Kelly Perry has a passion for wellness.
That’s why she and her business partner Amber Hodge are opening The Protein Place at 110 S. Jefferson Ave. in Iola.
There you’ll be able to buy Perry’s Pork Rinds, protein shakes and teas, and soon additional products like gourmet cheeses.
Though the 38-year-old Perry had worked at a number of jobs around the area over the past decade, “I never found something I was passionate about until I started my own business,” she said.
“Entrepreneurship is just my thing. I love to sell. I like to make people happy.”
Perry’s personal wellness journey began when she decided to take action to treat her diabetes and heal from surgery.
“I used to be almost 400 lbs.,” she said. “I’ve lost 188 lbs.”
One of her secrets? Home-made pork rinds. And she just happens to be married to a butcher.
“My husband [Thaddeus] got sick of me whining and would make them for me,” she laughed. “But it was based off of the diet I had to follow after my gastric bypass.”
At first they kept the pork rinds mostly to themselves, but word started to get around, Perry said, and they got in the business of producing them.
Perhaps the catalyst was when Perry and her husband decided to take a trip but didn’t have the funds to do so.
“We started just so we could have money to go on a Carnival Cruise vacation,” she recalled.
Now the operation has grown beyond what Perry could have ever imagined.
They’ve not only sold pork rinds to people across the country, including President George W. Bush, they are currently taking the steps necessary to launch their own small processing and shipping facility in Bronson.
Perry said 163 stores had reached out and were eagerly awaiting its opening, which is slated for the not-so-far future.
As for the most recent chapter of the story, Perry said she’d first gotten interested in protein shakes and teas due to her health journey.
She’d begun to gain weight again, she said, and soon found herself looking for ways to avoid losing all the progress she’d made.
