Pinky Cole doesn’t have a prenuptial agreement with her husband, Derrick Hayes. In a candid Funky Friday interview, the RHOA star shared her reasons. Her answer came down to one conversation before the wedding.
“We locked in like skin,” she stated. “And I’m gonna tell you why. Right before we got married, I looked at him and he looked at me. I said, ‘Listen, if this don’t work out, we going to go our separate ways with what we came with.’ And that’s why I married him.”
She summed up the arrangement plainly. “His plan was never to live off me, and my plan was to never live off him. And that’s why it works. And it might not work for somebody else, right?”
Coming from two people who built their own food empires, Cole with Slutty Vegan and Hayes with Big Dave’s Cheesesteaks, their logic holds more weight than most couples. Neither of them needed the other’s money going in.
From Losing Everything To The Forbes List, Twice
Cole also retold the arc of her career, and hearing it in one breath is genuinely dizzying.
“Back in 2016, I had a Jamaican restaurant that caught on fire,” she said. “Lost everything. Got evicted. Car got repoed. Wages got garnished. Almost lost my mind. Was in a relationship at the time, he went to jail. Everything fell apart for me. And then Slutty Vegan came. And I built a hundred-million-dollar brand. And I made the Time 100 list. And I made the Forbes list twice. I made the cover of Essence Magazine. I also made the cover of Black Enterprise Magazine. I did all of these things. And then I lost that hundred-million-dollar brand.”
Then she flipped the loss into a setup. “So you think if it happened before and I got it all back times ten, what do you think about to happen right now?”
She viewed her journey through faith. She believes everything in her life happened for a reason. However, she quickly added that she is not comparing herself to Jesus. The range of that life story is her real superpower on RHOA. She can sit across from a millionaire castmate or a struggling viewer and honestly say she has been both.
Calling Bankruptcy A “Strategy”
Cole addressed her Chapter 11 filing head-on, and she refused to treat it like a shameful secret.
“When you think about the U.S. bankruptcy code, it is a tool,” she said. “But the problem is, there’s a stigma in our community that when you talk about ‘Big Bertha,’ it means that you’re broke. But that is the lack of education because not many people in our community have ever been brave enough to proudly speak about it.”
She shared that her business had $4 million in debt. Then, she explained the structural issue causing it.
“What happens with startup companies, especially Black-owned businesses, if you don’t have the level of financial support to continue to fund you so that you can grow, you’re going to crumble. No matter what you try to do.”
She admitted she resisted filing at first but eventually had no choice. The reframe matters beyond her own case. Many big companies have used Chapter 11 to restructure and grow stronger. Cole’s open talk about it on a podcast helps reduce its stigma more than any finance seminar can. She regained control of Slutty Vegan after a 2025 restructuring. Then, she unveiled a franchise strategy for the brand.
Her Honest Take On Whether Slutty Vegan Is Healthy
Cole also tackled the criticism that her famous burgers are not exactly health food, and she gave the least defensive answer possible.
“I’m not an advocate to say every piece of vegan food is healthy, cause it’s not!” she explained. “There are unhealthy vegan options, and that’s just the truth… But let me tell you about a healthier planet, okay? The less meat that you eat, the healthier the planet can be. Less cholesterol, lesser sodium, there’s levels to this.”
“So, when I created Slutty Vegan, I really just wanted people to understand that there are other ways to eat,” she insisted.
A founder admitting her own product is not health food is rare, and it works precisely because it is true. Nobody orders a burger called what hers are called expecting a salad.
