‘I absolutely refuse to fail’: Sweet Peaches founder battles for national spot in frozen dessert aisles

Editor’s note: This story was originally published by Kansas City PBS/Flatland, a member of the Kansas City Media Collective, which also includes Startland News, KCUR 89.3, American Public Square, The Kansas City Beacon, and Missouri Business Alert.

Click here to read the original story.

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Denisha Jones is poised to turn America’s devotion to apple pie on its peach cobbler head.

The Blue Springs mother of four is founder of Sweet Peaches Cobblers. Since 2021, she has stood out among her Kansas City area frozen dessert makers by selling  40,000 frozen cobblers in 660 supermarkets throughout the Midwest, including Sun Fresh, Price Chopper, Hy-Vee, and Schnuck’s.

“Nobody has made it as far as I have,” said Jones, who started making peach cobblers at the Ennovation Center, an incubator for food start-ups located in Independence, Missouri.

Serving locally and regionally is one thing, but going national is another story altogether, and that has been an uphill battle for Jones.

The Black-owned startup began to struggle when it was time to find a Kansas City-based co-packer. A co-packer is a company contracted to scale up a recipe, automate the process, and handle the packaging and labeling required for mass production and distribution.

From the archives: Sweet Peaches wants a bigger piece of the pie; crowdfunding could scale this small biz across US

Her first co-packer cut corners by substituting shortening for the butter. The next got the thumbs down for sending test samples in bent pans and leaky packaging. Frustrated, three months behind on orders and running low on money, Jones circled back to the Overland Park-based Bernice’s Foods Inc.

Bernice’s Foods had recently purchased new manufacturing equipment enabling the production of the cobblers and a popular Sweet Peaches Cobblers eggroll created by her daughter and sold at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium during Chiefs games.

While Jones waits on test samples and a final contract, she’s negotiating the wholesale price of her cobblers for a three-month pilot with Walmart, the world’s largest retailer.

Denisha Jones of Blue Springs started her company Sweet Peaches Cobblers as a pandemic pivot. She has sold more than 40,000 frozen cobblers available in 660 supermarkets in the Midwest. She’s currently waiting for product samples to negotiate a pilot with Walmart; courtesy photo

“She is one of my first clients that I have worked with who has scaled their products to that level,” said Ryonda Hall, owner of OCD Financial, an accounting service in Lee’s Summit.

Hall is also a board member for Kansas City G.I.F.T, an accelerator for Black-owned startup businesses operating in low-income areas.

“I was completely blown away by Denisha’s level of intense connection with her product. She is so keenly attuned with her product because she routinely buys it from the store to taste test, and she could tell that the butter was not the same,” said Hall, who has continued to work with Sweet Peaches Cobblers beyond the initial G.I.F.T. grant.

“I can’t promote a product that I’m not proud of,” said Jones, who never considered herself a baker before recreating her nana’s unwritten recipe while craving comfort during the pandemic. “I feel like I can be confident now to make these co-packers understand that they have to abide by my rules and stick to my product.”

Frozen ground

Kansas City has a history as fertile ground for the creation of national supermarket brands, including Hostess, Wish-Bone, and KC Masterpiece.

“We see a lot of success for locally sourced products, and we take a lot of pride in products made here,” said Xander Winkel, director of the Culinary Kitchens at Green Hills Library Center in Kansas City, North, part of the Mid-Continent Public Library system.

Food incubators like Culinary Kitchens include commercial kitchens with a variety of industrial equipment available for rent, plus a business support team that can provide information and guidance, as well as programming to help entrepreneurs turn a passion into profit.

Over the past decade, Winkel has worked with an estimated 4,000 food start-ups through positions he’s held at both Ennovation Center and Culinary Kitchens.

“Most of us have a romanticized idea of what it means to get into the food business,” Winkel said. “What we try to do is give information — the good, bad, and the ugly — needed to make the right decisions. Once you get to the point that you have safety and logistics challenges, you need a mentor who has lived in that space to help navigate that and foster those connections.”

Jones has relied on many of those free resources, but has discovered entrée into the frozen foods aisle comes with an additional layer of complexity.

“We do have a lot of incubators that can help people who want to make a jar of jam and sell it at the farmer’s market or get something made in Kansas City,” Jones said, “but what we can’t seem to do is get somebody who has a frozen product into a supermarket.”

The U.S. frozen foods business is a $91.3 billion industry dominated by multinational corporations with well-established brands, including Sara Lee, Marie Callender’s, Dolly Parton’s, Great American Cobbler, and Best Choice.

It’s incredibly difficult for a small operation like Sweet Peaches Cobbler to break the stranglehold of the big boys. Supermarket stardom in a highly competitive market requires not only high name recognition to win customers on price but also huge capital expenditures in an industry with low profit margins.

Denisha Jones encourages her four children ages 9-21 to create products based on her cobbler fillings. The cinnamon roll cobbler was created by her son Daylen Jones; courtesy photo

One challenge for the small guys is waiting for 90 days or longer to start seeing revenue, something the large companies can withstand.

Frozen foods is a category with added complications.

Expensive cold chain distribution means even slight temperature fluctuations can ruin pallets of product, a cost usually absorbed by the wholesaler. The immense challenges are further complicated if the entrepreneur is a member of a group that has experienced a systematic lack of access to mainstream financial resources.

“While I don’t want to say all of my problems were because I am a Black woman, too many Black businesses come this far but can’t make the leap to scale up,” Jones said. “I absolutely refuse to fail. We know that we are bringing jobs and economic stability to our city, and hopefully, one day, far beyond.”

Denisha Jones, Sweet Peaches Cobblers, accepts the $10,000 second place pitch award at the 2022 AltCap Your Biz pitch competition; photo by Channa Steinmetz, Startland News

Queen of the pitch

On a Friday night at Lenexa Public Market, Collin Thomas of Overland Park orders two servings of cobbler, then returns for two more orders to take home. Cobbler “reminds me of downhome cooking … to me this is a rare kind of dessert,” she said.

Jones bought a food truck to make vending at festivals and events easier, but she quickly discovered going mobile can turn sour if the weather is bad or the crowd turnout is less than expected.

Jones has relied heavily on the support and labor of her family, including her husband Willie, a welder and stalwart cheerleader, and their four children: Daylen (21), DaMyah (19), Devyn (16) and Daniella Lucy (9).

Jones’ children did not grow up eating cobbler at family dinners and reunions.

They didn’t want to eat warm fruit, so Jones challenged them to come up with their own recipes. Their creations — including Daylen’s cinnamon roll cobbler and Devyn’s peach cobbler cookies and banana pudding cookies — have joined the lineup of cobbler flavors and fillings. But it’s DaMyah’s peach cobbler eggrolls that have become a best seller.

Denisha Jones crowns the “Sweetest Peach” at Kansas City’s Miss Juneteenth pageant. The title is given to a young woman who is voted on by her peers to promote unity and receives a one-year internship with the company; courtesy photo

Daylen helps on the food truck when he’s not busy with classes at the Metropolitan Community College — Blue River campus.

“She has taught me that if things don’t go your way, you need to find another way,” Daylen said. “There’s been a lot of moments when she wanted to give, and she’s had a lot of hiccups, or people who didn’t believe her, but she keeps going.”

“As a mother and a boss, I’m trying to incorporate teaching them that when you work for yourself you have more control over the generational wealth,” Jones said. “This is why I’m trying to not give up, because if I give up, I feel like I would set a precedent that it’s OK to give up when times get rough without giving it a fair chance.”

Jones has pitched for a place on “Shark Tank” (no luck thus far) and financed most of her growth through similar-style pitch competitions.

Willie and Denisha Jones, Sweet Peaches Cobblers, at the 2022 Hy-Vee OpportUNITY Inclusive Business Summit; Startland News photo

Grants received include $10,000 from AltCap, which provides access to capital for businesses not served by mainstream institutions; $30,000 from Hy-Vee’s OpportUNITY Inclusive Business Summit; and $35,000 from Kansas City G.I.F.T.

She also got a boost as a member of Pipeline Pathfinder Class of 2024, an elite entrepreneurial development program for startups based in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska.

Jones tried crowdfunding to help her scale up the business. When that effort fell flat, she applied for a small business administration loan but couldn’t bring herself to put her home on the line. Finally, she found unnamed investors to keep her afloat during the co-packer changes.

“I did have an expectation to have a lot of challenges, but I didn’t think that it was going to be as hard as it has been,” said Jones. “I think that I was steered in the wrong direction in the beginning because I didn’t have the knowledge. I didn’t have the confidence. I couldn’t rebut things that I wasn’t educated on.”

Peach apocalypse

In mid-September, Jones candidly shared her triumphs and missteps with her supporters during a rebranding party at the Ennovation Center.

Laura Manivong, who also started out of the Ennovation Center and even shared the same kitchen, has been on a similar entrepreneurial journey. The former Emmy-award-winning local television producer owns Fattyhead Keto Crust, available at local pizza restaurants, including Old Shawnee Pizza and Minsky’s, and at Hy-Vee stores and online sales in 48 states.

Wholesale food distributors such as Sysco, US Foods, and Ben E. Keith Foods initially courted Manivong for her popular gluten-free flatbread featuring almond flour.

“I’ve had close call, after close call, after close call,” Manivong said.” I have a path forward, but to take a massive leap to go national…it didn’t happen yet.”

Manivong has skipped a co-packer. Her most expensive piece of equipment is a $5,000 dough-press. Her product is shelf-stable for a few days, which allows it to be shipped in vacuum packs and frozen upon receipt.

“I think it’s the co-packing issue that is the difference,” Manivong said. “It’s so tricky to make a quality product, up your capacity and figure out cold distribution.”

Denisha Jones thrives on customer interaction. She and her family run a food truck to help promote brand recognition for Sweet Peaches Cobbler and test new products. Jones is shown here while serving during a concert series at Lenexa City Market in the summer of 2025; photo by Jill Wendholt Silva, Flatland

It remains to be seen if entry into Walmart will yield success for Sweet Peaches Cobblers, but Jones’ biggest motivation to keep her American dream alive comes at food truck events where she can witness “an apocalypse happen.”

“One person eats the cobbler and word just spreads, and before you know it people are coming up to get two and three cobblers. It’s the moment they taste it that gives me a sense of belonging,” she said.

“It gives me a sense I do belong in this space and industry. My product does belong out there competing with the others. I used to feel insecure when I was faced with all these challenges, but it’s been done by these same (big frozen food) companies for so long, maybe there’s room for mine on the shelves, too.”

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Editor’s Note: James Beard award-winning food editor and writer Jill Wendholt Silva previously provided public relations consulting services to Jones.