Mar 12, 2026
By Rick McNary
The first thing I noticed when I met Kelly Perry the first time in the fall of 2020 were all of the USPS Flat Rate boxes of Perry’s Pork Rinds stacked on her front porch ready to be shipped. But they were nothing compared to her living room, dining room and kitchen, which were lined wall to wall with even more boxes in their home in Bronson.
“This is crazy,” she laughed as she handed me a pork rind to taste. “We had no idea it would turn into this. We started doing this just to make a little cash for a long-overdue honeymoon.”
Kelly, and her husband, Thaddeus, had the idea to make pork rinds they could sell at festivals in the area to supplement their income in their town of 300 souls. At the time, he was driving an hour each way as a butcher in a meat locker and she was working for a medical office in their small town.
“We watched a video of how to make pork rinds, borrowed a big kettle and ordered our first bag of rinds for $250,” Kelly says. “We found out we could legally do it at home, then went to our first show, which was miserably cold and rainy, but we sold out so we did more.”
Their business continued to grow and, in time, they purchased an old gas station along U.S. Highway 54 in Bronson, built a new building and moved their operations there. They are in a food desert, which means there are no grocery stores nearby, so they decided to expand the store into rural grocery store, diner and even added an RV park.
“If I see a need, I am going to do my best to fulfill that need,” Kelly says. “I knew some local producers needed a delivery system for their products, so we offered them shelf space. There was no place to eat, so we added a diner. It’s at least a 30-minute drive to a grocery store, so we started offering more in the way of groceries.”
“However,” she continues. “I learned I can’t be all things to all people. We started Perry’s Pork Rinds because we had dreams of it becoming a national model. But things like diners and grocery stores and RV parks take a lot of time, and we’ve discovered that while it breaks even, we often don’t have enough money to pay ourselves. We were stretched too thin.”
She and Thaddeus went back to their original plan of making their business all about pork rinds, which is the part they enjoy the most. Recently, they've adjusted the store hours to focus on pork rinds.
“Thaddeus is about all about pork rinds,” she laughs. “He’s always coming up with new flavors and ways in which we can turn this into a national, wholesale business. While we do sell and ship to customers across the nation, we need to scale up the pork rind business in such a way as to make it national. That means we need to be more singularly focused.
“Hey, this is my first time on the planet and I don’t know everything,” she jokes. “We are making this up as we go. Running a small business in a rural setting has a lot of challenges and we told ourselves three years ago that after three years, we were going to sit down and take a hard look at where we were and where we wanted to go. We want Perry’s Pork Rinds in stores all over the nation so are making the readjustments along the way to make that happen.”
Kelly and Thaddeus remind me of a piece of advice a commercial airline pilot once gave me, “Once the plane leaves the ground headed for a certain destination, it makes a lot of course corrections before it actually lands. Course corrections are necessary if you want to arrive at your goal.”
Learn more about at Perry’s Pork Rinds.