Meet Our Female Founders: Cori Cauble & Lindsay Talbot
Pivotal Moments on an Amazing Journey
Early on in our JAi journey we were able to create an amazing experience at an outdoor event, and several COVID-pivots later, we’re delivering fresh craft cocktails to drinkers & lovers all across SoCal - and sipping on a few ourselves 😉
Lindsay was just 14 when she started her career in the restaurant industry. In the 21 years since then, she’s grown from hostess to server to bartender to manager to beverage director and finally to bar consultant (the person who develops the recipes and menu for top tier places), a role which allowed her to work alongside a Michelin Star chef, at the restaurant in Manhattan Beach she was most-recently employed at, Arthur J.
Cori’s career has meandered through several disciplines, weaving in a deep understanding of emotional intelligence as she served as a restaurant experience manager, events production, clothing retail, kundalini yogi, and Pattern Healing holistic wellness practice.
While Lindsay is our master mixologist, Cori is our visionary leader and manages the business side of things. Together they’ve created not just balanced drinks, but a balanced business, that is not just serving drinks, but serving our community through charitable giving, building a business that’s eco-conscious (with low-waste and a recycling program), and supporting other small businesses through collaboration and partnership.
Cori and Lindsay actually met while working together at a local restaurant in Long Beach 💖
Cori and Lindsay met at a restaurant where Cori managed the front of house, and Lindsay was bartending. They were ships passing in the night at work, but they made time to get to know each other and nurtured a spark into an amazing relationship.
“Well we fell in love behind a bar. We worked together at a local restaurant. And after our shift we would sneak off to our secret watering hole and spend hours just really diving in to who we were individually, what we wanted for the next chapters of life and that conversation developed into who we wanted to be collectively as a loving unit,” Lindsay says, “We fell in love over bottle beer and shots of Fireball.”
8 years later, it feels really refreshing for this pair to finally be spending not just their nights together, but their workdays, too - and to be building something that is their own, with all the autonomy and responsibility that ownership brings.
Waiting for the Green Lights
On Waiting for the Timing to Be Right
Sometimes, the best thing you can give your dream is patience — because when the timing is right, nothing can stop it from flowing with ease.
3 years prior to the shutdowns of 2020, Lindsay had developed the idea of Just Add Ice Cocktails to be a catering solution for requests she had been receiving by friends - but the rules were a bit different then, and red tape kept her from pursuing the idea. Every few months the idea would resurface, but so would the roadblocks. The liquor industry is a tough nut to crack - and it seemed like JAi might always be just potential.
While shut-downs and slow-downs made it clear that work would not continue on as “normal” for both Lindsay and Cori in early 2020, changes to the local regulations opened the door that had long been shut for JAi - and words of encouragement from a mutual friend created the momentum we needed to get this thing off the ground.
After 3 months of developing menus and sourcing ingredients, creating branding and printing labels, website-building and Instagram-posting, JAi had finally stopped being just a dream. Less than a year later, we’re happy to be serving a wide audience of individual customers across SoCal, and a growing number of organizations and corporations who are hosting virtual events.