Topics: Building a business, entrepreneurship, community-focused business, local business, rural grocery store, pork rinds

From Pork Rinds to Community Groceries: A Rural Success Story

In this episode of Retail Retold, Chris Ressa chats with Kelly Perry, co-owner of Perry’s Pork Rinds and Country Store in Bronson, Kansas. Kelly shares her journey from starting an e-commerce pork rind business to owning a multi-SKU grocery store in a town of 304 people. Faced with numerous challenges including licensing, food handling certification, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Kelly and her husband transitioned from their full-time jobs to build a thriving rural grocery store. With a focus on community relationships, local sourcing, and innovative product offerings, Perry’s Pork Rinds and Country Store has become a local favorite and achieved significant growth. Kelly’s inspiring story underscores resilience and entrepreneurial spirit, making this episode a must-listen for anyone interested in community-focused business success.

00:00 Introduction to Retail Retold
00:22 Meet Kelly Perry: From Kansas to pork rinds
01:18 The Unexpected journey to retail
02:35 Building a business from scratch
04:19 Expanding during the pandemic
06:15 Creating a micro grocery store
08:30 Learning the retail ropes
11:41 Community engagement and produce programs
13:39 The popularity of fresh produce
16:01 The difference between pork rinds and cracklins
18:20 24-Hour access inspiration
19:50 Website impressions and social media
20:14 Sales and Growth Journey
21:25 Expanding beyond the store
22:24 Online sales and email marketing
23:40 Local sourcing and community engagement
26:24 Building the store and overcoming challenges
28:29 Unique products and customer service
32:05 Future plans and pork rind expansion
34:48 Fun questions and conclusion

About Retail Retold:

The Retail Retold Podcast highlights community retailer stories from across the country and gives a behind-the-scenes perspective from business leaders in both retail and real estate industries. The show’s episodes contain valuable insights that help solve the needs of entrepreneurs and real estate pros. Join host Chris Ressa and new guests weekly for amazing insights and thought-provoking stories.

Transcript:

[00:00:17] Chris Ressa: Welcome to Retail Retold everyone. Today I’m joined by Kelly Perry.

Kelly is co-owner with her husband of the Perry’s Pork Rinds and Country Store in Bronson, Kansas. I

‘m excited for her to be here. Welcome to the show, Kelly.

[00:00:36] Kelly Perry: Thank you very much. It’s great to be here.

[00:00:40] Chris Ressa: So ,Kelly I’m curious, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Great name of a business, by the way.

[00:00:50] Kelly Perry: Thank you. It’s we’re pretty proud. It’s actually our last name. So, I am a Kansas gal and from a rural small town about an hour south of here. And my husband actually grew up 14 miles away from me. And neither one of us had ever known each other, but Parsons, Kansas, Southeast Kansas, Pittsburgh.

We’re about an hour and a half. south of Kansas City metro area. And we have absolutely no history or background in running a retail store. And so this has been quite an adventure for the last two years, getting to learn everything from rules, regulations, licensing, to really just setting up and running an actual brick and mortar.

We transitioned from an e-commerce store selling pork rinds. We had absolutely no intentions of starting a business and we just fell into it and the doors opened up. My husband and I, we have been together for actually 16 years and we have four kids between the two of us and all of our kids are pretty much grown. Seven years ago, we took on the idea that we were going to make some extra money to go on a honeymoon that we had never had the money to do.

And we were going to go on a Carnival Cruise. We were going to make funnel cakes and pork rinds at the local rodeo in a town of 300 and where my grandparents are.

[00:02:20] Chris Ressa: I saw Bronson. Kansas, as of the 2020 census has 304 people. So this is true small town. I often say I grew up in a small town, but this is small town.

[00:02:32] Kelly Perry: This is small town. Very small.

So we started. We were making pork rinds and we had a few extra leftover after the end of the night, and it was a disaster. We had no food handling. certification. We didn’t know what we were doing. But we knew how to make good food.

We knew how to make pork rinds. So we had a few left over and I posted they would be left over and anybody who wanted them to message me. And so they did. And we had such an online response that I thought, man, we should sell it the next local fair or whatever. So we did, and it continued to grow and take off.

And we started our actual LLC, a friend of ours is an accountant, and she did all the paperwork for us and helped me muddle through that. We literally launched our rural grocery store off of the back of our pork rind business. We had four flavors, four different SKUs at the time. So 2017 we started, and in 2018 I quit my job.

I worked as an HR person for a telecommunications company locally. And so I stopped that job and started focusing more on getting the legalities and the training, the certification and things for our pork rind business to grow. And then I finally convinced my husband, who was a butcher, one of our local, very few butchers that we have to quit his job after 22 years and walk away.

And we were going to build Kansas’s first pork rind store. And that’s all it was going to be. We were just going to quit selling pork rinds at fairs and festivals and make this little roadside store where people could pop in and get these specialty pork rinds. And I convinced him to quit his job.

We were at Topeka, Kansas selling one day and we got the news that our next festival was canceled. And then I got another one before the end of the day that our next festival was canceled and we didn’t realize it at the time, but we had both stepped away from our jobs and we’re on this new adventure and the pandemic hit.

He was getting calls from everyone, “hey, come back and butcher. Hey, we need a guy to come here” The meat was in demand. And we muddled through by growing our online base and it went crazy throughout the pandemic and we knew that we were outgrowing our home. And so we decided we were going to go ahead and purchase a local gas station that had been closed for several years.

And it was just about ready to go up on the tax sale. And I thought, let me call this guy and see if he wants to sell us this property. And we did. And he said, yeah, there’s a few things I want out of that old building before you do it. And we agreed. And so we saved up the money and we paid cash, little or nothing.

Again, our town is 300 and most people overlook these rural communities and they’re driving right past. We have a major highway 54. It actually goes from, I think it’s El Paso, Texas, all the way to Colorado. And so we have a lot of traffic just in front of our property. And I can see our rural grocery store from my front porch.

And I said, let’s buy this property. And my husband’s Oh, I think it’s going to be great because it’s along the highway. I think it’s going to be perfect. And so we did, we bought it in 2019. He never has gone back to butchering, and we continued pushing forward. By the time we got our loans and things worked out with the bank and got a contractor found throughout the pandemic, which was hard.

We were slated to start in March of 2022 with construction, with a local crew. And we hired everyone locally and rurally and we started to build. And as we were building, people would stop by and they would say, are you going to have milk? Are you guys going to have bread? Are you guys going to carry groceries?

And I would say, “Oh yeah, we’re going to do that.” You’re being a salesperson. I never tell someone, no. I sat “Oh yeah, we do that. Of course we can do that. We can go to the moon.” And my husband is super supportive and he never says no. And he said he said “yeah, anything you want, babe, if you want to put milk in there, go for it.”

He’s here to make the pork rinds. His focus has always been laser focused on the pork rinds. And I started getting ahold of some contract or some vendors and I then realized how hard it is to get the supplies to a rural grocery store. And we went back and we redrafted our blueprints to make room because again, this was just going to be a place to make pork rinds.

And so we redrafted the blueprints and did a change order. And we ended up putting in a micro grocery store is what the state and everyone refers to it as. When I’m telling you that it’s a micro grocery store The entire building is 20, excuse me, is 40 foot wide by 60 foot long, and it’s very rural, very tiny.

And we took the first 26 foot by 40 foot and we ended up making that our grocery store. And in that little 925-ish square foot space, we serve a full deli meat and cheese. We slice fresh. meats and cheeses. We have a three-door refrigerator. We have a three-door freezer. We have a fountain machine. We have a coke refrigerator.

We have an eight-foot fudge display and we self-handmade fudge in the store. And we also have a little, we call it a cafe or a diner. And we have just a small menu with sandwiches, cheeseburgers, fries, portobello mushrooms, Frito chili pies. Chicken strips, popcorn, shrimp, popcorn, chicken, things that you would find maybe at a gas station, but maybe at the local little cafe.

And we have not stopped, but it was a challenge in the beginning. Because a, I come from a background of working in offices and in nursing, and he’s a butcher. Neither one of us knew what POS referred to. We had no idea of point of sales. We had no idea that even just to sell plants in our rural grocery store, because we sell mums in the fall and stuff that we needed a license to do that.

We muddled our way through it. And really what has helped us along is I always. that it’s our faith. But I always say it’s the grace of God finding and the right doors opening when they’re supposed to. I was looking specifically for milk and I had called a supplier and I asked him for their pricing and they sent it over and they sent me their minimum.

And then I went to the local Walmart, which you have to know the local Walmart is about 26 miles one way. And that is one of the closest grocery stores and retail stores is Walmart. And so I went there and I was looking at the same brand of milk and I was like, man, that guy, the numbers he gave me are about three times that much.

And I was very confused as to how Walmart could sell it cheaper than what he was offering it to me for. Again, I’m very green here. I was highly confused. And yeah. So I’m searching rural grocery and I just happened to come across the Rural Grocery Initiative through Kansas State, and it just happened to be their biannual conference and it’s their national conference and lo and behold it was actually two hours away in Wichita, Kansas.

And it was the last day to enroll to sign up to go to the conference. And so I, we’re about a month into construction at this point, I would say a month into construction. And I said to my husband, I said, do you care if I go to this grocery store conference? And he’s whatever you want, babe.

So, I signed up and went and I was there for two or three days. And I sat through breakout sessions. I learned about taxes. I learned about regulations. I learned about supplies. I learned about so much and I just fell in love with it. And since then, I’ve used, I’ve gone through some retail training with them.

I’ve gone through insight summit. They have helped me to grow and network and learn things, even about how to properly display things and set the store up where you want to put certain items before you walk out the door, what needs to be next to the cash register, they’ve really helped do all of that.

And so we have now been open for two years in July and we have over a thousand SKUs and that does include our pork rinds it is still sold here and made here in the store, but we accept EBT and of course all major forms of payment, okay, you know We now understand what a point of sale system is.

We’ve learned about getting scales and getting them certified through the state. We do a partnership program with a local nonprofit, the Healthy Bourbon County Action Team. Our president and CEO Jody Love has been great in implementing some things throughout our region. And so, we created a produce program.

We do produce boxes and essentially we mark them down to where families can afford these produce boxes. And what it does is it drives sales into the store. It initiates healthy eating and fosters food access to a rural area that didn’t have food access before. So as an example, about two months ago when school started up, in this little farm town in Southeast Kansas, we sold about, I think it was 200 pounds of bananas and pineapples.

We sold probably, oh gosh, eight or 10 cases of pineapples. We try to do something each month that brings fresh nourishment and access to food that people wouldn’t normally have. Surprise, surprise. I learned a lot about strawberries and how to store them. So, we did some sales with strawberries and you get creative when you’re rural, you don’t want to lose your hind in, everything we work for we’ve been doing this eight years now.

So for six years, everything we built and we started the business with, and we’re not, we don’t come from generational wealth. We started our business. One of the reasons we resonate with folks is especially in our rural area is because they know us. They know we started the business with $250.That’s all we had in our savings account. And when we started the business of course it was pork rinds and that helped to grow and give us the capital we needed to start and the foundation of the grocery store business.

One of the biggest things that is really surprising me is how people really crave that fresh produce.

And we do try to source locally when we can. But just as a prime example, we partnered with another rural grocery store about an hour south of here, and we sold Florida strawberries and we pre-sold them. You can come into the store, you can buy it over the phone or you can hop online and buy it. So, we pre-sell them and then we tell the customers come at this day and at this time and the strawberries will be here ready for pickup.

So little did we know we had to have a county sheriff come in direct traffic because we had sold five pallets of strawberries and filled half a semi with fresh strawberries and we had four lines going through our little grocery store and they didn’t want there to be a wreck on that highway I was talking about in front of us.

We brought in Colorado peaches the same way. We sold a lot of Colorado peaches. But we try to give access to just things that people are normally not getting in our area. And very unique and amazing. They’re supportive and receptive. Like they love it.

[00:14:49] Chris Ressa: You have an amazing story, Kelly.

So I have a million questions. I’m not sure we’ll get to them all. So let’s start with one of the important ones. Because I don’t think a lot of my listeners know because I was listening intently to your whole story. What is a Frito pie?

[00:15:07] Kelly Perry: A Frito pie. What is a Frito pie? A Frito chili pie.

That’s the corn chips with handmade chili on top and then you can load it up with shredded cheese and onions and sour cream and jalapenos. You can get them a lot at local baseball and football games. It’s more of a concession stand food but people absolutely love it.

[00:15:33] Chris Ressa: Got it. Okay. I’ve seen at concession stands I’ve actually, I’ve seen, there recently I saw a walking taco, which is a bag of Fritos with Chili meat and cheese and stuff and you eat it with a fork.

And I was surprised at how many kids were ordering a walking taco. So

[00:15:53] Kelly Perry: And we do taco burgers!

[00:15:54] Chris Ressa: That’s my first question. Second question. How do you make pork rinds? What are we doing here?

[00:16:08] Kelly Perry: What sets us apart, which I know it’s a funny question that you’re asking, but what sets us apart is ours are not mass produced. It is the epidermis, it’s the skin of the pig, and it is a meat product, so they’re, typically anybody that wants to eat them, whether it’s keto, paleo, Atkins, diabetic, it’s a different way.

No carbohydrates, but it’s a protein. It’s not a significant amount of protein, but it is a protein snack and they’re dehydrated. They look almost the size of a poker chip and about the same thickness and they’re called pellets. And then you drop them into oil and you fry them and he fries them, I believe at 400 degrees.

I try to stay out of the kitchen. I stay in my lane. He’ll tell me like, what are you doing in here? This is my territory. He’ll say, go back to the office. But yeah, he fries them and after he fries them then he seasons them by hand. They’re all fried and strained and seasoned by hand. And think of a popcorn kernel cooking it oil on the stove, like back in the day, the whirly pop.

But think of the oil and just how that really just fluffs up. They, the consistency of ours is very different. They’re very light and fluffy. A lot of times people ask the question if they’re are they hard? And I’m like no. That’s a cracklin. That’s a hard cracklin. That’s from the belly of the pig and it has a thick layer of fat.

And you see how I can ramble on.

[00:17:32] Chris Ressa: So on your website you have pork rinds and cracklins. So tell me what cracklin is.

[00:17:37] Kelly Perry: So the crackling is a denser, thicker crunch, and it comes from the underside of the pig. And it also has a layer of fat on it. And typically they’re smaller and they don’t puff up.

And they are, it’s a lot harder of a crunch. More often you’ll find a crackling in the South. Deep South Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina, all up on the East coast. Those are pretty popular. The more north you go, people want pork rind, which are a lighter, fluffier, almost a cheese ball consistency.

Not a hard crunch.

[00:18:12] Chris Ressa: Yeah, I’ve had them before, pork rinds. Not sure I’ve had crackling but it’s right there up on your website.

So, how did you find me?

[00:18:20] Kelly Perry: I listen and read everything I can absorb. And I was reading a newsletter through K-State rural grocery initiative.

And there was a Minnesota grocery store that had 24-hour access. And the thought intrigued me of how this little bitty town had 24-hour access to their grocery store, because obviously we’re in a rural area and. And people will call me – and I’m not mad! They helped to build this business. This is how I have a job that I get to do that I love.

But they’ll say the football game just got over. It, it’s Thursday night or whatever football game just got over and I have no lunch meat or milk for tomorrow morning and for lunches tomorrow and can I run up to the store? Will you meet me? Cause they know I live a block away. And I’m like, yeah, I’ll be right up. And so I’ll run up there and I’ll grab the package of lunch meat and we’ll, they’ll get the milk out and I’ll bring them out.

And then they go on their merry way. And I thought the concept was really cool when I read that in the newsletter. And then after I read the newsletter, of course, I wanted to reach out to them and see how did you come up with this system? How do they get in the store? Like I wanted to know, I wanted to know the guts of it.

And then I found out that they were on your podcast. Oh, I got to hear this. And then I listened to the podcast and then I just went down the rabbit hole of all your podcasts. And I was like, I can start following him. So that’s what I do. I listen to all your podcasts.

[00:19:50] Chris Ressa: Cool! After you reached out to us I went to your website, and I was I thought the website was great.

You mentioned you were like you do all the social media and the website. I think it’s, I think it’s a really cool website. Yeah. It’s got a lot of unique stuff on there and I thought your guy’s story was interesting. Glad you reached out. Give me some context. Ground me a bit. Roughly, what are annual sales? Where are you at today from a rough perspective?

[00:20:18] Kelly Perry: Prior to opening the grocery store or post grocery store?

[00:20:25] Chris Ressa: Give me both.

[00:20:26] Kelly Perry: Okay. So, prior to opening the grocery store, the reason we knew we needed to get it out of our house was we had reached just close to 400, 000 in sales and we had about six skus at that time.

[00:20:39] Chris Ressa: Holy cow.

[00:20:41] Kelly Perry: I would lie if I told you I knew the exact amount, but I can tell you in just a couple of clicks.

So out of the grocery store alone, last year, total sales is 495, 000.

[00:21:00] And that, and so you say out of the grocery store, does that mean you’re having some sales that aren’t in the grocery store?

Yes. We obviously we don’t do this to get rich. We just like working for ourselves. And so we still go to all the fairs and festivals that we were going to before.

I know that if you’re east coast, west coast, wherever you go, there’s parades and festivals and town gatherings. So we still go. My husband and I and we actually have a crew. We have employees that will go and they’ll set up. We have custom tents and we’ll go and we’ll sell our fudge because we make fudge here in the store.

We’ll sell the pork rinds we make in the store. We have private label things like barbecue sauces and we have private label spices. We have private label pancake mixes, anything that we really like that can be private labeled, we’ll put our name on it, but only if we’ve obviously like it and enjoy the company and like the ingredients and things like that.

So we go to fairs and festivals and we do fundraisers.

[00:22:24] Chris Ressa: That’s amazing. So do you sell online? It looks like you do.

[00:22:33] Kelly Perry: We do. So the portion of the store that’s online is It started out, of course, with just the pork rinds. And since then, we’ve slowly grown our email list. We have about 15, 000 people on our email list.

I capture those with our point of sales. Every fair and festival we go to, I capture their email because if Facebook goes down or any of the social media platforms go down, we still have email. So I have captured email since day one. But online we now can do the produce. You can also buy our fudge online.

Right now I think the fudge is off because it would probably melt during shipping. I don’t have all the shipping things for shipping all the fudge to folks. But during the colder months we always ship fudge nationwide and you can get anything online except for our frozen and our jarred goods because we sell everything from pickled beets and eggs to bread and butter pickles.

But you can ship beef jerky, all of it.

[00:23:34] Chris Ressa: What percentage of your sales are online versus in the store?

[00:23:40] Kelly Perry: It’s actually shifted since the store opened. We see a lot more people to know what is in person versus, oh gosh, that’s a hard question. Our online store sessions only, I would say probably, probably about 16 percent of our sales are just the online. And then the biggest portion has been our storefront. And the thing is that drastically shifted? Yeah. It drastically shifted when we when we built it, they came. So like the saying, if you build it, they will come because we were just an e commerce store.

And then once we opened the brick and mortar, people come, we have we have people that will drive from two hours away from Joplin, Missouri, and they will drive up here because they want an Amish meat and cheese sandwich, and they want to get a local pork loin or pork chops. That’s something we’ve strived to do as well.

I didn’t mention that earlier, but we buy local beef and local pork, and we actually are one of the very few places with my husband’s history in being a butcher. We have a local meat locker on our main street in our town of 300. And that meat locker will, we’ll go and buy an animal from a local farmer here in our County.

He will transport it to our meat locker. Our meat locker will then process the animal for us. And I might get all sausage. I might get bacon. I might, whatever we ask them to make out of it, they will make it and then they label it. And then we put it in our store. So from farm to fork, you literally know every process of where that animal has been.

There is no big there’s no big fork involved. There is no wondering if it was, shipped here from here and there. It’s literally, I can tell you on our door, on our refrigerator doors. It’ll say this pork came from Nathan Collins Farm in Fort Scott, Kansas, which is actually one of our suppliers.

[00:25:49] Chris Ressa: Amazing.

[00:25:50] Kelly Perry: Yeah.

[00:25:51] Chris Ressa: So amazing. So I love that you were selling online and then you’re and now you’re brick and mortar is a larger percentage than you’re online. So let me, so you went from $250 in savings to a business that generates almost half a million dollars in revenue out of 2,400 square feet, not including your, your festival and carnival and fair sales.

Kudos to you. That’s an amazing American story. Really cool stuff. Bring me back to the beginning or when you started to open the store. So, you decided you were going to buy a gas station. And that this gas station was about to be tax liend. So you had an opportunity here from a business perspective, because there’s probably going to be a deal here.

What were you able to acquire the gas station for?

[00:26:40] Kelly Perry: I believe it was $6,000. Yeah.

[00:26:45] Chris Ressa: You bought a gas station, a piece of land for $6,000.

[00:26:49] Kelly Perry: Yes. Because everyone thinks that everyone, it feels like everyone overlooks the rural communities. And I’m a rural kid, like I, I grew up knowing all my neighbors, nobody used to lock their doors, like I’m just a rural person at heart.

And when we acquired this property, it sits along the highway, and I mean it’s highway frontage, why wouldn’t somebody want it, and we ended up, we did have to tear down that gas station. It had been here for several years. I did fill out the paperwork and we did a Brownsville study and we worked with the state of Kansas and we dug up the underground tanks.

And we did some EPA testing to make sure it was safe to put a store here and there was no contamination. But Yeah, the community believed in us, the bankers.

[00:27:37] Chris Ressa: Yeah, we are no stranger to that.

[00:27:37] Kelly Perry: No.

[00:27:38] Chris Ressa: So what did what was the I meant the Brownfield story. We’ve done a bunch of deals here.

Amazing that your first one was your first deal is Brownfield deal. So how did how much did it cost to after you tore it down, actually build the store now?

[00:27:52] Kelly Perry: Our store I want to say it was around $200,000 close to 200, 000. So we did like the the a slab build where the slab goes down first and then you put your foundation or you put your framing up afterwards.

Some people will do red post frame building or they’ll do an iron building, whatever it is. We did try to choose the least expensive route and it’s like people are talking about these barn dominiums. Our store is all similar to a barn dominium home.

[00:28:28] Chris Ressa: Got it. And so you build this and now and you’re like, You went from in the beginning just pork rinds.

Then you open, you start selling grocery products and now you have a thousand skews in 2400 square feet and you have this old fashioned, what I would call, old fashioned customer service where if you’re not open, you’re going to run to the store and open it for somebody. And I’m sure that helps.

One of the things I was going to ask and you highlighted a little bit is, on average, I know you have people from Joplin, Missouri coming for two hours, but on average, what is the, how far away is the average customers drive to you?

[00:29:20] Kelly Perry: I would say probably within a 15 mile radius.

[00:29:25] Chris Ressa: Okay. Got it. And so one of the interesting things that caught my ear when you were telling your story.

So in some retail offerings, you mentioned access to quality food and you’re doing these produce boxes. See them on your website. Clearly a really good move product mover for you. If I heard right, you’re selling those almost at cost to drive people in, give them good access, but they also buy other things that where you have better margins in.

Is that right?

[00:29:54] Kelly Perry: Yes. It is, it’s a blessing to us and it’s a blessing to them. And while they’re here, we’re fostering relationships that you’re not going to get at the big box stores. They’re talking to my staff about the local ball game or the kids or what’s going on in the community or the voting or whatever it is.

And we’re encouraging people to we’re building relationships with our customer base and that’s different than a gas station and it’s different than the big box stores. You’re not going to get someone behind the counter saying, “Oh how’s your son? I heard he tour hi ACL and Friday night’s football game.”

Our clerks, you get greeted when you walk in the door. If you can’t find something, even in our little space of 925 square foot of retail space the clerk’s going to come out and they’re going to show you, this is where this is at. Oh, you’re looking for wax lips. Oh, you need a candy necklace.

Oh, you need a pork chop or a pork rinds. They’re going to come out and greet you and meet you. And we try to keep it fun. doing unique things. We have a cookie dupe for the crumble cookie and we make these big cookies that you wouldn’t see at the local gas station.

[00:31:05] Chris Ressa: Wild. So kudos to you. This is a great story.

One day I’ll have to get, I’ll have to make my way to Bronson. If you’re listening and you haven’t seen, because they do sell online, I don’t know how far you ship, but perrysporkrinds. com is the website. Great name. Please go there. Check it out, everybody. , and you make fudge now.

That’s one of the things I love fudge. You make fudge now.

[00:31:32] Kelly Perry: Yeah, we we hand make fudge. We have a kettle, we hand, hand mix and make and score and cut and ship the fudge. We do fundraisers and we also have a manufacturer’s license for that. So we actually wholesale that to other stores. And so that’s another way we keep people employed.

And we keep working capital and revenue and things flowing through here.

[00:31:57] Chris Ressa: Awesome. All right. This has been fantastic. I got one more question for you before we go to the three fun questions. Do you ever envision a second location, another rural country grocery store?

[00:32:14] Kelly Perry: Absolutely.

[00:32:17] Chris Ressa: All right. Stay tuned, everyone. I love that answer. Okay. How soon? How soon? Is it coming soon?

[00:32:24] Kelly Perry: Oh, man. I don’t know that it’s soon because right now  we have our wholesale license for the pork rinds in Kansas. But actually, on the 30th of this month, we are meeting with some very important folks from the Department of Commerce, the USDA Economic Development, and we’re working on expanding the pork rinds to go nationally.

So I got to focus on what got us here and what is our biggest profit and that’s the pork rinds that needs to be the base and then we hope to go ahead and open more grocery stores because even when let’s say the grocery stores dipped off in sales i can always push the online sales or go to a fair and festival or do a fundraiser with the pork rinds so they really help to balance one another out

[00:33:14] Chris Ressa: If I’m buying the pork rinds, I’m on your website if i’m buying the pork rinds How am I buying these?

Are they coming in like pound bags? How are they coming to me? Eight-ounce bags? What?

[00:33:31] Kelly Perry: Yeah. So we have two different options for the pork rinds. Something that people don’t realize. And if you’re listening we actually have 12 flavors of pork rinds and that’s something that no one has really been doing.

We were the first manufacturer of cinnamon sugar pork rinds. We say that it’s similar to a churro or like a taco chip. My husband loves them with soft serve ice cream. But we do unique flavors. And those unique flavors are exciting for folks.

And then we do like Bath and Body Works. I’ll do a bring back my flavor and we’ve done tacos. We’ve done, oh gosh cheeseburger flavor, spicy dill pickle, you name it. And then if they sell, if it makes money and it makes sense. Then I invest in getting the nutrition label and the packaging and we go with it and we put it on board.

[00:34:29] Chris Ressa: All right. Got it.

[00:34:32] Kelly Perry: But we ship, sorry, I didn’t answer your question, but yes, we ship coast to coast nationwide, and PO addresses. And yeah, you can get our pork rinds. We ship literally six days of the week.

[00:34:46] Chris Ressa: Fascinating. Okay. So my final three questions. Are you ready?

[00:34:52] Kelly Perry: Yes.

[00:34:54] Chris Ressa: All right, question one. What extinct retailer do you wish would come back from the dead?

[00:34:59] Kelly Perry: I don’t know that it’s a large chain retailer, but I absolutely enjoy the Five and Dime. And there’s only one left that I can go to that I remember and it’s in Branson, Missouri.

[00:35:11] Chris Ressa: Got it. I love that.

[00:35:12] Chris Ressa: Question two. You’re a physical retail store owner. What’s the last item in a store that you bought over 20?

[00:35:25] Kelly Perry: Oh my gosh. Ew. Honestly, it’s probably decor for the house. Halloween decor. Like I’m big on, on that kind of stuff. So I think it was, I think it was actually plant. It was big plants for outside.

[00:35:43] Chris Ressa: Okay. And then final question. If you and I were shopping at Target and I lost you, what aisle would I find you in?

[00:35:57] Kelly Perry: You’re going to find me in the laundry aisle opening every twist top and smelling the detergents to see which one I want to use.

[00:36:08] Chris Ressa: All right. Fascinating.

[00:36:12] Chris Ressa: Listen, this was great. I, your story is pretty compelling and I had a lot of other questions like what is your average, check out size and all this stuff. But we got enough covered here. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. I loved how like you’ve been attending conferences and you’re really digging in.

Good luck. I’ll pass this link around to other people so they can check you out and see this pretty cool new store.

[00:36:41] Kelly Perry: Thank you so much. It’s been a fun adventure.