CRESTED BUTTE — More than a chip, more than a business, Jackson’s Honest is a mission.
And Megan and Scott Reamer’s 12-year quest to ease the suffering of their son, Jackson, stricken with a rare neurodevelopment disorder, has yielded much more than a thriving potato chip company or an extraordinary mom-and-pop success story.
“Everything we have learned, viscerally and through a lot of trial and error … are really hard-won facts, and we feel like we need to share that,” said Scott, gathered with his family in the Crested Butte kitchen where they first simmered Jackson’s Honest potato chips in shallow vats of coconut oil.
The Jackson’s Honest tale isn’t just about how a high-fat diet with once-maligned saturated fats like coconut oil and lard have eased the chronic inflammation in Jackson Reamer’s brain that has left him in wheelchair. It’s about how replacing manmade, chemical-laden polyunsaturated vegetable oils with natural, nutrient-dense fats can help people struggling with a disease that won’t abate.
“It’s such a wider population of people who have responded to this story because they are trying to address something they are not getting answers for and they turn to diet and nutrition to manage their diseases,” said Megan, her arm draped around her oldest son, who studies a visitor in his kitchen with a piercing glare.
Four-and-a-half years after selling their first bag of chips at Mountain Earth Whole Foods, the local organic grocery in Crested Butte, Jackson’s Honest is everywhere, available in Natural Grocers, Whole Foods, Wegmans, Publix and other chains and shops coast to coast. Piloting a potato-chip empire is a path Scott and Megan never imagined. For the past decade, the pair have labored to raise their four children in this end-of-the-road Colorado resort town while jetting across the country searching for a diagnosis for Jackson.
Jackson was born in May 2001. He was Scott and Megan’s first kid. He was a healthy toddler, walking and talking shortly after his first birthday. Yet by the time sister Ella arrived in December 2002, Jackson’s feet seemed weak. Suddenly he preferred to crawl instead of walk. His stomach ached. He lost weight. By the time he was 3, Jackson could no longer speak, stand, feed himself or sit upright.
He endured batteries of tests by pediatricians across the country. Scott and Megan, who can rattle off a dozen of the nation’s top hospitals in a single breath, explored alternative therapies — massage, acupuncture and homeopathy. Nothing worked. Doctor after apologetic doctor sent them away with little more than a “good luck.”
Before his fourth birthday, Jackson hit his nadir. He could not sleep and everything he ate hurt him. He dipped to 17 pounds. After a prolonged hospital stay, doctors sent Jackson home with a two-week supply of morphine.
Scott, a chemistry major with a job in finance, and stay-at-home mom Megan tried a hail-Mary recipe rich in natural fats.
“We kind of made this big assumption then that it was some kind of inflammatory-based, autoimmune problem … the only thing we could control was his diet and trying to manage his symptoms we were seeing,” said Megan, whose eyes well when she recalls those darkest of days.
Within a week of flipping the food pyramid upside down, feeding their son a paleoketogenic-type diet of beef stock blended with healthy fats, Jackson was sleeping better. Within a month he was gaining weight. What followed was an arduous, years-long process of elimination, grinding different foods in a processor to discover what could help Jackson thrive despite his crushing disease.
Scott called it “reverse engineering.” After several years, the do-not-eat list — crafted by Jackson’s plunges into sleepless and gastrointestinal distress that could last for days — included anything with carbohydrates, sugar and polyunsaturated oils. The good-to-eat list was heavy with fish, wild game, eggs, butter, lard, and coconut oil.
“We thought, wow, the foods on the do-not-eat list are all new foods from the last few decades. All the food on the eat list people have been eating for thousands and thousands of years,” Scott said.
The family — including Charlie, 7, Olivia, 10, and 14-year-old Ella — soon revolved around Jackson’s diet, which included long nights slow-cooking locally grown potatoes in coconut oil on the family’s Verona stove. The chips weren’t necessarily for Jackson. They were mostly for Megan, who said she was ready to “eat a piece of wood” to satisfy her pangs for a crunchy, salty treat.
Two years ago, Jackson won inclusion in the Undiagnosed Disease Program at the National Institute of Health. After a long series of tests, doctors concluded Jackson had a rare variant of the already super-rare Aicardi–Goutières syndrome, a genetic, inflammatory disease that affects the brain. There are perhaps 400 confirmed cases and there is no cure. But one of the best treatments for AGS symptoms includes a paleo-type diet rich in saturated fats.
When doctors called with the diagnosis, they noted Jackson’s years-long diet heavy with natural fats and told Scott and Megan, “bravo,” Scott said.
“They were the only doctors who ever said that. After 12 years, it was this incredibly cathartic moment for Megan and I that we were, in effect, doing something that was helping Jackson but that went against all nutritional advice and certainly any physician we had ever dealt with,” Scott said.
Meanwhile, friends were cajoling the family to sell those coconut oil chips they made for friends and family. Scott would often pack sandwich bags of chips on ski outings with his buddies.
“I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who said, ‘Man, you should really sell these,” said Bryan Boyle, a longtime family friend who recently joined Jackson’s Honest as one of the growing company’s nine employees. “I know I wasn’t the only one piping up.”
In 2012, after several years of all-hands-on-deck chip production in the family kitchen because no chip company was making snacks in coconut oil, the Reamers sold their first bag of chips.
“I would stay up at night and babysit them and cook chips,” Ella said. “I would smell like oil and potatoes for days.”
They moved production to a local catering kitchen and less than a year later they were churning out thousands of bags at a Front Range manufacturing facility. It was a challenging transition. Potato chips are typically flash-fried in seconds in blazing hot oil. The Jackson’s Honest slow-and-low process uses not-so-hot coconut oil and the chips cook for as long as 9 minutes. It’s a labor- and time-intensive process that Scott hopes deters the billion-dollar players that dominate the salty treat aisle.
“I’m always feeling like we are an ant,” he said. “These big guys, if they just decided to pay attention for a minute they could stop this in its tracks. Maybe, or maybe not.”
Debbie Knapp, who heads the effort to find new foods and drinks to sell in Natural Grocers stores, was at the meeting when Scott and Megan made their first-ever pitch to sell their chips outside of the Gunnison Valley.
Today, Jackson’s Honest’s 11 flavors of coconut oil-cooked potato and corn chips are in the chip aisle of just about every one of the country’s 139 Natural Grocers stores.
It was a great story, Knapp said. But stories alone can’t sell food.
“Their chips taste good. They really do. They’ve come up with a product that everyone seems to like. We are really grateful they came to us,” Knapp said. “The product stands on its own merits, that’s for sure. After you taste it and read their story, that just gives you more reason to buy another bag, right?”
Two years ago the Reamers took Jackson to an AGS family conference in Washington, D.C. He appeared better off than the other children, Scott said. He wasn’t debilitated with heart ailments, seizures or gastrointestinal distress. He didn’t need a feeding tube or fistfuls of pills or respiratory aids. He was much more cognitively aware, Scott said. The other parents were eager to hear their dietary approach to helping ease Jackson’s symptoms.
“It was the first time I realized that every single one of our efforts, years of finding the right type of food, mixing it and grinding it in the grinder, it had paid off. That was a moment when we felt like it was all worth it,” Scott said. “It was incredibly emotional for me. Other parents were saying they had a goal now. They wanted to know how we did it.”
The family now lives in Boulder, where resources, programs and therapies for Jackson are abundant. A freshman at Fairview High School, he recently scored a touchdown for the football team, rolling across the goal line in his chair. Still, the family’s heart remains in Crested Butte, where they lived for 16 years.
“I skied my first black today,” Charlie proudly told a visitor during a recent trip back home, turning to his dad to ask if they could stay another day and ski again. “Please?”
Scott and Megan say Crested Butte launched the Jackson’s Honest crusade. It’s home to the massage therapist who regularly donated her time to help Jackson. The gardener who takes Jackson skiing at the Adaptive Sports Center. The neighbors who provided countless dinners during hard days. The friends whose shoulders shared the family’s burdens.
“This is our community where we can retreat. Such a good network with so many dimensions of support,” Megan said. “Every single part of the business has something to do with this community, whether directly or indirectly.”
