Meet Mo Lemonade Cafe: Fresh Flavors, Fresh Starts and a Business Built to Keep Growing

Lakissia Ervin started Mo Lemonade Cafe with a tent and lemonade after her restaurant closed during COVID. Today, the menu has grown to include açaí bowls, smoothies, salads and plenty of reasons to stop when you see the trailer.

By Sara Turney

Baby Enjoying Mo Lemonade Cafe- Credit Cummings Media Group

The name may say lemonade, but Lakissia Ervin would like you to try the açaí bowl.

That is her pick for someone visiting Mo Lemonade Cafe for the first time.

Customers have another favorite. They keep coming back for the Drip Lemonade, which Lakissia says is the business's bestseller.

Either choice is a good introduction to what Mo Lemonade Cafe has become.

The menu now includes lemonade in a variety of flavors, smoothies, salads, açaí bowls and protein cheesecake bowls. Lakissia has built a business around fresh choices and the simple pleasure of handing someone something they genuinely enjoy.

She will even let you taste before you decide.

Customers can sample products before buying them, an uncomplicated gesture that says something about the confidence she has in what she serves.

Try it.

See what you think.

Then pick your favorite.

There is an ease to Mo Lemonade Cafe today that makes it easy to forget the business began during a much more uncertain chapter.

Before the trailer and the expanded menu, there was a restaurant.

Then there wasn't.

Starting again with lemonade

Lakissia was already a restaurant owner when COVID changed the course of her business.

Her restaurant closed.

What came next was much simpler.

A tent and lemonade.

That first setup may have been smaller than the restaurant she had operated, but Lakissia kept building from it. Over the years that followed, lemonade grew into Mo Lemonade Cafe, and the tent eventually gave way to a trailer.

Purchasing that trailer remains one of the accomplishments she is most proud of.

It is easy to understand why.

For a mobile business, a trailer is not simply something you tow from one event to another. It changes what you can carry, what you can serve and how the business can show up in the world.

For Lakissia, it also represented progress.

She had started again, and it was working.

More than lemonade

Lemonade still sits comfortably at the center of Mo Lemonade Cafe.

It is in the name, after all.

But Lakissia has continued adding to what customers can find when they visit.

Açaí bowls have become an important part of the menu, enough that she would choose one as the first thing a new customer should try. Smoothies and salads give customers more options, while protein cheesecake bowls offer something a little unexpected.

Then there is the Drip Lemonade.

Every business seems to have that one item customers decide belongs to them as much as it belongs to the person who created it. For Mo Lemonade Cafe, Lakissia says the Drip is that item.

It is the bestseller, the order that keeps finding its way across the counter.

Of course, one of the pleasures of visiting a business built around flavored lemonade is figuring out which one becomes your own order.

That is where the samples come in.

Lakissia encourages customers to taste what she has before choosing.

It makes ordering a little more fun, and it gives people a reason to discover something they might not have picked from the name alone.

The people on the other side of the counter

Ask Lakissia what she enjoys most about running the business and she doesn't immediately talk about food.

She talks about people.

Mo Lemonade Cafe Staff with Owner LaKissia- Credit Cummings Media Group

“Meeting new people,” she says.

Mobile businesses have a particular relationship with their customers. Instead of waiting for everyone to come to one permanent address, the business moves through communities, festivals and pop ups, meeting different crowds along the way.

Lakissia enjoys that.

Festivals and markets give her a chance to introduce Mo Lemonade Cafe to people who may be discovering it for the first time. Community pop ups keep the business moving even when it is outside the festival circuit.

Each setup creates another opportunity for someone to walk up expecting lemonade and leave having found a new favorite.

That connection is part of what has kept Lakissia going.

But the person at the center of her motivation has always been much closer to home.

Her son.

A business that helped send a son to college

When Lakissia is asked what she is most proud of as a business owner, she could choose the trailer.

She could choose rebuilding after her restaurant closed.

She could point to the menu she has expanded or the customers she has gained.

Instead, she talks about her son.

Mo Lemonade Cafe helped her put him through college.

For a parent building a small business, there may not be a more personal measure of what all those days of work have accomplished.

The festivals matter. The sales matter. The trailer matters. Growth matters.

Then there are the things the business makes possible beyond itself.

For Lakissia, education for her son is part of that story.

It also explains her answer when asked what keeps her motivated.

“My son.”

Simple as that.

Growing a small business one step at a time

Lakissia is proud of what she has built, but she is also candid about one of the realities of trying to make a small business larger.

Access to capital has been her biggest challenge.

She wants Mo Lemonade Cafe to continue growing, and growth requires resources.

That reality has shaped the advice she would give someone else thinking about starting a business.

“Do it,” she says, “but you got to be able to handle the ups and downs.”

Lakissia knows both.

She knows what it is like to have a restaurant close.

She also knows what it is like to stand back and look at a trailer you worked toward purchasing.

She knows the uncertainty of starting beneath a tent and the satisfaction of watching customers return for something they love.

Both experiences belong to the same business story.

That is what makes the progress meaningful.

What comes next?

Ask a business owner about the future and there is often a ready answer.

Another location. A larger operation. New products. Expansion into another market.

Lakissia's answer is more personal.

She is “praying about the next chapter.”

There is no need to rush it.

Mo Lemonade Cafe has already traveled a considerable distance from its beginning.

What started with lemonade beneath a tent has become a mobile cafe with a broader menu, a trailer Lakissia is proud to own, customers she enjoys meeting and a business that helped her son make it through college.

For now, there are plenty of reasons to enjoy the chapter she is already in.

Find the trailer.

Ask what's being sampled.

Try the Drip Lemonade that customers keep ordering.

Or take Lakissia's recommendation and get the açaí bowl.

You may arrive because the name says lemonade.

Just don't assume that's all you're going to find.