Family-Owned Pie Company Launches Investment Campaign to Support New Wash Park Location

Elias Lehnert and his wife, Rachel, are the youngest generation of the family behind Colorado Cherry Company. Now they've found a balance between honoring their family’s legacy and making their own mark with the next phase of the business: Legacy Pie Co.

Colorado Cherry Company began as Brass Ball Fruit Stand in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Elias's great-grandmother, Katherine, sold fruits, vegetables and an assortment of seasonal pies from a small roadside stand. “She was a little Hungarian lady, and she just made amazing pies,” he says.

Katherine, her husband and her children moved to Loveland in the late 1950s and soon discovered that local cherries were a source of pride for the town. “So [my grandparents] took advantage of the local agriculture and founded Colorado Cherry Company in 1960” with a roadside location along Hightway 32 heading up to Estes Park, Elias explains. In 2005, the business was passed down to his parents.

As Elias was growing up, the family business dominated his weekends, school breaks and summer holidays. “I did farmers' markets all throughout high school and worked at the shop," he recalls. "I would recruit all of my high school friends —  me and eight friends would disperse to different markets around the Denver area, Fort Collins, all over the place."

He continues, "My dad, at the beginning of the summer, would always get us all hyped up to go out there and talk to people, and he would show us movie clips from Glengarry Glen Ross about making the sale, making the deal, how to talk to people and be personable.”

As a teenager, Elias didn’t think he would be joining the family business. Instead, he opted to go pre-med with the goal of becoming a veterinarian. “I sort of was like, ‘I’m going to do my own thing.’ But then you realize what a cool thing [my family] built,” he says.
So in 2018, when his parents needed some extra hands, Elias and his wife jumped in. By then, Colorado Cherry Company had expanded to two more locations: Lyons in 2008, and a retail shop and cafe in the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park in 2015. Even as it grew, the business stayed true to its origins as a rustic, homey roadside stop for tourists hankering for a taste of the local cherries — in jams, jellies, syrups, honeys and, of course, pies. Although over the years they experimented with cookies, scones, coffee cakes and cinnamon rolls, to this day the tart cherry pie made with Montmorency cherries is the crowd favorite, with the Key lime pie as a close second.

“It all starts with our crust. Our crust is really simple — we use sweet cream butter [as opposed to shortening or lard], and everything’s made from scratch, handmade, and baked fresh every day,” Elias explains. “I think having the history, having the legacy gives people the confidence that we’ve been doing it for a while and we haven’t really changed anything.”

But Elias did want one small change: an expansion and evolution of the family’s brand with a neighborhood-focused shop. In 2020, he and Rachel opened a standalone location of Colorado Cherry Company at 4000 Tennyson Street. “It was a fun time to open a restaurant bakery,” Elias jokes. “Luckily, our storefront has these big, beautiful windows, and so we were able to sell out of the windows, which was really awesome and a great experience.”

At the Tennyson location, you’ll find a larger variety of pies, and fewer retail products compared to other Colorado Cherry Company locations. The decor is still nostalgic and homey, but a touch more contemporary and sleek, intentionally appealing to the millennial audience shopping and living in the neighborhood. Additionally, Elias and his wife are the majority owners of the location, with other family members holding smaller financial stakes.
With these changes came a realization: The name Colorado Cherry Company didn’t fully encapsulate the business anymore. Elias and his wife wanted the frame of reference to be about pies, not cherries. It is "a place for people to come and get sweet and savory pies fresh, made daily, and also take-and-bake,” he explains. “What was also important for us is this idea of legacy, the idea of four generations and family and tradition...so we changed the name to Legacy Pie Co. here in Denver."

Now it’s time to expand again. Many of Legacy Pie Co.’s customers are driving up from south Denver, so the Lehnerts started to put feelers out for a new location. They found it at Wash Park Supply, a retail center in the Washington Park neighborhood. Currently under renovation, the new location of Legacy Pie Co. is slated to open by the end of the year. Compared to the Tennyson shop, the Wash Park outpost will be smaller, with better parking to better serve take-and-bake pickup orders, which currently make up 40 percent of business.

As with the Tennyson location, the Lehnerts will open Legacy Pie Co. to crowdfunding investors. “We were able to raise $124,000 for Tennyson Street from 170 different investors at a rate of 1.5 times that we pay out over five years,” explains Elias.

Businesses like Legacy Pie Co. are able to undertake this kind of investment through Regulation Crowdfunding, commonly known as Reg CF, which is a regulatory framework introduced by the JOBS Act in 2016. The law is intended to encourage funding small businesses previously not allowed because of securities regulations.

Legacy Pie Co. uses Mainvest as its crowdfunding platform. For Tennyson, roughly a third of the capital costs came through Mainvest, with investments as small as $100. In addition to the cash, it gives patrons an opportunity to be more involved with the business and become champions for the brand.
Unlike a Kickstarter campaign, these are investments, not donations. Investors get a set percentage of profits as dividends every quarter; then in the fifth year, Legacy Pie Co. is required to pay all investors back 150 percent of their investment, even if that means a balloon payment in the last year. Effectively, this corresponds to a compounded interest rate of 9 percent — slightly higher than an average bank loan of 7 percent (in the current economy, with a million caveats).

The Lehnerts believe that premium is a small price to be able to provide a small sense of ownership to their patrons. Investors also receive perks such as a 20 percent discount on in-store purchases; invitations to private parties and dinners; swag; and opportunities to vote on business decisions.

Those interested in joining the investment round for Wash Park can sign up here.

Despite the changes, Legacy Pie Co. isn't leaving Colorado Cherry Company behind. “Eventually, the goal is for my wife and I to take over fully and buy my parents out," Elias says. "For me, changing the name was a really hard thing personally, because the last thing I wanted to do was hurt my parents' feelings or to ruin something good. But they were pumped! They were super excited about the name change, and they agreed with the strategy and were super encouraging. They have empowered my wife and I to take on the next phase of this company.”

And it doesn’t need to stop at the fourth generation: Elias and Rachel are expecting their first child in November, and he's excited about the potential for another generation to join the Colorado Cherry Company/Legacy Pie Co. family business.