The PodcastEPISODE #73
Baked With Love & CBD: LeAnn & Joseph Jackson of LeAnn's Cheesecakes in Tampa, FL Part 1 Today, we have a cheesecakes in a jar that are taking Florida by storm, and there are plans for national domination. The story begins with a whirlwind romance and a lightning-fast marriage. And it stars two controlling, passionate people, each of whom fight for what they believe in. We’re sitting down with Joseph and LeAnn Jackson of LeAnn’s cheesecakes—including CBD-infused cheesecakes. Why? Because of a first-person story that should make anyone a believer in the power of the plant. These two have faced every kind of hurdle imaginable. They’ve become experts at weathering crisis with entrepreneurial effort. So how does a packaged food business work out when you’re talking a pre-school teacher and a salesman, neither with food industry experience? CLICK HERE FOR A COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF PLACES TO HEAR THIS SHOW FOR ITUNES, CLICK HERE FOR SOUNDLCOUD, CLICK HERE DOWNLOAD THE MP3 BY RIGHT-CLICKING HERE AND SELECTING "SAVE AS" |
THE SHOW NOTES
LeAnn and Joseph Jackson of LeAnn’s Cheesecakes makes cheesecakes in a jar that are taking Florida by storm. But not only do they make amazing cheesecakes, they also make cheesecakes infused with CBD. Joseph is passionate about CBD, and how it can help with pain. They are a former preschool teacher and salesman who have brought a 100-year-old family recipe to the 21st century. Find out how they got started, why Joseph proposed to LeAnn after dating for only 21 days, and why they are passionate about this business together.
Takeaways
Summary
Links
LeAnn’s Cheesecakes
LeAnn and Joseph Jackson of LeAnn’s Cheesecakes makes cheesecakes in a jar that are taking Florida by storm. But not only do they make amazing cheesecakes, they also make cheesecakes infused with CBD. Joseph is passionate about CBD, and how it can help with pain. They are a former preschool teacher and salesman who have brought a 100-year-old family recipe to the 21st century. Find out how they got started, why Joseph proposed to LeAnn after dating for only 21 days, and why they are passionate about this business together.
Takeaways
- Joseph believes CBD saved his life by providing an alternative to opioids.
- Working to discover a unique way to present a product
- Doing what it takes to survive a crisis
Summary
- What the business is all about and how it got started by LeAnn just quitting her job (04:08)
- Food infusions, from Bailey’s to CBD (06:31)
- Meeting each other through friends, MySpace, Ceasar Salads and proposing after 21 days (08:25)
- Tasting the cheesecake in a jar (13:15)
- Why they put their cheesecake in a jar (14:41)
- How they started making money from the first week (18:37)
- How their products are all over the state of Florida (20:38)
- Why Joseph is passionate about CBD (22:02)
- Their other products, including CBD chocolate bars (26:39)
- Their goals for the future (27:48)
- Their respective backgrounds in teaching and sales (29:00)
- Being hit with crisis over crisis and weathering the storm (32:04)
- How the chocolate bars are made (35:16)
- Joseph’s thoughts on dosing CBD (36:47)
Links
LeAnn’s Cheesecakes
THE TRANSCRIPT
Blaine Parker: Mother of God. Come on. Later that same evening...
Honey Parker: Do we need to share a screen?
Blaine Parker: There's no reason we should need to share a screen. Oh, I know what's wrong. Here we go.
Welcome to CoupleCo: Working With Your Spouse For Fun & Profit. I'm Blaine Parker.
Honey Parker: Which makes me Honey Parker.
Blaine Parker: And as a couple in business together, we are coming to you from the Couple Coach, our compact, trans American land yacht.
Honey Parker: We're navigating the nation, in search of standout couples in business together.
Blaine Parker: And we're bringing them to you, so you can hear their inspiring stories of crushing it in business, without crushing each other.
Honey Parker: Today, for episode 73, seven, three, 73, we have a cheesecake in a jar.
Blaine Parker: Yes. Cheesecake in a jar.
Honey Parker: These cheesecakes are taking Florida by storm, and there are plans for national domination.
Blaine Parker: The story begins with a whirlwind romance, and a lightening fast marriage.
Honey Parker: And it stars two controlling, passionate people, each of whom fight for what they believe in.
Blaine Parker: So how does a packaged food business work out when you're talking a preschool teacher and a salesman, neither with food industry experience?
Honey Parker: And then you add CBDs.
Blaine Parker: That's right. The non-psychoactive phytocannabinoid that had been used to treat anxiety, cognition, movement disorders, and pain.
Honey Parker: And which the F.D.A. has approved for treatment of two epilepsy disorders.
Blaine Parker: No, it's not marijuana. And neither is Smokin' Mary Smoked Bloody Mary Mix.
Honey Parker: That is ... Can I say it? That is like the dumbest transition we've ever done.
Blaine Parker: You know, when you're coming up with segues on the fly, you got to do something.
Honey Parker: Well, you did something.
Blaine Parker: Okay. Well let's pretend I didn't do it.
Smokin' Mary Smoked Bloody Mary Mix.
Honey Parker: Smokin' Mary is a fantastic mixer made with only fresh, whole tomatoes.
Blaine Parker: No reconstituted tomato juice, like the big brands.
Honey Parker: And you can mix it with the distilled spirit of your choice, for great tasting cocktails. Really, really great. Let me be clear. They're great.
Blaine Parker: Honey has an opinion on this.
Honey Parker: I have opinions about a lot of things.
Blaine Parker: Or you can mix it in fabulous alcohol free virgin cocktails.
Honey Parker: And it's a great cooking ingredient, as well.
Blaine Parker: The Smokin' Mary website is loaded with great, easy recipes featuring Smokin' Mary's zesty tomato rich goodness.
Honey Parker: Like Smokin' Mary Stuffed Eggplant Parm Rolls.
Blaine Parker: Or Smokin' Mary Crab and Calamari Ceviche.
Honey Parker: Or Smokin' Mary Smoking Mole.
Blaine Parker: I could cook off that recipe page all summer long.
Honey Parker: And Smokin' Mary is a couple owned business.
Blaine Parker: Smokin' Mary Smoked Bloody Mary Mix. Hey, nice tomatoes. Online at smokinmary.com.
Honey Parker: Now, CoupleCo is going to be sending out some big news, very soon.
Blaine Parker: If you want to get on our mailing list, go to coupleco.com.
Honey Parker: That's coupleco.com.
Blaine Parker: Now, on today's episode, we're sitting down with Joseph and LeAnn Jackson, of Le'Anns Cheesecakes.
Honey Parker: So why CBD infused cheesecakes?
Blaine Parker: Because of a first person story that should make anyone a believer in the power of the plant.
Honey Parker: Besides that, these two have faced every kind of hurdle imaginable.
Blaine Parker: They've become experts at weathering crisis with entrepreneurial effort.
Honey Parker: But still, there's the unique stress of not having a nine to five job, but of being at work, with your partner, spending 18 hours in a truck, and then going home together, for the remaining six hours.
Blaine Parker: There's the venting, the crying, the celebrations, and the passion.
Honey Parker: Not to mention to Sicilian grandmother's kitchen that figures in all of this.
Blaine Parker: Here now, part one of LeAnn and Joseph Jackson, of Le'Anns Cheesecakes in Tampa, Florida.
LeAnn and Joseph Jackson, please say howdy.
LeAnn Jackson: Howdy.
Joseph Jackson: Howdy.
Blaine Parker: That's the first time anybody's ever actually done that. Thank you very much.
Honey Parker: And by done that, he means pay attention, and listen to what he said.
Blaine Parker: We are in lovely Clearwater, Florida. We're actually in the Belleair neighborhood of Clearwater, Florida. Wow. And I haven't even been eating CBDs, or ingesting THCs, or any of the other C's that are involved in the process we're about to discuss.
LeAnn and Joseph are the proprietors of Le'Anns Cheesecakes and Le'Anns Infusions, which is a bakery at ... Well, what would we call it? A bakery and what else?
LeAnn Jackson: It's a wholesale bakery.
Blaine Parker: Wholesale bakery. But Le'Anns Infusions is special.
LeAnn Jackson: Yes.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah. I mean, it is still a wholesale bakery, but we're specializing in infused products.
Blaine Parker: Infused products. And I know there are people out there who are going to go ah.
Honey Parker: Or say, what does that mean? What's an infused-
Blaine Parker: Yes. One of the two.
Honey Parker: What's an infused product?
Blaine Parker: They're going to be shocked to find that there's infusion going on here, or they're not going to have any idea.
So before we get into anything else, because usually we ask other questions first. I think we need to explain A, what you do, and B, what the genesis was. How you got to this place.
Joseph Jackson: Well I mean, it first started where I started a different business completely. We went to a business function, and we heard the story of another couple who was from the Tampa area, who started their business about 15, or so, years ago. They took a family recipe and made it national, through finding Oprah's Favorite Things, and some other steps along the way.
We kind of looked at each other about halfway through, and said that kind of us, with your cheesecake recipe.
LeAnn Jackson: So I quit my job.
Blaine Parker: You quit? You just quit your job?
Honey Parker: So you said, well, if people made money by getting their product on Oprah's Favorite Things, I have a cheesecake recipe, I should quit my job?
LeAnn Jackson: I looked at Jay and I was like, you know what? We could do this with the cheesecake. Because it was something that I've always done as a hobby. I love to bake. The cheesecake recipe was something that was really special, in my family.
When I got married to him, I made it for him a lot. I made it for friends, and everything. And they're like, you need to bring this to the market. And I'm like, no, no, no. It's a secret family cheesecake recipe. I can't do that.
Blaine Parker: Yes, apparently you can.
Joseph Jackson: We just started going to try and actually bake it in the house, and found out that, in Florida, you had to have a commercial kitchen, if you're doing cold food. So I crossed my fingers. Did a little simple search online, and found the single rental kitchen in the Tampa Bay area. Contacted them. In two weeks, we were fully licensed, and selling cheesecake at farmers markets.
Blaine Parker: So we'll get more into the details about how this all unfolded. There's another part of this that I think is really fascinating, and needs to be heard by anybody who's gasping, or confused, by infused products.
Joseph Jackson: Infusion is taking a food product, and adding a adult version to it.
Blaine Parker: Adult version.
Joseph Jackson: Right now, with St. Paddy's Day just passed, we put in, we did a Bailey's cheesecake to start with. So that's an infusion.
But the more important infusions are with CBD, right now, and that is where we're taking Cannabidiol, which is the sister to THC from the cannabis and hemp plants, and infusing it into our products, so people can get relief throughout the day.
Blaine Parker: And it does not get you high?
LeAnn Jackson: It does not get high.
Joseph Jackson: No. CBD does not get you high, at all.
LeAnn Jackson: It gets you relaxed. That's what we say.
Joseph Jackson: Yes.
Blaine Parker: And again, people are still confused by this. Just to paint a picture of how benign CBDs are, from a getting high standpoint, the state of Utah has made CBDs legal, and there is no more square state than the state of Utah.
Honey Parker: We'll say, we're based in the great state of Utah.
Blaine Parker: We love Utah.
Honey Parker: We love it. So this is not a dis on Utah.
Blaine Parker: It's just a fact. The culture in Utah is, as our governor said, we do not want to have every Dr. Feelgood out there prescribing medical marijuana to people.
Joseph Jackson: CBD is definitely something that came from research, in finding that it stopped seizures in children. Taking Charlotte's Web, and getting that throughout the United States, and showing that it wasn't intoxicating, but it was medically beneficial to be part of our bodies again.
Blaine Parker: I actually find that kind of fascinating. It's one of the reasons why the laws in Utah changed to allow CBDs. It was because a woman, whose child was having seizures, the only way she could get relief for the kid was through CBDs, and she led the charge.
Okay. We've got some business out of the way. Now we need to go to what I call the single most important question of this interview. Are you ready?
LeAnn Jackson: Um-hmm (affirmative).
Joseph Jackson: Okay.
Blaine Parker: How did you two meet?
Joseph Jackson: That's another story. We were both kind of dating other people.
LeAnn Jackson: Well, no. I was-
Blaine Parker: There's always two versions.
LeAnn Jackson: Prior to meeting you, I think I had ended a four year relationship, maybe a month prior to meeting Joseph. So I was single, and ready to get out there. And then one of my friends that I worked with, she met him on a dating website.
They didn't work out as a couple, but they stayed-
Blaine Parker: They liked each other.
Joseph Jackson: We were friends.
LeAnn Jackson: ... but they stayed in touch as friends. So her and I went out the dinner with a couple other of our girlfriends, and she was like, hey, I got this really great guy for you to meet. And I'm like, I don't really want to. Because I wanted to stay single. I had just-
Blaine Parker: You were enjoying the single life.
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah.
Honey Parker: I'm not ready for the great guy.
LeAnn Jackson: So after she sent me his info to contact him, or whatever, I didn't do anything. I didn't contact him, or anything. He contacted me through-
Joseph Jackson: Myspace.
LeAnn Jackson: Myspace, yeah.
Blaine Parker: Myspace?
Joseph Jackson: Yeah. Back in the Myspace days.
Blaine Parker: Wow. This was like ancient history in internet years.
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah. So we met up, and went out to dinner one night. We both had a Caesar salad for our first date.
Joseph Jackson: Afterwards, we went to a bar where her friend met us up. Then they both disappeared for a while. So I was like, all right, well, that's that. I was about to leave the bar, when they both came back out. So it's just gone from there.
What was it? 21 days later, I proposed.
LeAnn Jackson: Yep.
Blaine Parker: 21 days.
Honey Parker: Holy cow.
LeAnn Jackson: 21 days later, he proposed.
Honey Parker: Okay, 21 days. Did you know when you met LeAnn that this was the one? Or how long did it take you to?
Joseph Jackson: After that first night, we kind of both were like, this is something different than either of us had ever experienced with someone else.
LeAnn Jackson: It felt comfortable. It felt like we had somehow been together before, in a prior lifetime. It was just, it was different. I felt like I could be myself around him. I didn't have to be like, oh, let me eat little bites. Let me be all nice and proper.
Joseph Jackson: I mean, our first, what? Five dates in the first week that we knew each other, were all four, five, six hours long, of just sitting around, talking to each other. And it was just like, all right. Well, this is how it is. At that time, she was living in Venice. I was up in Tampa. So an hour plus drive, each way. The distance kind of pushed things a little further, and a little quicker, than usual. But, 10 years later ...
LeAnn Jackson: We're still together.
Honey Parker: When he proposed, were you shocked, or were you thinking, yeah, this is just right?
LeAnn Jackson: I thought it was just right. My parents, they were, my whole family. They were like, oh my God. Why are you getting married so quickly?
Joseph Jackson: But her dad-
LeAnn Jackson: You don't even know this guy.
Joseph Jackson: ... wanted to propose to her mom within a month of meeting, as well. He proposed three different times before her mom said yes to him. So they both saw kind of the same thing that they went through, with us. At least there was support, and not a, this is too soon. Can't do this. No way. Even though my family, my grandmother always said, when you meet the person that you're supposed to be with, you'll know the instant you meet them.
Blaine Parker: Wow. Okay.
Honey Parker: Did you know, sweetheart? The instant you met me?
Blaine Parker: Of course I did. What do you think? I fought for you, didn't I?
Honey Parker: You did. You did.
Blaine Parker: How long ago was this, anyway?
Joseph Jackson: Just over 10 years ago. February 8th was our first date.
LeAnn Jackson: 2009.
Blaine Parker: So still waiting for the magic to wear off, huh?
Joseph Jackson: No, 2009. I'm sorry. 2009.
Honey Parker: 2009. 10 years.
Blaine Parker: By the way, if anybody requires sustenance, we still have ... We are in the Couple Coach. This is the first interview that we have recorded in the Couple Coach. [crosstalk 00:12:27]
Honey Parker: It's not spacious.
Blaine Parker: It is not spacious. It really, the dinette-
Joseph Jackson: There's plenty down here.
Blaine Parker: ... is not sized for four adults. We didn't really think about that when we designed. I think we're going to have to remodel.
Honey Parker: Well I like that this place is supposedly, you can sleep six. No. Sorry.
Blaine Parker: Two small people.
Honey Parker: The cat was lucky to make the trip.
Blaine Parker: Mom, dad. Mom, dad, and four kids. Small kids.
Joseph Jackson: It's like Airbnbs that say you can sleep 10. You get there. There's two beds.
Blaine Parker: And normally-
Honey Parker: 10 people standing up. You sleep standing up, right? What's the problem?
Blaine Parker: Normally, we'd be drinking wine over microphones, but it's the middle of the day. We all have work to do. After this, you guys are going to sling cheesecakes, aren't you?
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah. We have a few deliveries to make.
Blaine Parker: Okay. Speaking of cheesecakes. We've heard about this family recipe already. Honey has yet to taste the cheesecake. So you hear this?
Honey Parker: What flavors did you get for me, babe?
Blaine Parker: That is the opening of the cheesecake in the jar. This is ...
Honey Parker: Good pop sound.
Blaine Parker: Yes. Le'Anns Cheesecakes strawberry ... Is this infused?
LeAnn Jackson: Nope.
Joseph Jackson: No.
Blaine Parker: This is not infused.
LeAnn Jackson: No. That's regular.
Joseph Jackson: We have a guava, and a chocolate, that are CBD infused. But our classic strawberry is a Florida classic, so.
Honey Parker: And this has got a graham cracker base on the bottom?
Joseph Jackson: Yes.
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah.
Honey Parker: Blaine, why don't you explain, while I'm about to taste it.
Blaine Parker: This is a cheesecake in a jar. It's a small mason jar. What is that? Eight ounces?
Joseph Jackson: Yes.
Blaine Parker: It's an eight ounce mason jar. Here she goes.
Honey Parker: All right. I'm not going for a delicate bite.
Blaine Parker: All right. That's a good, girl-sized bite.
Honey Parker: You can all leave now. I'm just going to. Oh my word. I'm just going to curl up, and I'm going back in. I'm going to curl up with my cheesecake in a jar. I love you, cheesecake in a jar. Do you want to take my picture with the cheesecake in a jar?
Blaine Parker: Oh, yes. Where's my? Oh, there it is. Thank you.
Honey Parker: Here. Let me fill this top.
Blaine Parker: We'll get a picture. You can go to the website, or Facebook, and see the photo of Honey, with the cheesecake in the jar.
Honey Parker: Wow. That's good. But I'm not going [crosstalk 00:14:35].
Blaine Parker: I'm not going to ask how you make that, because I understand family secrets. We got a quick version of the backstory. The next question usually is, okay, that's how you met. Fast forward to how the heck did you start a cheesecake company, much less a CBD cheesecake company? Or an infused cheesecake company?
Joseph Jackson: Well, I mean, I guess we should start with the jar first. Because we started doing whole pies and slices that you traditionally see at restaurants and stores.
LeAnn Jackson: And we only started with the original flavor, too. There was not other toppings. No other anything. It was just plain cheesecake.
Joseph Jackson: And then Florida's hot summer weathers showed us that cheesecake melts. So we had to figure out a way to insulate it.
Blaine Parker: Little cheesecake melts.
LeAnn Jackson: We were doing the farmers markets to get us out there, and for people to taste our product. We had cheesecake, a slice of cheesecake, in a styrofoam container, sitting on top of our table. It just looked like-
Joseph Jackson: It would melt.
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah. The tip of it would fold over. It would just look like crap.
Blaine Parker: Oh, no.
Joseph Jackson: It would turn into just a soupy mess. So one day, one of our friends took a cheesecake, and left it out a little too long, so it was a little soupy. He just threw it in a bowl. Was trying to like, you know, just throw it in a bowl, or maybe like a jar. Wait. And we all kind of stopped at the table. The jar was the answer, because we could keep it cold, and it would insulate the full slice, and give you time to transport it.
Now what we didn't know, was it also fit in a cup holder. So perfect for your car. Movie theater. Airplane. And even sporting events. They have been snuck into Lightening games, Bucs games, and stuff like that, for people to enjoy.
Blaine Parker: That's crazy.
Honey Parker: So the light bulb goes off. Cheesecake in a jar. What are the steps involved? You have this epiphany. But then you have to make it happen. So what's the next step?
Blaine Parker: What's the process? How? How?
LeAnn Jackson: Once the light bulb hit about the cheesecake in the jar, we went to Walmart, and we got seven different jars that they had on their shelf, to see which one baked the best. Which one made our product look the best.
Blaine Parker: You bake this in the jar?
LeAnn Jackson: Yep. We bake it right in the jar.
Blaine Parker: Man.
LeAnn Jackson: So we found our jar. From then on, we've stuck with it.
Joseph Jackson: Then we started adding different flavors, the crust, toppings, and then.
LeAnn Jackson: We had a cheesecake party one night, where we had thousands of different topping combinations that you could make.
Joseph Jackson: So we just had a big pile in the middle. Everybody grabbing jars, throwing different combos together, and trying them out. Seeing which ones were great, which ones were terrible. We had some terrible ones that we tried. We were like, nope, that's definitely not a good combo.
Honey Parker: I definitely want to be at your research sessions.
Blaine Parker: You've got to make the terrible ones. It's the only way that you can figure out, A, don't make those, and B, how do you make the really good ones?
LeAnn Jackson: Then we had a create your own flavor. We had a menu with different toppings that we would carry on us, and everything. People just kept asking us, what are your favorites? What is your favorite flavor?
Blaine Parker: Oh, decision paralysis.
LeAnn Jackson: Right. So we're like, well this is what it's for. You pick your base, dah, dah, dah. It wasn't clicking. So we took the-
Joseph Jackson: So we developed a top five, which was the top five sellers across the board, and we went down to just those five. Then we started adding seasonal options, like a s'mores, your pumpkin, your raspberry white chocolate, for the holidays. And just adding-
Blaine Parker: What season is s'mores?
Joseph Jackson: S'mores is summer. That's from about June until about August, September.
Blaine Parker: Campfire season.
Joseph Jackson: Yes.
Blaine Parker: It's in Florida, so I'm not really sure who's, what the idea of seasons is here, recreationally.
Joseph Jackson: Seasons go morning, afternoon, and night, here, in Florida.
LeAnn Jackson: All a Sunday.
Honey Parker: So you figure out what you're doing. What kind of storage facility do you need?
Joseph Jackson: It's working with the commercial kitchens. Working with the distributors. Working with grocery stores that have the storage, where we can drop off, and do deliveries from, when we're baking. With trucks.
Honey Parker: What's the timeframe of, we have this idea, to having it actually make money? And I'm not even talking about being in the black. I'm just talking about to when does it start ...
Blaine Parker: Generating revenue.
Honey Parker: Yeah.
Joseph Jackson: That was really from the first week. Honestly, we kind of found a hidden-
LeAnn Jackson: Niche.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah. That was really needed.
Blaine Parker: It was a void that nobody knew existed.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah.
LeAnn Jackson: Right. I mean, it was cheesecake, and a lot of people made cheesecake, but how many people actually put it in a jar?
Blaine Parker: Nobody.
LeAnn Jackson: Right. So we have this product that was unique.
Joseph Jackson: Then with Tampa, there really wasn't any local cheesecake makers. You just had the Cheesecake Factory, or Publix, or Sara Lee. There really wasn't a locally made cheesecake. So we kind of found that out afterwards. Which, sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes, a bad thing. You find out afterwards, that there was a market all ready for your product. Which, for us, just worked where we could find local shops, and we kind of blossomed at the right time, as well, in Tampa, where it was under a resurgence of the food scene. All these local, great restaurants, farmers markets, coffee shops, were opening up.
LeAnn Jackson: Food trucks.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah. Food trucks.
LeAnn Jackson: The food truck era. That was really big here in Tampa. It still kind of is. It's kind of dying down, now, but that's ...
Joseph Jackson: The food trucks supply food for a lot of the call centers, and offices, throughout the Tampa Bay area, on a daily basis. It really was about a two year festival scene, there. It was, about every month, there was a great food truck rally, where we were able to go out, sell directly to consumer, and pass out what we call our map to the jars.
Blaine Parker: I've got the map to the jars here. For anyone who's been to Los Angeles, and seen them selling map to the stars, you'll understand why this is funny.
Joseph Jackson: I mean, the jars are the star of the show, so we had to make a map to where you can find them, since we didn't have a retail front. We were doing everything. Baking it, and then selling it to retailers, to buy around the Tampa Bay area, and this is how we developed a way to let our customers at events know where they could find us when we weren't at events.
Blaine Parker: I'm just going to point out ... Forgive me for interrupting.
LeAnn Jackson: Please.
Blaine Parker: This is not casual. You are everywhere.
LeAnn Jackson: Everywhere.
Blaine Parker: Everywhere. This is crazy.
Honey Parker: That was going to be my next question. If somebody was looking for you, you're in different restaurants. You're in markets.
LeAnn Jackson: Yep. Different produce stands. Or biggest grocery store. Our first grocery store, and our biggest grocery store, is Lucky's Market. But you can find us all over the state of Florida.
Honey Parker: Are you outside of Florida?
LeAnn Jackson: No, thank you.
Joseph Jackson: Not currently. We're currently working on distribution throughout Florida. Once we get that taken care of, we'll be moving to the southeast, and nationally.
Honey Parker: And to Utah.
Joseph Jackson: Yes.
Honey Parker: And to Utah.
Joseph Jackson: Yes, to Utah.
Honey Parker: We love our sweets in Utah. I think you'll do well. I think you'll do well.
Blaine Parker: Yeah. Utah. Because about half the population will not go out and get a drink, but they will go out and get frozen custard.
Honey Parker: We like dessert.
Blaine Parker: It's a huge thing. So frozen custard in a jar? No. That doesn't sing. Well?
Joseph Jackson: We're looking at other products. With doing CBD infused products, that's kind of opened us up to other markets, to be. Like we brought out our new chocolate bar, just recently. We're looking at possibly salad dressings. Hot sauces. Breads.
LeAnn Jackson: Anything that you can eat in your day, that's what we want to infuse CBD with.
Honey Parker: So what was the reason for wanting to get into, for adding CBD to this? Because it sounded like it started with, my family has a great cheesecake recipe, and the world needs to know.
LeAnn Jackson: Right.
Joseph Jackson: That was her portion of the whole venture. The infusions, I guess, is mine, because I am alive because of it. It's a personal journey that I've been on for about the past 15 years. Going from pain killers, and opioids, to CBD and cannabis infused products, that has kept me alive, and prevented me from OD'ing on opioids, just accidentally.
Honey Parker: Did you have an accident?
Joseph Jackson: I played sports growing up. From the age of 13 on, they put me on Tylenol 3 with Codeine, up through Vicodins, opioids, and beyond.
LeAnn Jackson: Oxycontin.
Honey Parker: Oh my word.
Joseph Jackson: Plus Xanax, Fentanyl. I mean, I took some so that-
Blaine Parker: That just sounds like there's a menu of opioids here.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah.
Blaine Parker: Wow.
LeAnn Jackson: We would call his cocktail. That was his cocktail, that you would take every morning.
Joseph Jackson: As I'm looking back at the history, we were learning a lot of pain medication, during the time that I was going through this. So I was part of the experimental generation, where they tried different pain medications, to see what worked, and what didn't.
Blaine Parker: Oh boy.
Joseph Jackson: And now, they're seeing that yeah, it's cannabis and hemp products that really work, on constant pain. I have seven discs between my neck and my lower back that are some form of injured. I have arthritis, carpal tunnel, knee issues, ankle issues. So, I mean, for me, my day starts with some CBD, to help get the arthritis down, and try to get the movement, and inflammation down in my back, from sleeping all night. Then I go about my day. It allows me to actually do the job that we do.
So that's kind of a personal passion for me, is to help other people who may not know what cannabis products do yet, and also, may be adverse to smoking, or taking things other ways, that ... You know, there's a lot of stigma, still, with the whole hemp and cannabis process.
Part of me, and what I want to do, is help educate the population, and actually provide them other options than just smoking. That's where the food based products go. Because prior to Prohibition, CBD was in our food products, because it was fed to our livestock. It was also part of our regular medicine, and everything like that. So we need to get back to that.
Honey Parker: Fascinating.
Blaine Parker: Honey, here.
Honey Parker: What flavor is this? Because I really wanted the chocolate. So I'll save that for later.
Blaine Parker: As soon as we've discuss this, this is ... Oh, okay. This is guava.
Honey Parker: I'll go guava.
Blaine Parker: Since we're in a subtropical climate, I figured guava would be good. This is a CBD infused cheesecake.
Honey Parker: I'm very excited because, I don't know how many years this has been going on, I mean, my hands hurt constantly. Arthritis runs in my family.
Blaine Parker: And you're too young to have arthritis.
Honey Parker: I go on a short bike ride, my hands, it's brutal. So, here we go.
Joseph Jackson: Our cheesecakes have about 80 milligrams of CBD in each cheesecake. So we always say it's either one serving, or two servings, depending on what time of day, and how much pain you're in.
Honey Parker: One jar is a serving.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah.
Blaine Parker: Okay. So you get a serving. How does that cheesecake taste?
Honey Parker: All right. Leave me alone. I'm eating. It's been out of the refrigerator for maybe about a half an hour?
Joseph Jackson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah.
Honey Parker: And the consistency is fantastic. It's really soft. It's delicious. It's really soft. Guava is not really a go-to flavor for me, but I love how it mixes, the guava flavor mixes with the cheesecake. It's really pretty fantastic.
Joseph Jackson: Here in Tampa, and Ybor, the guava and cheese pastry is a classic. So we had to take our version of that, and make it into our dessert for restaurants, and everybody that loves that classic guava and cheese combo.
Honey Parker: What were your five original flavors?
LeAnn Jackson: It was strawberry, the guava.
Joseph Jackson: The cookies and cream.
LeAnn Jackson: Chocolate, and peanut butter.
Honey Parker: I should have tried to guess it. I wouldn't have gotten the cookies and cream, though.
LeAnn Jackson: That one's a hit.
Joseph Jackson: That's a big hit, because the children love it, and also, I mean, adults love Oreo cookies.
LeAnn Jackson: It's one of my favorites.
Joseph Jackson: Our current seasonal special is called our Grand Slam. We take our Oreo infused cookie, and add peanut butter, and caramel on top. It's just absolutely amazing.
LeAnn Jackson: Very sweet. To me, that one's sweet. The caramel, and everything. It's good, but it's very sweet.
Joseph Jackson: That's our most decadent cheesecake that we do.
Blaine Parker: One of the reasons I'm interested in this is, I've developed Gout, and CBD is supposed to be good for Gout.
Joseph Jackson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
LeAnn Jackson: Yep.
Blaine Parker: Not that I should be eating cheesecake, but.
LeAnn Jackson: That's why we have the chocolate bar.
Blaine Parker: So with the chocolate bars, it's not like you sit down and eat a chocolate bar. You eat a square. That is a single serving?
Joseph Jackson: Correct.
LeAnn Jackson: Yes. Yep.
Joseph Jackson: The chocolate bars are 150 milligrams total, with 15 pieces. So you get 10 milligrams per piece. So for us, we came out with this to be a more portion control option, and more of a throughout your day. Whereas the cheesecake is more of an at night, or if you're in pain, or taking anxiety meds, or things like that. It can really help you, throughout the day, with cheesecake, but the chocolates are more of the dose as you go.
Blaine Parker: Dose as you go.
Honey Parker: Guava is ... That's really surprising to me. Because again, I'm not a huge guava fan, but that's probably my favorite guava taste I've ever had.
LeAnn Jackson: One of our friends, he did hot sauce. He actually does our jam for us.
Joseph Jackson: So it's an actual guava paste that's just guava, that's re-concentrated, and made into a jam. Same thing with all our fruit jams. It's all pure fruit, with Florida cane sugar, and it's just natural ingredients.
Honey Parker: Where are you looking to take the business? What's growth for you?
Joseph Jackson: Our goal is national and international. At short term, we're looking at our own facility to build out. Have our own storage and processing on site, instead of having to go to the commercial kitchen we currently use.
Working with the medical marijuana treatment centers here in Florida. Working with the regulators to help pass more open regulations, because currently in Florida, it's vertical market, so there's only 12 companies that are allowed to handle the THC side of the business, here. Hopefully, with the governor, and agriculture commissioner, things will get worked out for there, for everybody.
But really, it's working towards national recreational laws, for adult use, for cannabis, outright. That's kind of where we want to see our business go, and having to help people that way, because we feel that it's a plant, and it should be available to all to use, however they need, for their life.
So that's a vital part of our business. But also, providing great cheesecakes to restaurants throughout the country is also another vital part.
Honey Parker: I have a question, because neither of you come from a packaged goods background.
LeAnn Jackson: My profession, before we started the cheesecake business, is I was a preschool teacher. I had been doing that for six years before I decided that I wanted to go get my associate's in elementary ed, and go through public schools, and everything else. Just it wasn't hitting me anymore. I was eight years into it, and I just, it wasn't ... I still love kids, and I still love teaching them, and everything else. It's just the structure has changed a lot. It didn't make sense for me anymore.
Blaine Parker: So you wanted to be a teacher, but the system was making it difficult for you to actually feel good about doing it.
LeAnn Jackson: Correct.
Blaine Parker: I haven't heard that before.
Joseph Jackson: Everything that you hear about pay, ability, classroom size, everything, is what I was hearing from her, every day.
LeAnn Jackson: Yep. I would have to buy all of my supplies for my syllabus, that I was going to teach my kids, for the day. And it's like, that should be provided by the school. I should not have to go out and buy my supplies. And I did, because I couldn't let my kids down. We were making special things that day, or something like that. I couldn't just tell them that I didn't have the supplies.
Blaine Parker: I couldn't let my kids down. I can't tell you how many times I have heard some version of that. It's tragic.
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah, it is.
Blaine Parker: Good on you for wanting to do it. And oh well.
Honey Parker: Joseph, what were you doing?
Joseph Jackson: I come from a background of sales. My family had our own business. Was a [inaudible 00:30:46] and gift shop, where we did home décor for the first 15 years of my life. Prior to that, my family had a grocery store they ran up in New York, before I was around, and my father had a couple of gourmet restaurants down on Westshore, in Tampa.
I worked at Publix for a few years. But like I said, numbers, sales, marketing. That was my wheelhouse. I worked with a couple of major companies, in their sales divisions. Really just bouncing from different marketing and sales jobs. That kind of was my wheelhouse. Now, I do the same thing for this.
Blaine Parker: Entrepreneurism was modeled for you, in your family.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah. That's the main thing. It's just owning our own business, owning our own restaurant. That was the family history.
LeAnn Jackson: Same here. My dad has his own electrical business that he's had for 20 something years.
Blaine Parker: He's an electrician?
LeAnn Jackson: Yes.
Blaine Parker: A master electrician?
LeAnn Jackson: Master electrician.
Joseph Jackson: And then her family has bakeries up in New York, still, that they still operate.
Blaine Parker: Oh, really?
LeAnn Jackson: Yep.
Joseph Jackson: I mean, personally, we didn't have any hands on food, but-
LeAnn Jackson: Experience.
Joseph Jackson: ... but our family has the history of the food.
Blaine Parker: Where in New York?
LeAnn Jackson: Mount Vernon, is one. And Rochester?
Blaine Parker: It's cold up there.
Joseph Jackson: Poughkeepsie.
LeAnn Jackson: It's very cold up there.
Blaine Parker: No wonder you're here.
Joseph Jackson: Yes. Both of our families got tired of the snow, and moved to Florida. We're the first ones born in Florida, from both our families.
Honey Parker: So in doing this, moving forward with something that wasn't really in your backgrounds, what is something, or some things, that came up that you were like, wow, we didn't see that hurdle coming?
Joseph Jackson: Everything.
LeAnn Jackson: Starting the business. I mean, that was a hurdle, itself.
Joseph Jackson: The first phone call, of finding out that we had a commercial kitchen that we had to find, and couldn't do it out of our house, because it was a cold food product, to our first employee, to our first hurricane that we weathered through, to the government shutdown that we had to weather, because we have product at the airport.
Honey Parker: What did you do with that?
Joseph Jackson: We didn't get orders. I mean, it's just, between the hurricane Irma, that was a six month hit for our business. Then, after that, Red Tide slowed down restaurants up and down the coast of Florida. As that recovered, the government shut down for 35 days, which hit us at the ... Tampa International Airport is one of our bigger accounts. So all the employees that worked for T.S.A. didn't get a paycheck.
LeAnn Jackson: So they couldn't afford specialty items in their stores at the airport.
Joseph Jackson: To buy product.
Honey Parker: So how do you weather, no pun intended, how do you weather those times? How do you personally manage cash flow?
Joseph Jackson: We don't get a paycheck. We get new accounts in different areas. We find new products to start. We market harder. Do events again. It's that struggle of finding enough revenue to be able to pay your bills, buy enough product, and make that next batch of product to get your next sale, to then wait 30 days to be paid by your supplier.
Honey Parker: Not for the faint of heart.
Joseph Jackson: No.
Honey Parker: So a stressful time comes up. I'm going to assume it's different for each of you. How do you deal with a stressful time?
Joseph Jackson: She is quiet. I'm talkative.
LeAnn Jackson: I am calm, because in my mind, I'm trying to think of how can I fix this? Or what can I do to make it better? So I kind of keep to myself. That's what I do. This one. I call it squirreling. He squirrels into these ...
Joseph Jackson: There's a reason I take CBD products. To stop the squirrel, so I can concentrate and focus on what's actually going on. What I can actually do to solve the problem, and how can I move forward from what just happened? It's a battle which everybody faces, because we always think the worst is always going to happen. We always think that, okay, well, what if we don't do get that order? But we're going to get that order. We've been doing this for four years. We know when our orders are going to come in. We know if it's going to be slow for a couple of weeks, well, the next couple of weeks are going to be very busy.
In January. It was extremely slow January, for us, this year, compared to even last year.
LeAnn Jackson: But then February 1st hit.
Joseph Jackson: But February 1st, yeah.
LeAnn Jackson: It was like, oh my gosh, we have all these orders that we need to fill.
Joseph Jackson: We doubled our January sales in the first ten days of February.
Blaine Parker: Wow. Holy crap.
Honey Parker: Do you have employees?
LeAnn Jackson: No.
Joseph Jackson: No. But we have part-time help that comes in on our production days, that helps us produce our product. But, on the daily basis, we don't have an employee coming in.
Honey Parker: So you're not dealing with health insurance, or anything like that?
LeAnn Jackson: No.
Joseph Jackson: No. Well, we're still dealing with our own health insurance, and figuring all that out. Make sure we made enough money, every year, so we qualify for insurance, and all that.
Blaine Parker: I'm going to be selfish here, for a second, and go back to the product. Because I just tasted Le'Anns Infusions chocolate. That's really good. How the heck do you do that?
LeAnn Jackson: We don't make the chocolate.
Blaine Parker: Okay. Now I'm disappointed.
LeAnn Jackson: No, we actually use a company that's locally here in Florida, in Tampa, and they make chocolate. We had approached them about doing CBD chocolates. They don't want to do it under their chocolate brand.
Blaine Parker: Of course not.
LeAnn Jackson: Which is perfectly fine. So what we did is, we asked them to private label the chocolate bars, for us.
Blaine Parker: Have they private labeled anything before this?
Joseph Jackson: I think they've private labeled for a few other companies, depending on what they wanted, but nothing like this.
LeAnn Jackson: Not CBD.
Blaine Parker: Is it your recipe?
LeAnn Jackson: Nope.
Joseph Jackson: With chocolate, there really isn't a recipe, per se. It's the percentage of cocoa versus butterfat, and the bean. What they do is, we wanted to make sure that we worked with someone ... Just like our cheesecake. That's an all natural product. It's a bean to bar. So they get the raw cocoa beans in. They roast them. They process them. They melt it down. They temper it, and then they make the chocolate bars with the CBD that we supply, from our suppliers, that we provide them. Then they do the mixture inside, and give you that chocolate bar.
Blaine Parker: That's a really good chocolate bar.
Honey Parker: I look forward to it.
Blaine Parker: And hey, hello Gout.
Honey Parker: But I just went face first into the cheesecake, so I'm going to wait.
Joseph Jackson: Oh, yes.
Blaine Parker: How much of it should I be eating to try and stem the tide of my-
LeAnn Jackson: I would say, probably start with two pieces a day.
Joseph Jackson: I would definitely say, right now, there's not enough information on CBD out there.
Blaine Parker: This is one of the big challenges of CBD, is there's no. Right.
Joseph Jackson: The main thing we have to really tell people, is we're not doctors. We're not doctors. We're not going to be able to tell you exactly what dose you should take. Things like that. If this is something that you're wanting to try out, I would definitely say talk to your doctor first.
See someone who has expertise with your health, and how hemp extracted CBD can help you.
Just like if you're going to start going to a medical marijuana treatment center, and do THC products, you would first talk to a doctor, and get all their recommendations, and see what their best recommendation is for you.
Now unfortunately, even medical doctors don't have the information they need.
Blaine Parker: It's totally new.
Joseph Jackson: This country does not do research on cannabis, at all, because we can't. We're relying on Israel, Australia ...
LeAnn Jackson: New Zealand.
Joseph Jackson: ... the U.K., all these different countries, on their research, to see what we should do first. Because it's still a Schedule 1 narcotic, federally. So pharmaceutical companies can't research it, and figure out how it affects, on the dosage level.
So it's all a personal thing right now. It's really, we suggest starting small, and working your way up, to see what works for you.
Honey Parker: Touchdown. I finished my cheesecake.
Blaine Parker: I have not finished my chocolate bar.
Honey Parker: That's probably good.
Blaine Parker: I do have a question here, that goes to procedure. How do you two work together?
This has been part one of LeAnn and Joseph Jackson, of Le'Anns Cheesecakes, in Tampa, Florida. You can find them online at leannscheesecakesnmore.com. That L-E-A-N-N, cheesecakes, the letter N, more.com.
Or just visit the couples page at coupleco.com, and click the link hiding beneath LeAnn and Joseph.
Honey Parker: And if you've enjoyed this podcast, you can go to iTunes and leave a star rating, and a review, to help people just like you find it.
Blaine Parker: Join us next time, as we return to Tampa to finish our conversation with the cannabinoid cooks.
Honey Parker: We'll hear about pitfalls of hiring friends, which is something that we've talked about in the past. And surviving the rough patches.
Blaine Parker: Telling each other truth, whether or not the other wants to hear it.
Honey Parker: And ultimately, it's about the power of doing what you love, with the one you love.
Blaine Parker: Next time, here on CoupleCo: Working With Your Spouse For Fun & Profit.
Honey Parker: Copyright 2019. All rights reserved.
Blaine Parker: Love you, baby.
Honey Parker: Love you, too.
Blaine Parker: CoupleCo out.
Blaine Parker: Mother of God. Come on. Later that same evening...
Honey Parker: Do we need to share a screen?
Blaine Parker: There's no reason we should need to share a screen. Oh, I know what's wrong. Here we go.
Welcome to CoupleCo: Working With Your Spouse For Fun & Profit. I'm Blaine Parker.
Honey Parker: Which makes me Honey Parker.
Blaine Parker: And as a couple in business together, we are coming to you from the Couple Coach, our compact, trans American land yacht.
Honey Parker: We're navigating the nation, in search of standout couples in business together.
Blaine Parker: And we're bringing them to you, so you can hear their inspiring stories of crushing it in business, without crushing each other.
Honey Parker: Today, for episode 73, seven, three, 73, we have a cheesecake in a jar.
Blaine Parker: Yes. Cheesecake in a jar.
Honey Parker: These cheesecakes are taking Florida by storm, and there are plans for national domination.
Blaine Parker: The story begins with a whirlwind romance, and a lightening fast marriage.
Honey Parker: And it stars two controlling, passionate people, each of whom fight for what they believe in.
Blaine Parker: So how does a packaged food business work out when you're talking a preschool teacher and a salesman, neither with food industry experience?
Honey Parker: And then you add CBDs.
Blaine Parker: That's right. The non-psychoactive phytocannabinoid that had been used to treat anxiety, cognition, movement disorders, and pain.
Honey Parker: And which the F.D.A. has approved for treatment of two epilepsy disorders.
Blaine Parker: No, it's not marijuana. And neither is Smokin' Mary Smoked Bloody Mary Mix.
Honey Parker: That is ... Can I say it? That is like the dumbest transition we've ever done.
Blaine Parker: You know, when you're coming up with segues on the fly, you got to do something.
Honey Parker: Well, you did something.
Blaine Parker: Okay. Well let's pretend I didn't do it.
Smokin' Mary Smoked Bloody Mary Mix.
Honey Parker: Smokin' Mary is a fantastic mixer made with only fresh, whole tomatoes.
Blaine Parker: No reconstituted tomato juice, like the big brands.
Honey Parker: And you can mix it with the distilled spirit of your choice, for great tasting cocktails. Really, really great. Let me be clear. They're great.
Blaine Parker: Honey has an opinion on this.
Honey Parker: I have opinions about a lot of things.
Blaine Parker: Or you can mix it in fabulous alcohol free virgin cocktails.
Honey Parker: And it's a great cooking ingredient, as well.
Blaine Parker: The Smokin' Mary website is loaded with great, easy recipes featuring Smokin' Mary's zesty tomato rich goodness.
Honey Parker: Like Smokin' Mary Stuffed Eggplant Parm Rolls.
Blaine Parker: Or Smokin' Mary Crab and Calamari Ceviche.
Honey Parker: Or Smokin' Mary Smoking Mole.
Blaine Parker: I could cook off that recipe page all summer long.
Honey Parker: And Smokin' Mary is a couple owned business.
Blaine Parker: Smokin' Mary Smoked Bloody Mary Mix. Hey, nice tomatoes. Online at smokinmary.com.
Honey Parker: Now, CoupleCo is going to be sending out some big news, very soon.
Blaine Parker: If you want to get on our mailing list, go to coupleco.com.
Honey Parker: That's coupleco.com.
Blaine Parker: Now, on today's episode, we're sitting down with Joseph and LeAnn Jackson, of Le'Anns Cheesecakes.
Honey Parker: So why CBD infused cheesecakes?
Blaine Parker: Because of a first person story that should make anyone a believer in the power of the plant.
Honey Parker: Besides that, these two have faced every kind of hurdle imaginable.
Blaine Parker: They've become experts at weathering crisis with entrepreneurial effort.
Honey Parker: But still, there's the unique stress of not having a nine to five job, but of being at work, with your partner, spending 18 hours in a truck, and then going home together, for the remaining six hours.
Blaine Parker: There's the venting, the crying, the celebrations, and the passion.
Honey Parker: Not to mention to Sicilian grandmother's kitchen that figures in all of this.
Blaine Parker: Here now, part one of LeAnn and Joseph Jackson, of Le'Anns Cheesecakes in Tampa, Florida.
LeAnn and Joseph Jackson, please say howdy.
LeAnn Jackson: Howdy.
Joseph Jackson: Howdy.
Blaine Parker: That's the first time anybody's ever actually done that. Thank you very much.
Honey Parker: And by done that, he means pay attention, and listen to what he said.
Blaine Parker: We are in lovely Clearwater, Florida. We're actually in the Belleair neighborhood of Clearwater, Florida. Wow. And I haven't even been eating CBDs, or ingesting THCs, or any of the other C's that are involved in the process we're about to discuss.
LeAnn and Joseph are the proprietors of Le'Anns Cheesecakes and Le'Anns Infusions, which is a bakery at ... Well, what would we call it? A bakery and what else?
LeAnn Jackson: It's a wholesale bakery.
Blaine Parker: Wholesale bakery. But Le'Anns Infusions is special.
LeAnn Jackson: Yes.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah. I mean, it is still a wholesale bakery, but we're specializing in infused products.
Blaine Parker: Infused products. And I know there are people out there who are going to go ah.
Honey Parker: Or say, what does that mean? What's an infused-
Blaine Parker: Yes. One of the two.
Honey Parker: What's an infused product?
Blaine Parker: They're going to be shocked to find that there's infusion going on here, or they're not going to have any idea.
So before we get into anything else, because usually we ask other questions first. I think we need to explain A, what you do, and B, what the genesis was. How you got to this place.
Joseph Jackson: Well I mean, it first started where I started a different business completely. We went to a business function, and we heard the story of another couple who was from the Tampa area, who started their business about 15, or so, years ago. They took a family recipe and made it national, through finding Oprah's Favorite Things, and some other steps along the way.
We kind of looked at each other about halfway through, and said that kind of us, with your cheesecake recipe.
LeAnn Jackson: So I quit my job.
Blaine Parker: You quit? You just quit your job?
Honey Parker: So you said, well, if people made money by getting their product on Oprah's Favorite Things, I have a cheesecake recipe, I should quit my job?
LeAnn Jackson: I looked at Jay and I was like, you know what? We could do this with the cheesecake. Because it was something that I've always done as a hobby. I love to bake. The cheesecake recipe was something that was really special, in my family.
When I got married to him, I made it for him a lot. I made it for friends, and everything. And they're like, you need to bring this to the market. And I'm like, no, no, no. It's a secret family cheesecake recipe. I can't do that.
Blaine Parker: Yes, apparently you can.
Joseph Jackson: We just started going to try and actually bake it in the house, and found out that, in Florida, you had to have a commercial kitchen, if you're doing cold food. So I crossed my fingers. Did a little simple search online, and found the single rental kitchen in the Tampa Bay area. Contacted them. In two weeks, we were fully licensed, and selling cheesecake at farmers markets.
Blaine Parker: So we'll get more into the details about how this all unfolded. There's another part of this that I think is really fascinating, and needs to be heard by anybody who's gasping, or confused, by infused products.
Joseph Jackson: Infusion is taking a food product, and adding a adult version to it.
Blaine Parker: Adult version.
Joseph Jackson: Right now, with St. Paddy's Day just passed, we put in, we did a Bailey's cheesecake to start with. So that's an infusion.
But the more important infusions are with CBD, right now, and that is where we're taking Cannabidiol, which is the sister to THC from the cannabis and hemp plants, and infusing it into our products, so people can get relief throughout the day.
Blaine Parker: And it does not get you high?
LeAnn Jackson: It does not get high.
Joseph Jackson: No. CBD does not get you high, at all.
LeAnn Jackson: It gets you relaxed. That's what we say.
Joseph Jackson: Yes.
Blaine Parker: And again, people are still confused by this. Just to paint a picture of how benign CBDs are, from a getting high standpoint, the state of Utah has made CBDs legal, and there is no more square state than the state of Utah.
Honey Parker: We'll say, we're based in the great state of Utah.
Blaine Parker: We love Utah.
Honey Parker: We love it. So this is not a dis on Utah.
Blaine Parker: It's just a fact. The culture in Utah is, as our governor said, we do not want to have every Dr. Feelgood out there prescribing medical marijuana to people.
Joseph Jackson: CBD is definitely something that came from research, in finding that it stopped seizures in children. Taking Charlotte's Web, and getting that throughout the United States, and showing that it wasn't intoxicating, but it was medically beneficial to be part of our bodies again.
Blaine Parker: I actually find that kind of fascinating. It's one of the reasons why the laws in Utah changed to allow CBDs. It was because a woman, whose child was having seizures, the only way she could get relief for the kid was through CBDs, and she led the charge.
Okay. We've got some business out of the way. Now we need to go to what I call the single most important question of this interview. Are you ready?
LeAnn Jackson: Um-hmm (affirmative).
Joseph Jackson: Okay.
Blaine Parker: How did you two meet?
Joseph Jackson: That's another story. We were both kind of dating other people.
LeAnn Jackson: Well, no. I was-
Blaine Parker: There's always two versions.
LeAnn Jackson: Prior to meeting you, I think I had ended a four year relationship, maybe a month prior to meeting Joseph. So I was single, and ready to get out there. And then one of my friends that I worked with, she met him on a dating website.
They didn't work out as a couple, but they stayed-
Blaine Parker: They liked each other.
Joseph Jackson: We were friends.
LeAnn Jackson: ... but they stayed in touch as friends. So her and I went out the dinner with a couple other of our girlfriends, and she was like, hey, I got this really great guy for you to meet. And I'm like, I don't really want to. Because I wanted to stay single. I had just-
Blaine Parker: You were enjoying the single life.
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah.
Honey Parker: I'm not ready for the great guy.
LeAnn Jackson: So after she sent me his info to contact him, or whatever, I didn't do anything. I didn't contact him, or anything. He contacted me through-
Joseph Jackson: Myspace.
LeAnn Jackson: Myspace, yeah.
Blaine Parker: Myspace?
Joseph Jackson: Yeah. Back in the Myspace days.
Blaine Parker: Wow. This was like ancient history in internet years.
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah. So we met up, and went out to dinner one night. We both had a Caesar salad for our first date.
Joseph Jackson: Afterwards, we went to a bar where her friend met us up. Then they both disappeared for a while. So I was like, all right, well, that's that. I was about to leave the bar, when they both came back out. So it's just gone from there.
What was it? 21 days later, I proposed.
LeAnn Jackson: Yep.
Blaine Parker: 21 days.
Honey Parker: Holy cow.
LeAnn Jackson: 21 days later, he proposed.
Honey Parker: Okay, 21 days. Did you know when you met LeAnn that this was the one? Or how long did it take you to?
Joseph Jackson: After that first night, we kind of both were like, this is something different than either of us had ever experienced with someone else.
LeAnn Jackson: It felt comfortable. It felt like we had somehow been together before, in a prior lifetime. It was just, it was different. I felt like I could be myself around him. I didn't have to be like, oh, let me eat little bites. Let me be all nice and proper.
Joseph Jackson: I mean, our first, what? Five dates in the first week that we knew each other, were all four, five, six hours long, of just sitting around, talking to each other. And it was just like, all right. Well, this is how it is. At that time, she was living in Venice. I was up in Tampa. So an hour plus drive, each way. The distance kind of pushed things a little further, and a little quicker, than usual. But, 10 years later ...
LeAnn Jackson: We're still together.
Honey Parker: When he proposed, were you shocked, or were you thinking, yeah, this is just right?
LeAnn Jackson: I thought it was just right. My parents, they were, my whole family. They were like, oh my God. Why are you getting married so quickly?
Joseph Jackson: But her dad-
LeAnn Jackson: You don't even know this guy.
Joseph Jackson: ... wanted to propose to her mom within a month of meeting, as well. He proposed three different times before her mom said yes to him. So they both saw kind of the same thing that they went through, with us. At least there was support, and not a, this is too soon. Can't do this. No way. Even though my family, my grandmother always said, when you meet the person that you're supposed to be with, you'll know the instant you meet them.
Blaine Parker: Wow. Okay.
Honey Parker: Did you know, sweetheart? The instant you met me?
Blaine Parker: Of course I did. What do you think? I fought for you, didn't I?
Honey Parker: You did. You did.
Blaine Parker: How long ago was this, anyway?
Joseph Jackson: Just over 10 years ago. February 8th was our first date.
LeAnn Jackson: 2009.
Blaine Parker: So still waiting for the magic to wear off, huh?
Joseph Jackson: No, 2009. I'm sorry. 2009.
Honey Parker: 2009. 10 years.
Blaine Parker: By the way, if anybody requires sustenance, we still have ... We are in the Couple Coach. This is the first interview that we have recorded in the Couple Coach. [crosstalk 00:12:27]
Honey Parker: It's not spacious.
Blaine Parker: It is not spacious. It really, the dinette-
Joseph Jackson: There's plenty down here.
Blaine Parker: ... is not sized for four adults. We didn't really think about that when we designed. I think we're going to have to remodel.
Honey Parker: Well I like that this place is supposedly, you can sleep six. No. Sorry.
Blaine Parker: Two small people.
Honey Parker: The cat was lucky to make the trip.
Blaine Parker: Mom, dad. Mom, dad, and four kids. Small kids.
Joseph Jackson: It's like Airbnbs that say you can sleep 10. You get there. There's two beds.
Blaine Parker: And normally-
Honey Parker: 10 people standing up. You sleep standing up, right? What's the problem?
Blaine Parker: Normally, we'd be drinking wine over microphones, but it's the middle of the day. We all have work to do. After this, you guys are going to sling cheesecakes, aren't you?
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah. We have a few deliveries to make.
Blaine Parker: Okay. Speaking of cheesecakes. We've heard about this family recipe already. Honey has yet to taste the cheesecake. So you hear this?
Honey Parker: What flavors did you get for me, babe?
Blaine Parker: That is the opening of the cheesecake in the jar. This is ...
Honey Parker: Good pop sound.
Blaine Parker: Yes. Le'Anns Cheesecakes strawberry ... Is this infused?
LeAnn Jackson: Nope.
Joseph Jackson: No.
Blaine Parker: This is not infused.
LeAnn Jackson: No. That's regular.
Joseph Jackson: We have a guava, and a chocolate, that are CBD infused. But our classic strawberry is a Florida classic, so.
Honey Parker: And this has got a graham cracker base on the bottom?
Joseph Jackson: Yes.
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah.
Honey Parker: Blaine, why don't you explain, while I'm about to taste it.
Blaine Parker: This is a cheesecake in a jar. It's a small mason jar. What is that? Eight ounces?
Joseph Jackson: Yes.
Blaine Parker: It's an eight ounce mason jar. Here she goes.
Honey Parker: All right. I'm not going for a delicate bite.
Blaine Parker: All right. That's a good, girl-sized bite.
Honey Parker: You can all leave now. I'm just going to. Oh my word. I'm just going to curl up, and I'm going back in. I'm going to curl up with my cheesecake in a jar. I love you, cheesecake in a jar. Do you want to take my picture with the cheesecake in a jar?
Blaine Parker: Oh, yes. Where's my? Oh, there it is. Thank you.
Honey Parker: Here. Let me fill this top.
Blaine Parker: We'll get a picture. You can go to the website, or Facebook, and see the photo of Honey, with the cheesecake in the jar.
Honey Parker: Wow. That's good. But I'm not going [crosstalk 00:14:35].
Blaine Parker: I'm not going to ask how you make that, because I understand family secrets. We got a quick version of the backstory. The next question usually is, okay, that's how you met. Fast forward to how the heck did you start a cheesecake company, much less a CBD cheesecake company? Or an infused cheesecake company?
Joseph Jackson: Well, I mean, I guess we should start with the jar first. Because we started doing whole pies and slices that you traditionally see at restaurants and stores.
LeAnn Jackson: And we only started with the original flavor, too. There was not other toppings. No other anything. It was just plain cheesecake.
Joseph Jackson: And then Florida's hot summer weathers showed us that cheesecake melts. So we had to figure out a way to insulate it.
Blaine Parker: Little cheesecake melts.
LeAnn Jackson: We were doing the farmers markets to get us out there, and for people to taste our product. We had cheesecake, a slice of cheesecake, in a styrofoam container, sitting on top of our table. It just looked like-
Joseph Jackson: It would melt.
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah. The tip of it would fold over. It would just look like crap.
Blaine Parker: Oh, no.
Joseph Jackson: It would turn into just a soupy mess. So one day, one of our friends took a cheesecake, and left it out a little too long, so it was a little soupy. He just threw it in a bowl. Was trying to like, you know, just throw it in a bowl, or maybe like a jar. Wait. And we all kind of stopped at the table. The jar was the answer, because we could keep it cold, and it would insulate the full slice, and give you time to transport it.
Now what we didn't know, was it also fit in a cup holder. So perfect for your car. Movie theater. Airplane. And even sporting events. They have been snuck into Lightening games, Bucs games, and stuff like that, for people to enjoy.
Blaine Parker: That's crazy.
Honey Parker: So the light bulb goes off. Cheesecake in a jar. What are the steps involved? You have this epiphany. But then you have to make it happen. So what's the next step?
Blaine Parker: What's the process? How? How?
LeAnn Jackson: Once the light bulb hit about the cheesecake in the jar, we went to Walmart, and we got seven different jars that they had on their shelf, to see which one baked the best. Which one made our product look the best.
Blaine Parker: You bake this in the jar?
LeAnn Jackson: Yep. We bake it right in the jar.
Blaine Parker: Man.
LeAnn Jackson: So we found our jar. From then on, we've stuck with it.
Joseph Jackson: Then we started adding different flavors, the crust, toppings, and then.
LeAnn Jackson: We had a cheesecake party one night, where we had thousands of different topping combinations that you could make.
Joseph Jackson: So we just had a big pile in the middle. Everybody grabbing jars, throwing different combos together, and trying them out. Seeing which ones were great, which ones were terrible. We had some terrible ones that we tried. We were like, nope, that's definitely not a good combo.
Honey Parker: I definitely want to be at your research sessions.
Blaine Parker: You've got to make the terrible ones. It's the only way that you can figure out, A, don't make those, and B, how do you make the really good ones?
LeAnn Jackson: Then we had a create your own flavor. We had a menu with different toppings that we would carry on us, and everything. People just kept asking us, what are your favorites? What is your favorite flavor?
Blaine Parker: Oh, decision paralysis.
LeAnn Jackson: Right. So we're like, well this is what it's for. You pick your base, dah, dah, dah. It wasn't clicking. So we took the-
Joseph Jackson: So we developed a top five, which was the top five sellers across the board, and we went down to just those five. Then we started adding seasonal options, like a s'mores, your pumpkin, your raspberry white chocolate, for the holidays. And just adding-
Blaine Parker: What season is s'mores?
Joseph Jackson: S'mores is summer. That's from about June until about August, September.
Blaine Parker: Campfire season.
Joseph Jackson: Yes.
Blaine Parker: It's in Florida, so I'm not really sure who's, what the idea of seasons is here, recreationally.
Joseph Jackson: Seasons go morning, afternoon, and night, here, in Florida.
LeAnn Jackson: All a Sunday.
Honey Parker: So you figure out what you're doing. What kind of storage facility do you need?
Joseph Jackson: It's working with the commercial kitchens. Working with the distributors. Working with grocery stores that have the storage, where we can drop off, and do deliveries from, when we're baking. With trucks.
Honey Parker: What's the timeframe of, we have this idea, to having it actually make money? And I'm not even talking about being in the black. I'm just talking about to when does it start ...
Blaine Parker: Generating revenue.
Honey Parker: Yeah.
Joseph Jackson: That was really from the first week. Honestly, we kind of found a hidden-
LeAnn Jackson: Niche.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah. That was really needed.
Blaine Parker: It was a void that nobody knew existed.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah.
LeAnn Jackson: Right. I mean, it was cheesecake, and a lot of people made cheesecake, but how many people actually put it in a jar?
Blaine Parker: Nobody.
LeAnn Jackson: Right. So we have this product that was unique.
Joseph Jackson: Then with Tampa, there really wasn't any local cheesecake makers. You just had the Cheesecake Factory, or Publix, or Sara Lee. There really wasn't a locally made cheesecake. So we kind of found that out afterwards. Which, sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes, a bad thing. You find out afterwards, that there was a market all ready for your product. Which, for us, just worked where we could find local shops, and we kind of blossomed at the right time, as well, in Tampa, where it was under a resurgence of the food scene. All these local, great restaurants, farmers markets, coffee shops, were opening up.
LeAnn Jackson: Food trucks.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah. Food trucks.
LeAnn Jackson: The food truck era. That was really big here in Tampa. It still kind of is. It's kind of dying down, now, but that's ...
Joseph Jackson: The food trucks supply food for a lot of the call centers, and offices, throughout the Tampa Bay area, on a daily basis. It really was about a two year festival scene, there. It was, about every month, there was a great food truck rally, where we were able to go out, sell directly to consumer, and pass out what we call our map to the jars.
Blaine Parker: I've got the map to the jars here. For anyone who's been to Los Angeles, and seen them selling map to the stars, you'll understand why this is funny.
Joseph Jackson: I mean, the jars are the star of the show, so we had to make a map to where you can find them, since we didn't have a retail front. We were doing everything. Baking it, and then selling it to retailers, to buy around the Tampa Bay area, and this is how we developed a way to let our customers at events know where they could find us when we weren't at events.
Blaine Parker: I'm just going to point out ... Forgive me for interrupting.
LeAnn Jackson: Please.
Blaine Parker: This is not casual. You are everywhere.
LeAnn Jackson: Everywhere.
Blaine Parker: Everywhere. This is crazy.
Honey Parker: That was going to be my next question. If somebody was looking for you, you're in different restaurants. You're in markets.
LeAnn Jackson: Yep. Different produce stands. Or biggest grocery store. Our first grocery store, and our biggest grocery store, is Lucky's Market. But you can find us all over the state of Florida.
Honey Parker: Are you outside of Florida?
LeAnn Jackson: No, thank you.
Joseph Jackson: Not currently. We're currently working on distribution throughout Florida. Once we get that taken care of, we'll be moving to the southeast, and nationally.
Honey Parker: And to Utah.
Joseph Jackson: Yes.
Honey Parker: And to Utah.
Joseph Jackson: Yes, to Utah.
Honey Parker: We love our sweets in Utah. I think you'll do well. I think you'll do well.
Blaine Parker: Yeah. Utah. Because about half the population will not go out and get a drink, but they will go out and get frozen custard.
Honey Parker: We like dessert.
Blaine Parker: It's a huge thing. So frozen custard in a jar? No. That doesn't sing. Well?
Joseph Jackson: We're looking at other products. With doing CBD infused products, that's kind of opened us up to other markets, to be. Like we brought out our new chocolate bar, just recently. We're looking at possibly salad dressings. Hot sauces. Breads.
LeAnn Jackson: Anything that you can eat in your day, that's what we want to infuse CBD with.
Honey Parker: So what was the reason for wanting to get into, for adding CBD to this? Because it sounded like it started with, my family has a great cheesecake recipe, and the world needs to know.
LeAnn Jackson: Right.
Joseph Jackson: That was her portion of the whole venture. The infusions, I guess, is mine, because I am alive because of it. It's a personal journey that I've been on for about the past 15 years. Going from pain killers, and opioids, to CBD and cannabis infused products, that has kept me alive, and prevented me from OD'ing on opioids, just accidentally.
Honey Parker: Did you have an accident?
Joseph Jackson: I played sports growing up. From the age of 13 on, they put me on Tylenol 3 with Codeine, up through Vicodins, opioids, and beyond.
LeAnn Jackson: Oxycontin.
Honey Parker: Oh my word.
Joseph Jackson: Plus Xanax, Fentanyl. I mean, I took some so that-
Blaine Parker: That just sounds like there's a menu of opioids here.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah.
Blaine Parker: Wow.
LeAnn Jackson: We would call his cocktail. That was his cocktail, that you would take every morning.
Joseph Jackson: As I'm looking back at the history, we were learning a lot of pain medication, during the time that I was going through this. So I was part of the experimental generation, where they tried different pain medications, to see what worked, and what didn't.
Blaine Parker: Oh boy.
Joseph Jackson: And now, they're seeing that yeah, it's cannabis and hemp products that really work, on constant pain. I have seven discs between my neck and my lower back that are some form of injured. I have arthritis, carpal tunnel, knee issues, ankle issues. So, I mean, for me, my day starts with some CBD, to help get the arthritis down, and try to get the movement, and inflammation down in my back, from sleeping all night. Then I go about my day. It allows me to actually do the job that we do.
So that's kind of a personal passion for me, is to help other people who may not know what cannabis products do yet, and also, may be adverse to smoking, or taking things other ways, that ... You know, there's a lot of stigma, still, with the whole hemp and cannabis process.
Part of me, and what I want to do, is help educate the population, and actually provide them other options than just smoking. That's where the food based products go. Because prior to Prohibition, CBD was in our food products, because it was fed to our livestock. It was also part of our regular medicine, and everything like that. So we need to get back to that.
Honey Parker: Fascinating.
Blaine Parker: Honey, here.
Honey Parker: What flavor is this? Because I really wanted the chocolate. So I'll save that for later.
Blaine Parker: As soon as we've discuss this, this is ... Oh, okay. This is guava.
Honey Parker: I'll go guava.
Blaine Parker: Since we're in a subtropical climate, I figured guava would be good. This is a CBD infused cheesecake.
Honey Parker: I'm very excited because, I don't know how many years this has been going on, I mean, my hands hurt constantly. Arthritis runs in my family.
Blaine Parker: And you're too young to have arthritis.
Honey Parker: I go on a short bike ride, my hands, it's brutal. So, here we go.
Joseph Jackson: Our cheesecakes have about 80 milligrams of CBD in each cheesecake. So we always say it's either one serving, or two servings, depending on what time of day, and how much pain you're in.
Honey Parker: One jar is a serving.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah.
Blaine Parker: Okay. So you get a serving. How does that cheesecake taste?
Honey Parker: All right. Leave me alone. I'm eating. It's been out of the refrigerator for maybe about a half an hour?
Joseph Jackson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah.
Honey Parker: And the consistency is fantastic. It's really soft. It's delicious. It's really soft. Guava is not really a go-to flavor for me, but I love how it mixes, the guava flavor mixes with the cheesecake. It's really pretty fantastic.
Joseph Jackson: Here in Tampa, and Ybor, the guava and cheese pastry is a classic. So we had to take our version of that, and make it into our dessert for restaurants, and everybody that loves that classic guava and cheese combo.
Honey Parker: What were your five original flavors?
LeAnn Jackson: It was strawberry, the guava.
Joseph Jackson: The cookies and cream.
LeAnn Jackson: Chocolate, and peanut butter.
Honey Parker: I should have tried to guess it. I wouldn't have gotten the cookies and cream, though.
LeAnn Jackson: That one's a hit.
Joseph Jackson: That's a big hit, because the children love it, and also, I mean, adults love Oreo cookies.
LeAnn Jackson: It's one of my favorites.
Joseph Jackson: Our current seasonal special is called our Grand Slam. We take our Oreo infused cookie, and add peanut butter, and caramel on top. It's just absolutely amazing.
LeAnn Jackson: Very sweet. To me, that one's sweet. The caramel, and everything. It's good, but it's very sweet.
Joseph Jackson: That's our most decadent cheesecake that we do.
Blaine Parker: One of the reasons I'm interested in this is, I've developed Gout, and CBD is supposed to be good for Gout.
Joseph Jackson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
LeAnn Jackson: Yep.
Blaine Parker: Not that I should be eating cheesecake, but.
LeAnn Jackson: That's why we have the chocolate bar.
Blaine Parker: So with the chocolate bars, it's not like you sit down and eat a chocolate bar. You eat a square. That is a single serving?
Joseph Jackson: Correct.
LeAnn Jackson: Yes. Yep.
Joseph Jackson: The chocolate bars are 150 milligrams total, with 15 pieces. So you get 10 milligrams per piece. So for us, we came out with this to be a more portion control option, and more of a throughout your day. Whereas the cheesecake is more of an at night, or if you're in pain, or taking anxiety meds, or things like that. It can really help you, throughout the day, with cheesecake, but the chocolates are more of the dose as you go.
Blaine Parker: Dose as you go.
Honey Parker: Guava is ... That's really surprising to me. Because again, I'm not a huge guava fan, but that's probably my favorite guava taste I've ever had.
LeAnn Jackson: One of our friends, he did hot sauce. He actually does our jam for us.
Joseph Jackson: So it's an actual guava paste that's just guava, that's re-concentrated, and made into a jam. Same thing with all our fruit jams. It's all pure fruit, with Florida cane sugar, and it's just natural ingredients.
Honey Parker: Where are you looking to take the business? What's growth for you?
Joseph Jackson: Our goal is national and international. At short term, we're looking at our own facility to build out. Have our own storage and processing on site, instead of having to go to the commercial kitchen we currently use.
Working with the medical marijuana treatment centers here in Florida. Working with the regulators to help pass more open regulations, because currently in Florida, it's vertical market, so there's only 12 companies that are allowed to handle the THC side of the business, here. Hopefully, with the governor, and agriculture commissioner, things will get worked out for there, for everybody.
But really, it's working towards national recreational laws, for adult use, for cannabis, outright. That's kind of where we want to see our business go, and having to help people that way, because we feel that it's a plant, and it should be available to all to use, however they need, for their life.
So that's a vital part of our business. But also, providing great cheesecakes to restaurants throughout the country is also another vital part.
Honey Parker: I have a question, because neither of you come from a packaged goods background.
LeAnn Jackson: My profession, before we started the cheesecake business, is I was a preschool teacher. I had been doing that for six years before I decided that I wanted to go get my associate's in elementary ed, and go through public schools, and everything else. Just it wasn't hitting me anymore. I was eight years into it, and I just, it wasn't ... I still love kids, and I still love teaching them, and everything else. It's just the structure has changed a lot. It didn't make sense for me anymore.
Blaine Parker: So you wanted to be a teacher, but the system was making it difficult for you to actually feel good about doing it.
LeAnn Jackson: Correct.
Blaine Parker: I haven't heard that before.
Joseph Jackson: Everything that you hear about pay, ability, classroom size, everything, is what I was hearing from her, every day.
LeAnn Jackson: Yep. I would have to buy all of my supplies for my syllabus, that I was going to teach my kids, for the day. And it's like, that should be provided by the school. I should not have to go out and buy my supplies. And I did, because I couldn't let my kids down. We were making special things that day, or something like that. I couldn't just tell them that I didn't have the supplies.
Blaine Parker: I couldn't let my kids down. I can't tell you how many times I have heard some version of that. It's tragic.
LeAnn Jackson: Yeah, it is.
Blaine Parker: Good on you for wanting to do it. And oh well.
Honey Parker: Joseph, what were you doing?
Joseph Jackson: I come from a background of sales. My family had our own business. Was a [inaudible 00:30:46] and gift shop, where we did home décor for the first 15 years of my life. Prior to that, my family had a grocery store they ran up in New York, before I was around, and my father had a couple of gourmet restaurants down on Westshore, in Tampa.
I worked at Publix for a few years. But like I said, numbers, sales, marketing. That was my wheelhouse. I worked with a couple of major companies, in their sales divisions. Really just bouncing from different marketing and sales jobs. That kind of was my wheelhouse. Now, I do the same thing for this.
Blaine Parker: Entrepreneurism was modeled for you, in your family.
Joseph Jackson: Yeah. That's the main thing. It's just owning our own business, owning our own restaurant. That was the family history.
LeAnn Jackson: Same here. My dad has his own electrical business that he's had for 20 something years.
Blaine Parker: He's an electrician?
LeAnn Jackson: Yes.
Blaine Parker: A master electrician?
LeAnn Jackson: Master electrician.
Joseph Jackson: And then her family has bakeries up in New York, still, that they still operate.
Blaine Parker: Oh, really?
LeAnn Jackson: Yep.
Joseph Jackson: I mean, personally, we didn't have any hands on food, but-
LeAnn Jackson: Experience.
Joseph Jackson: ... but our family has the history of the food.
Blaine Parker: Where in New York?
LeAnn Jackson: Mount Vernon, is one. And Rochester?
Blaine Parker: It's cold up there.
Joseph Jackson: Poughkeepsie.
LeAnn Jackson: It's very cold up there.
Blaine Parker: No wonder you're here.
Joseph Jackson: Yes. Both of our families got tired of the snow, and moved to Florida. We're the first ones born in Florida, from both our families.
Honey Parker: So in doing this, moving forward with something that wasn't really in your backgrounds, what is something, or some things, that came up that you were like, wow, we didn't see that hurdle coming?
Joseph Jackson: Everything.
LeAnn Jackson: Starting the business. I mean, that was a hurdle, itself.
Joseph Jackson: The first phone call, of finding out that we had a commercial kitchen that we had to find, and couldn't do it out of our house, because it was a cold food product, to our first employee, to our first hurricane that we weathered through, to the government shutdown that we had to weather, because we have product at the airport.
Honey Parker: What did you do with that?
Joseph Jackson: We didn't get orders. I mean, it's just, between the hurricane Irma, that was a six month hit for our business. Then, after that, Red Tide slowed down restaurants up and down the coast of Florida. As that recovered, the government shut down for 35 days, which hit us at the ... Tampa International Airport is one of our bigger accounts. So all the employees that worked for T.S.A. didn't get a paycheck.
LeAnn Jackson: So they couldn't afford specialty items in their stores at the airport.
Joseph Jackson: To buy product.
Honey Parker: So how do you weather, no pun intended, how do you weather those times? How do you personally manage cash flow?
Joseph Jackson: We don't get a paycheck. We get new accounts in different areas. We find new products to start. We market harder. Do events again. It's that struggle of finding enough revenue to be able to pay your bills, buy enough product, and make that next batch of product to get your next sale, to then wait 30 days to be paid by your supplier.
Honey Parker: Not for the faint of heart.
Joseph Jackson: No.
Honey Parker: So a stressful time comes up. I'm going to assume it's different for each of you. How do you deal with a stressful time?
Joseph Jackson: She is quiet. I'm talkative.
LeAnn Jackson: I am calm, because in my mind, I'm trying to think of how can I fix this? Or what can I do to make it better? So I kind of keep to myself. That's what I do. This one. I call it squirreling. He squirrels into these ...
Joseph Jackson: There's a reason I take CBD products. To stop the squirrel, so I can concentrate and focus on what's actually going on. What I can actually do to solve the problem, and how can I move forward from what just happened? It's a battle which everybody faces, because we always think the worst is always going to happen. We always think that, okay, well, what if we don't do get that order? But we're going to get that order. We've been doing this for four years. We know when our orders are going to come in. We know if it's going to be slow for a couple of weeks, well, the next couple of weeks are going to be very busy.
In January. It was extremely slow January, for us, this year, compared to even last year.
LeAnn Jackson: But then February 1st hit.
Joseph Jackson: But February 1st, yeah.
LeAnn Jackson: It was like, oh my gosh, we have all these orders that we need to fill.
Joseph Jackson: We doubled our January sales in the first ten days of February.
Blaine Parker: Wow. Holy crap.
Honey Parker: Do you have employees?
LeAnn Jackson: No.
Joseph Jackson: No. But we have part-time help that comes in on our production days, that helps us produce our product. But, on the daily basis, we don't have an employee coming in.
Honey Parker: So you're not dealing with health insurance, or anything like that?
LeAnn Jackson: No.
Joseph Jackson: No. Well, we're still dealing with our own health insurance, and figuring all that out. Make sure we made enough money, every year, so we qualify for insurance, and all that.
Blaine Parker: I'm going to be selfish here, for a second, and go back to the product. Because I just tasted Le'Anns Infusions chocolate. That's really good. How the heck do you do that?
LeAnn Jackson: We don't make the chocolate.
Blaine Parker: Okay. Now I'm disappointed.
LeAnn Jackson: No, we actually use a company that's locally here in Florida, in Tampa, and they make chocolate. We had approached them about doing CBD chocolates. They don't want to do it under their chocolate brand.
Blaine Parker: Of course not.
LeAnn Jackson: Which is perfectly fine. So what we did is, we asked them to private label the chocolate bars, for us.
Blaine Parker: Have they private labeled anything before this?
Joseph Jackson: I think they've private labeled for a few other companies, depending on what they wanted, but nothing like this.
LeAnn Jackson: Not CBD.
Blaine Parker: Is it your recipe?
LeAnn Jackson: Nope.
Joseph Jackson: With chocolate, there really isn't a recipe, per se. It's the percentage of cocoa versus butterfat, and the bean. What they do is, we wanted to make sure that we worked with someone ... Just like our cheesecake. That's an all natural product. It's a bean to bar. So they get the raw cocoa beans in. They roast them. They process them. They melt it down. They temper it, and then they make the chocolate bars with the CBD that we supply, from our suppliers, that we provide them. Then they do the mixture inside, and give you that chocolate bar.
Blaine Parker: That's a really good chocolate bar.
Honey Parker: I look forward to it.
Blaine Parker: And hey, hello Gout.
Honey Parker: But I just went face first into the cheesecake, so I'm going to wait.
Joseph Jackson: Oh, yes.
Blaine Parker: How much of it should I be eating to try and stem the tide of my-
LeAnn Jackson: I would say, probably start with two pieces a day.
Joseph Jackson: I would definitely say, right now, there's not enough information on CBD out there.
Blaine Parker: This is one of the big challenges of CBD, is there's no. Right.
Joseph Jackson: The main thing we have to really tell people, is we're not doctors. We're not doctors. We're not going to be able to tell you exactly what dose you should take. Things like that. If this is something that you're wanting to try out, I would definitely say talk to your doctor first.
See someone who has expertise with your health, and how hemp extracted CBD can help you.
Just like if you're going to start going to a medical marijuana treatment center, and do THC products, you would first talk to a doctor, and get all their recommendations, and see what their best recommendation is for you.
Now unfortunately, even medical doctors don't have the information they need.
Blaine Parker: It's totally new.
Joseph Jackson: This country does not do research on cannabis, at all, because we can't. We're relying on Israel, Australia ...
LeAnn Jackson: New Zealand.
Joseph Jackson: ... the U.K., all these different countries, on their research, to see what we should do first. Because it's still a Schedule 1 narcotic, federally. So pharmaceutical companies can't research it, and figure out how it affects, on the dosage level.
So it's all a personal thing right now. It's really, we suggest starting small, and working your way up, to see what works for you.
Honey Parker: Touchdown. I finished my cheesecake.
Blaine Parker: I have not finished my chocolate bar.
Honey Parker: That's probably good.
Blaine Parker: I do have a question here, that goes to procedure. How do you two work together?
This has been part one of LeAnn and Joseph Jackson, of Le'Anns Cheesecakes, in Tampa, Florida. You can find them online at leannscheesecakesnmore.com. That L-E-A-N-N, cheesecakes, the letter N, more.com.
Or just visit the couples page at coupleco.com, and click the link hiding beneath LeAnn and Joseph.
Honey Parker: And if you've enjoyed this podcast, you can go to iTunes and leave a star rating, and a review, to help people just like you find it.
Blaine Parker: Join us next time, as we return to Tampa to finish our conversation with the cannabinoid cooks.
Honey Parker: We'll hear about pitfalls of hiring friends, which is something that we've talked about in the past. And surviving the rough patches.
Blaine Parker: Telling each other truth, whether or not the other wants to hear it.
Honey Parker: And ultimately, it's about the power of doing what you love, with the one you love.
Blaine Parker: Next time, here on CoupleCo: Working With Your Spouse For Fun & Profit.
Honey Parker: Copyright 2019. All rights reserved.
Blaine Parker: Love you, baby.
Honey Parker: Love you, too.
Blaine Parker: CoupleCo out.