John Yarusi loved the 15 years he spent working in advertising in New York City, bringing campaigns to life for clients such as JetBlue, Mercedes-Benz, and Prudential. Then the Great Recession hit and things went south. The agency he owned went under, Hurricane Sandy devastated his hometown on the Jersey Shore, and he got divorced. At the age of 45, Yarusi moved into his mother's house and tried to pick up the pieces.
A lover of all things New Jersey, Yarusi thought back to his childhood, when he would get breakfast sandwiches at the corner store on the way to the beach. They were always made with pork roll, a meat invented in New Jersey in the 1800s but barely known outside of the Garden State. “I had two little kids and I couldn't find a job,” Yarusi says, adding that he'd always been fond of food trucks. “I thought, Why not a truck? I had this love of my state and this funny little meat that the rest of the country didn't know about.”
