Brewing a brand

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Mar 2, 2008

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GONZALES — Frigid air cascades from a stainless steel appliance, enveloping Brian LeBlanc in a cloud as he examines his product in a nitrogen-fed flash freezer. Welcome to the brave new culinary world of the Louisiana Edible Creations Center, an incubator of fledgling food businesses.

LeBlanc would like nothing better than to be the hottest trend in the beverage industry — selling espresso chilled at minus 100 degrees to lock in the intense coffee flavor for later rebirth in home kitchens.

His business concept — based on wife Shari’s brainstorm — is purely elemental: Convenience is king in contemporary culture. After several years of taking a short-cut to making gourmet coffee at home, the LeBlancs launched JazzyBird Coffee espresso in December.

Now in six stores, sales started at Matherne’s Supermarket on Bluebonnet Boulevard in Baton Rouge. The product retails for $5.99 for eight espresso shots frozen in sealed 1-ounce cups.

“The jury’s still out on how successful we’re going to be,” said LeBlanc. “But it’s starting to turn the corner.”

To nudge JazzyBird in the right direction, the LeBlancs have served samples at the Ascension Fresh Market and at stores — and demonstrated how to handle the product at home. Home brewers need no special talent or equipment to reconstitute the flash-frozen, concentrated product, Brian LeBlanc said.

After running water over the sealed 1-ounce cup several seconds, the frozen espresso can be unsealed and popped out into a mug of milk or water and microwaved for cappuccino, latté, iced latté or café Americano, he said. The package includes recipes for other beverages, even brownies.

LeBlanc originally thought he could line up a series of espresso makers in the food incubator on the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center property, then balance the delivery of the shots into containers in an assembly line.

Didn’t work.

So he ordered a huge custom-built brewer that distills a gallon of espresso every five minutes and mated it with coffee specially roasted by a New Orleans area vendor to capture the right balance for his flash-frozen product. Then, he bought a stainless-steel automated packaging machine that in rapid-fire fashion squirts the right amount of brewed product into his 1-ounce cups.

For now, the brewing and packaging process is perfected for serving a regional market. Should JazzyBird demand grow swiftly, LeBlanc said he’s prepared to make a decision in six months about building a Gonzales-area production facility and having it operational in 2009.

LeBlanc said he owes JazzyBird’s emergence to the food incubator, a facility operated as a first-of-its-kind in the state by the Ascension Economic Development Corp.

AEDC recently obtained a Louisiana Business Incubator Association grant — funded by the state Department of Economic Development — for more than $49,000 to help pay for the flash-freezer and nitrogen-supplying equipment at the incubator. Liquids that might take hours to freeze in conventional freezers solidify in fewer than 30 minutes in the flash freezer furnished through a partnership with local industrial supplier Air Products.