Future 40: Meet Aisha "Pinky" Cole, Founder of "Slutty Vegan"
Slutty Vegan is Atlanta's go-to burger joint for vegans and carnivores alike. It has also become a celebrity favorite (Tyler Perry, Meagan Good, Cory Booker and Omarion are fans) thanks to Aisha "Pinky" Cole, the founder and proprietor.
She's a Clark Atlanta alum who built her plant-based burger dreams in the city's West End community, a predominantly African-American neighborhood, in order to change the way Southerners look at vegan eating. Cole opened the location in the summer of 2018, and in less than six months, she became a millionaire.
"The Slutty Vegan was born in my two bedroom apartment in July 2018. I was hungry and wanted some vegan junk food and, in pure lightbulb style, the name came to me. A Slutty Vegan, to my mind, is someone who eats vegan but enjoys junk food -- as long as it's not dead. I knew the name would be a great hook to help people to reimagine food. What I didn't know was how much of an impact it would make," Cole told Forbes.
Cheekily named menu favorites like "One Night Stands" and a variety of original Slutty sauces have drawn customers from all over the world and have given Cole the ability to expand Slutty Vegan to food trucks, pop-up locations, products and eventually more brick-and-mortar locations.
Her hustler mentality comes after some struggle -- as a child, she watched her mother work hard, while her father did a 20-year prison bid. In 2016, she went broke after her NYC Jamaican restaurant went up in flames in a grease fire. But she preserved and says she wouldn't change a thing.