Pork King Good: The Best Pork Rinds in America

There's a snack happening in America right now that almost nobody saw coming. The pork rind — the same one your grandfather kept in a glove compartment, the one that disappeared from polite snacking culture sometime around the introduction of baked chips — is having the loudest comeback in the snack aisle.

And one of the makers driving it is a proudly quirky, woman-owned company out of Cudahy, Wisconsin called Pork King Good. We've featured them in Mantry crates before. We'll feature them again. Here's why.

The Brand: Built in Wisconsin, Built on Conviction

Pork King Good has been making the snacks they want to eat since 2018. That's the line on their site, and it tells you almost everything about how this company works.

They're based in Cudahy, a Milwaukee suburb with the kind of unglamorous, hardworking Midwest food culture that produces the country's most underrated makers. Wisconsin has been quietly responsible for some of the best small-batch food brands in America for decades — and Pork King Good fits the pattern: they started by making something they couldn't find elsewhere, and they kept going because the customers found them.

The brand voice is the most fun in the snack category. Variety packs are named "Go Pork Yourself," "Meat Sweats," "Get Porked," "Pucker Up," and "Sweet Mother of Pork." Their dessert pork rinds line includes a flavor called Cinnamon ChurWHOA. None of it is corporate copywriting. All of it is exactly the kind of voice you can only have when you're a real, founder-led company that hasn't yet been bought by a big snack conglomerate.

That voice — combined with a product line that has expanded thoughtfully every year since launch — is why Pork King Good has built a cult following with over 4,000 customer reviews averaging close to five stars.

The Products: Way More Than Just a Bag of Pork Rinds

Most pork rind brands make one product. Pork King Good makes seven categories.

Flavored Pork Rinds (1.75 oz, 3 oz, and 7 oz Party Sizes)

The core product. These are kettle-cooked in their own lard — which is what gives them the airy, almost-popcorn-like texture that separates great pork rinds from disappointing ones. The flavor lineup leans premium and unexpected: Salted Butter, White Cheddar, Onion & Sour Cream, Himalayan Pink Salt & Vinegar, Dill Pickle, Nacho Cheddar. The Salted Butter flavor in particular gets the kind of customer reviews that read like love letters: "these taste EXACTLY like eating yummy, buttered, slightly salted popcorn — only without the annoying irritation of getting all those little, pokey kernels stuck in your teeth."

Dessert Pork Rinds

This is where Pork King Good stops being a pork rind company and starts being something genuinely new. Dessert-flavored pork rinds — Appley Cinnamon, Cinnamon ChurWHOA, and a rotating cast of sweet flavors — are exactly what they sound like: pork rinds dusted in sweet seasonings instead of savory. They've been a viral hit on TikTok for a reason. They satisfy a sweet craving while staying zero-carb and high-protein. Sounds gimmicky, tastes incredible.

Pork Rind Breadcrumbs (Pork Rind Crumbs)

This is the secret weapon. Pork King Good takes their pork rinds and grinds them into a 1:1 substitute for panko breadcrumbs. Four flavors: Original, Italian, Unseasoned, Spicy Cajun. If you've ever tried to make breaded chicken or fish on a keto/low-carb/gluten-free diet, you know how thin the substitute options are. These crumbs solve it. They crisp up, they hold flavor, they don't get soggy. There's a whole library of low-carb recipes on the Pork King Good blog showing what to do with them.

Pork King Good's Dill Pickle Seasoning — one of the variety lines that gets used on cucumbers, eggs, popcorn, and everything else.

Seasonings

Standalone shakers of the same flavors that go on the pork rinds — Dill Pickle, White Cheddar, Ranch, Taco, Bacon, Himalayan Pink Salt & Vinegar. Customers report sprinkling them on cucumbers, vegetables, eggs, popcorn, basically anything. The Dill Pickle seasoning alone has over 300 reviews.

Pickled Products

Pickled eggs and pickled sausages. Pure Wisconsin tavern energy. These are the snacks dive bars used to keep in glass jars on the counter, now made with quality ingredients and shipped to your door. The pickled comeback in American food has been quiet but real, and Pork King Good caught it early.

Chicken Puggets

A chicken nugget product made with their pork rind breading. Frozen, ships nationwide with free shipping. Yes, really.

Variety Packs

Their bundling game is strong. The "Go Pork Yourself Pack," "The Meat Sweats Pack," "The Piglet Pack," and others let new customers sample the range without committing to a single flavor.

The Trend: Why Pork Rinds Are Suddenly Cool Again

For most of the 2000s and 2010s, pork rinds lived in the unfashionable end of the snack aisle. Then three trends collided.

First, the keto and low-carb resurgence. Pork rinds are technically the perfect keto snack: zero carbs, high fat, decent protein, no sugar. As keto went from fringe diet to mainstream eating pattern, the pork rind got rediscovered by a generation of snackers who had previously never considered them.

Second, the protein era. Driven partly by the explosion of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy — which suppress appetite but make every calorie consumed need to count more — Americans are eating fewer calories overall and spending more of them on protein. Pork rinds deliver real, dense, satisfying protein in a portable bag. A 1.75 oz bag of Pork King Good has 17 grams of protein and zero grams of carbs. The protein math is hard to beat.

Third, the carnivore and animal-based diet movement. Whether you take it seriously or not, a meaningful slice of high-engagement food culture (gym culture, longevity culture, masculine wellness culture) has moved toward animal-protein-focused eating. Pork rinds fit cleanly into that worldview. They're real food, made from one animal, with minimal ingredients.

The result: a category that used to grow in the low single digits is now one of the fastest-growing in salty snacks. Pork King Good has been positioned for this since 2018.

Why We Feature Pork King Good in Mantry Crates

Mantry features makers who meet three criteria. Pork King Good hits all three.

First, the product has to be genuinely better than mass-market alternatives. Walk into any gas station and you can buy a bag of pork rinds for two dollars. They taste like nothing. Pork King Good's pork rinds taste like a specific flavor, cooked carefully, by people who actually eat what they make. The Salted Butter flavor is closer to fresh popcorn than to a drugstore snack. The Dessert Pork Rinds are closer to a churro than a chip.

Second, the maker has to have a story worth telling. Pork King Good is a woman-owned, founder-led, Wisconsin-based snack company that made something most people thought was unfashionable until the rest of the food world caught up. That's the kind of story we want to put in front of subscribers.

Third, the product has to land well in the Mantry experience. Our crates have six full-size products from six different makers — pantry staples, sauces, salts, oils, sweets, snacks, wildcards. Pork King Good has been the snack-and-wildcard in multiple crates over the years. The reaction is always the same: customers ask where they can buy more. We send them to porkkinggood.com. They thank us. They reorder a Mantry crate. The cycle continues.

That's the maker discovery flywheel Mantry is built on. Pork King Good is one of the cleanest examples of it working.

How to Try Pork King Good Through Mantry

There are two ways to discover Pork King Good through Mantry.

Option one: Subscribe to a Mantry crate. Subscribe here. Every two months, six full-size products from six different makers land on your kitchen table. Pork King Good is a frequent feature. Other recent makers in crates include Yellowbird Hot Sauce, Bourbon Smoked Paprika, Eat Your Bourbon BBQ Sauce, Ground Up Nut Butter, Eastwell Candy Oil, New Elixirs Hot Smoke, and Savage Jerky Co.

Option two: Send a Mantry crate as a gift. Send a gift here. Single gift crates, 3-crate gift subscriptions (over six months), and 6-crate gift subscriptions (over a year). The gift recipient gets a curated discovery experience — the same one we'd send our own dads, brothers, or friends. Father's Day, anniversaries, housewarmings, "thank you" gifts. Free shipping on every gift crate through Tuesday, June 16, 2026.

Either path lands you in the same place: a kitchen counter, opening a wooden crate, finding a bag of something with "Pork King Good" on the label, looking at the flavor name (probably "Sweet Mother of Pork" or "Cinnamon ChurWHOA"), and being slightly delighted before you've even opened the bag.

That's the whole point of Mantry. Find the makers most people wouldn't find. Put their best work in front of you. Let the food speak for itself.

The Bottom Line

Pork King Good is the kind of maker that proves the food industry isn't fully consolidated yet. A woman-owned, Wisconsin-based, founder-led company built a cult-following snack brand by making something with care, naming it with humor, and waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to the trend.

The trend caught up. The protein era, the keto resurgence, the dessert-snack TikTok cycle, the pickled-foods comeback — Pork King Good was positioned for all of it years before any of it was obvious.

If you've never tried them, the easiest way is through a Mantry crate — same way we discover all our favorite makers. If you've tried them and want more, Pork King Good's site has the full range.

Either way: this is the snack we'd want our own dad to find in his Father's Day gift. It probably will be.

This post is part of our Maker Spotlight series, where we tell the stories behind the small-batch makers featured in Mantry crates. New post every other week. Subscribe to the Mantry newsletter to get them first.