For one strange Wednesday, Queer Eye fans believed they had witnessed a love story. After years of will-they-won’t-they speculation, Antoni Porowski and Jonathan Van Ness (JVN) appeared to go Instagram official. Anyone paying attention should have raised an eyebrow: JVN had been married to husband Mark Peacock for more than two years, and Porowski had openly discussed his serious relationship with boyfriend Kevin Harrington, who had appeared on Porowski’s grid as recently as late August. None of that stopped the internet from briefly losing its mind.
The reveal came a day later. The two were indeed partners, but in business, not romance. Their new venture is Yummers, a pet food brand. And the fake relationship was not a goofy afterthought. It was the launch.
The prank was a media buy in disguise
Look at what the stunt actually bought them. A meal-topper startup is, on paper, one of the least newsworthy things in the pet aisle. Toppers are an add-on, a flavor-and-nutrition boost you sprinkle over kibble, and the category is crowded. A straightforward press release announcing two more celebrity founders entering pet food would have earned a polite paragraph and vanished.
Instead, the duo weaponized the exact thing their fandom had spent years invested in: the unresolved romantic tension between two of the Fab Five. For 24 hours, “Antoni and JVN” trended on a story that had nothing to do with pet food, and by the time fans got the real answer, the brand name was already attached to the relief, the laugh, and the eye-roll. That is a remarkable amount of attention for a product you shake onto dog dinner. The romance was fake; the reach was not.
What they were actually selling
Underneath the theatrics is a genuine product with a clear thesis. Yummers launched with two lines that split along a simple idea: make mealtime either more delicious or more useful.
The Gourmet mix-ins are freeze-dried, single-ingredient proteins, in flavors like chicken, beef liver, cheddar, salmon and sweet potato, and turkey and cranberry, aimed squarely at the picky eater who turns up their nose at plain kibble. The Functional mix-ins go the other direction, targeting specific concerns: skin and coat, digestion, joints and hips, and heart health. Available directly from Yummers and in Petco stores, the line was priced roughly in the $15 to $30 range, positioning it as an affordable upgrade rather than a premium splurge.
It is a tidy division of labor that mirrors the founders themselves: Porowski, the food-and-wine expert, owns the “make it tastier” half, and JVN, the wellness-and-self-care voice, owns the “make it better for them” half. The brand also arrived with real backing, having closed a $6.3 million seed round and brought on pet-industry veteran Rebecca Rudisch to actually run the company, a detail that separates Yummers from a pure celebrity cash-in.
The part the prank was built on
The reason the stunt landed is that the affection underneath it is not invented. Both founders are serious pet people. JVN has been a pet parent for over a decade and at the time of launch had five cats, Larry, Liza, Tildy, Lady G, and Baggy, along with dogs Elton and Pablo. Porowski came to it later, adopting his dog Neon after fostering him during the early-2020 production shutdown.
Both adopted from Austin Pets Alive, the rescue featured on the Texas season of Queer Eye, which is also a quietly on-brand choice for a company selling itself on caring more than the competition. The fake love story got the clicks, but the rescue-dog backstory is what the founders clearly want fans to remember once the joke wears off.
So no, Antoni and JVN did not fall in love. They did something arguably savvier: they turned a low-drama product category into a one-day cultural event, and pointed all of that borrowed attention at a bowl of kibble that, with a little freeze-dried liver on top, their fans’ pets might actually prefer.
