up to yet ANOTHER grocery category. Let’s just say… we’re going to continue to turn some heads. We’re excited, motivated, and ready for whatever comes next. And most importantly—we’re still having a Pork King Good time doing it!