Article

'Slutty Vegan' throws a food truck party in Atlanta

Following her instincts, Pinky Cole's food truck has grossed sales in the six figures since launching in August.

Pinky Cole is on a mission to introduce vegan cuisine to people in Atlanta.

January 30, 2019 by Elliot Maras — Editor, Kiosk Marketplace & Vending Times

Pinky Cole knows how to throw a party. As a teenager, she organized paid-admission parties that drew kids by the thousands.

Today, at age 31, she's found a higher calling: introducing people to vegan cuisine. But she hasn't lost her dramatic flair.

Cole's Atlanta food truck, Slutty Vegan, offers menu items such as Ménage à Trois, One Night Stand, The Fussy Hussy and Super Slut.

"A lot of people think that I'm selling sex," she said. "I'm not selling sex." Cole uses these names to get people's attention. And once she gets it, her goal is to encourage a healthy lifestyle. "I want the people around me to live long," she said.

Following her instincts

While some might find her marketing tactics risqué, Cole has never hesitated to follow her instincts. Which may be why her food truck has grossed sales in the six-figure range since launching in August.

"I've always had the entrepreneur edge to me," she said, attributing this tendency to her father, who owned a night club. "I love conceptualizing and manufacturing the things that I want to do. To see something start from an idea to an actual physical concept."

Slutty Vegan specializes in what Pinky Cole calls "vegan junk food."

Cole's food truck is not her first foodservice enterprise. In 2014, while working as a network TV producer in New York City, she opened a chicken restaurant and a juice bar. Two years later, she lost the restaurant to a fire.

Without insurance to cover the loss, Cole was unable to continue her foodservice business. It was a tough lesson in preparedness.

Cole's Atlanta food truck is as much a comeback from her setback in New York City as it is a mission to promote a healthier lifestyle.

Relocation brings a flash of inspiration

Food trucks were actually the last thing on Cole's mind when she moved from Los Angeles to Atlanta in July. She relocated to the city while working as a casting director on "Iyanla Fix My Life," a self-improvement TV show on the Oprah Winfrey Network. She accepted the position after 10 years in New York City working stints as a producer for "The Maury Povich Show" and "Lauren Lake's Paternity Court."

Cole was happy to relocate to Atlanta, given her connection to Clark Atlanta University, where she had studied media.

But being used to an around-the-clock work schedule in her media career, she faced some lifestyle adjustments upon her return to Atlanta. One of the first things she noticed was that most restaurants were closed late at night, unlike restaurants in Los Angeles.

"I was hungry," she said. She came up with the idea of a vegan junk food eatery. "It came to me like a light bulb, the name and everything," she said.

A woman on a mission

Cole wanted to take a second shot at the restaurant business, but at this stage in her life, her culinary focus was vegan. She has been totally vegan for four years and has not eaten meat in 11 years.

She said that a vegan diet has given her mental clarity, and that she viewed it as part of a lifelong quest to improve herself in every way. "I've always been very health conscious," she said. 

She was especially interested in educating the black community about the vegan lifestyle.

"Veganism once upon a time was a rich white lifestyle," she said. "Either black people couldn't afford it, or we didn't have the resources or the information to adopt that lifestyle. It wasn't in our community."

"We take soul food as something like a comfort, for black people, but that's the same thing that's killing us," she said. "Being able to introduce other options that don't include flesh; I'm guiding my people in the right direction."

Cole also takes comfort in seeing people of all backgrounds come together to embrace a better lifestyle.

"Even eating vegan junk food, this is the start of something greater," she said. "This is just the first step in the right direction. Ninety-five percent of the people who patronize my business are not eating vegan."

She also felt it was a good time to start a food truck in Atlanta because its food truck scene, unlike California's, is still developing. "Who doesn't like something new and fresh?" she asked.

The business evolves

Cole's first idea was to start a virtual restaurant, preparing food in a shared kitchen and delivering it to customers using Uber Eats. She launched her virtual restaurant in August.

Within three weeks, the business outgrew the shared kitchen she was using and she needed to find another location.

One of her friends referred her to a restaurant equipment store that was just getting into food truck equipment. She paid $45,000 for a used UPS truck built in 1996 with the cooking appliances installed. The truck came with two 24-inch flat-top grills, two deep fryers, a warmer, a prep table and a sink. 

Cole is able to prepare everything on the truck, offering four items daily from a full menu of nine items. "Each day, the menu is different, which is a beautiful thing," she said. There is the "impossible" burger, "beyond meat," vegan bacon, soy bacon and french fries. All sauces are made from scratch.

Cole left her TV gig in November to devote all of her time to the food truck. "I walked away from my dream job to do my dream job," she said.

Part two of this two-part series will explore how Cole used her media savvy to create a hugely successful food truck business in less than a year.

Photos courtesy of Slutty Vegan

About Elliot Maras

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Elliot Maras is the editor of Kiosk Marketplace and Vending Times. He brings three decades covering unattended retail and commercial foodservice.