Brei Olivier
Ashley Pecquet was a teenager when she got her start in the cheese industry, spending her weekends at grocery stores in New Orleans peddling samples to curious customers.
Her mom, Lori Lucas, had been working with cheese for over thirty years—first for importers, connecting them with family-owned groceries, then later as a solo cheese broker, L&L Brokerage. When Pecquet was old enough to drive, she planned on getting a casual part-time retail position at a local pharmacy. But her mom had other plans.
“She had me become her demo girl,” Pecquet recalled. “I stood in the grocery stores with a tray of cheese asking people, all day long, every Saturday, if they would like to try cheese—and had to tell them all about it, where it was from, how it was made. At the time, I was not happy about it—it was horrible, but that’s how I learned all the cheeses.”
Twenty years later, Pecquet has now made her own career in the cheese industry. She owns The Rind Cheese and Sandwich Shop, nestled in downtown Hammond, with her former boss—her mom. The business wears many hats—retail shop, lunch-time restaurant, caterer, wholesaler—and now stocks more than two hundred cheese varieties.
[Read Holly Duchmann's story about Therapy Boards, Hammond's homegrown skateboard brand, here.]
“The cheeses that are popular now, that everyone thinks [are] brand new, it’s the same cheese I was sampling at sixteen,” said Pecquet.
And even then, many of those cheeses have roots dating back sometimes hundreds of years. Mimolette, for example—a bright orange, nutty-tasting cheese that features a brown casing, enjoyed recent fame on TikTok, but first found notoriety hundreds of years ago in France after it was made at the request of King Louis XIV.
In 2007, Pecquet was living in Hammond, attending Southeastern Louisiana University, where she was studying entrepreneurial management. Two years after Hurricane Katrina, her mom was busy working to rebuild L&L Brokerage’s grocer network in the Greater New Orleans area when the business lost one of its largest customers—Rouses Markets. Pecquet felt compelled to rejoin the business with her mom—but this time, she wanted part ownership in the company.
Brei Olivier
Ashley Pecquet and Lori Lucas, the mother-daughter behind The Rind Cheese and Sandwich Shop.
“I told mom, I’ll help you rebuild,” Pecquet says. “We’ll start new. But I want to be a partner, not a worker.”
Over the next decade, the mother-daughter duo rebuilt the business’s network, bringing in new customers, remaining flexible. The industry was shifting—grocers were moving away from working with cheese brokers—instead opting to source their stock directly from warehouses or producers.
Eventually, Pecquet and Lucas realized that if they wanted to remain part of the cheese industry, they had to pivot. In 2016, they closed L&L Brokerage to launch a retail and distribution company, The Rind, near Southeastern’s campus, in Hammond.
With the new venture, Pecquet says they were saying “yes to everything,” making sandwiches and cheese trays, operating a retail shop for the general public as well as a warehouse for larger distribution orders. Quickly, they realized they had to pump the brakes.
“I told mom, I’ll help you rebuild,” Pecquet says. “We’ll start new. But I want to be a partner, not a worker.”
“We made every decision wrong in business that you can possibly make,” Pecquet said. “We started this business not knowing how to run a business—what we knew was cheese and how to sell it. The invoicing, the billing—it was all new to us.”
Pecquet and Lucas began brainstorming how to streamline their new business venture, and in early 2018, the pair closed their retail shop to focus on distribution with restaurants, casinos, and grocery stores across the region. In 2019, the pair partnered with a warehouse to house their two hundred different cheese varieties and make deliveries.
In early 2020, at the suggestion of a few business friends, Pecquet and Lucas moved The Rind downtown, into a space along Railroad Avenue.
“We moved here, and COVID immediately hit,” said Pecquet.
But as the world seemingly came to a halt, and other food industry businesses saw sales sputter, Pecquet and Lucas watched as their sales jumped upwards of forty percent. “Grocery sales skyrocketed during the pandemic—everyone was eating at home,” said Pecquet. “We were in the grocery stores setting up all the cheese cases.”
Over the next seven months, while dining rooms of restaurants were
quiet, Pecquet built out the kitchen and retail displays in the new shop. She offered curbside pickup for local cheese orders as well as virtual cheese classes, during which she taught about wine and cheese pairings.
Brei Olivier
The Rind re-opened their doors to the public in April 2021 as a lunch-time restaurant, as well as a retail shop. They started offering in-person classes and catering, while maintaining a healthy wholesale client list. Always looking to evolve, Pecquet recently installed a candy display in the shop and is optimistic about The Rind’s future.
Customers entering the shop today are greeted with a refrigerated case overflowing with a colorful assortment of cheeses, such as a blueberry cheddar or the Port Salut, a French soft cheese in the Brie family that was developed by monks in the early 1800s. The bright green marbled block is the popular Sage Derby, an English cheddar blended with its namesake herb, while Drunken Goat semi-soft goat cheese bears a bright purple rind after being bathed in red wine.
Pecquet’s personal favorite cheese is the mango and papaya Wensleydale, made from milk drawn from cows grazing the limestone pastures of Upper Wensleydale, in Yorkshire, England.
Presiding over the shop like a guardian angel, perched on a shelf behind the counter safely away from climbing children, is Boris, a goat statue Pecquet was gifted at a food show by a Dutch cheesemaker. “We call him Boris the drunken goat,” Pecquet said. “I’ve had him since I was nineteen. The cheesemaker didn’t want to bring him back on the plane to go back to Holland. He comes to every food show with us now—people try to steal him.”
For Pecquet, this year marks the twentieth that she’s been in business with her mom. Looking forward, she’s working to open a second location of The Rind in South Louisiana—either in Covington or Baton Rouge.
“Working with mom, we’re basically the same person,” says Pecquet. “We look pretty much the same, our mannerisms are the same—but where she’s a calm, passive person, I’m loud. She calms me down. She’s made me who I am today.”
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