Decadence Gourmet

If anyone had told me that I would be baking Cheesecakes in a Jar for a living back in the 70's, 80's or 90's, I would have thought that they might have had one or two drinks too many!

Growing up in New Jersey, to be specific, on 'Da Shore', I always had a thing for food. Some of my first real jobs on the Atlantic City Boardwalk involved food; making pizzas on The Steel Pier, bussing at the old Marlborough Blenheim Hotel, cooking steaks and eggs in the window at The Ranch House Restaurant and making silver dollar pancakes in the window at Nash's Beef and Beer.

I ended up going away to a small college in Vermont (where I first started finding out just how flavorful and useful maple syrup could be, especially in cheesecake) but ended up out west in Northern California where I started what would turn out to be 20+ years in the newspaper industry in California, New Jersey and Colorado. It took a very serious, life-threatening medical condition that made me realize that I needed to change my life. I ended up moving to Western Colorado and eventually a small town called Palisade, home of some of the best peaches in the country!

Needless to say, I enrolled in the Colorado Culinary Academy at Colorado Mesa University.

About two or three weeks into my first semester, I had brought in a cheesecake that I had been making for years, my Vermont Maple Cheesecake, and my chef instructor, Chef Jon St. Peter, took a few bites and asked me where he could get one. I looked at him and said... Give me 90 days!. 90 days later, Decadence was born!

Right before Christmas 2005, I was getting ready for a road trip back to New Jersey to see family and friends for the holidays and I stopped by the culinary school. Dan Kirby, head of the program said, "You should put your cheesecakes in a jar!" Now I still think he was kidding, but I could not get that idea out of my head and when I got back from New Jersey, I set out to rework all of my recipes to see if you really could bake a quality gourmet cheesecake in an individual serving jar. After quite a few attempts, we actually did it.

We launched the product line at the Downtown Grand Junction, Colorado Farmer's Market in June 2006 and had no idea of what people would think. We did OK in sales that first week, a lot of strange looks (until they took a bite!) but the second week, over half of our customers were repeats and within 60 days, our Cheesecakes in a Jar were our Number One selling product line! In September of 2008, we were honored to earn a Second Place in The Spirit of Innovation Awards, sponsored by Prepared Foods Magazine and Ventura Foods! (It seems that we were beaten out by some small company called Kraft Foods!) We are one of the smallest companies ever to win this award and the first Colorado company to place!