By Lee Hurley
Joanie Hartson Mulkin grew up as one of six girls in a pink New Orleans house with a pink kitchen. Her mother—Mama Joanie—taught her how to make cheese straws by hand kneading the dough and cranking out the straws in a cookie press. “It’s a very grueling process,” Mulkin says. “But people seemed to like the results.” Decades later, it became her business.
The Shopify Morning
The redirection came after COVID, when Mulkin and her husband Jon moved back to Birmingham from New York City. Their three children Mathilde, Pearce and Isabelle had grown up and flown the coop. Jon was working out of the house—and the house, as she puts it, had always been her place. Time to act.
A brother-in-law mentioned Shopify. “I’m not kidding,” she says. “I woke up one day, I got on Shopify, I created an account then started the business.” She secured cottage-law credentials to bake from home, got an EIN and launched as a sole proprietor under the name Joanie’s Cheese Straws: A Taste of New Orleans Tradition. The first packaging was a simple pink circular label with a sketch by the artist Anne Smith Reeves.
The recipe is unfussy and intentionally regional: cheese, flour, a plant-based buttery margarine, Tabasco and Zatarain’s cayenne pepper. She has tried repeatedly to convert it to butter, but “it doesn’t taste as good,” she offers. The Louisiana pantry brands are deliberate. “I use Tabasco and Zatarain’s ‘cause it’s a New Orleans thing.”
That first year, she made everything by hand crank, renting a commercial kitchen by the hour in Pelham when Christmas orders piled up. Family filled the gap—her sister Connie came and baked; sister Betsy proved a gifted packer. Her mother-in-law Jane pitched in. After that first holiday season though she reached a clear verdict: “This is overwhelming.” So, she hit the pause button.
A neighbor, Montana, and the ramp up
The restart came sideways, the way these things do in New Orleans. She’d given cheese straws to her next-door neighbor, who carried them out to Montana to visit friends. One friend loved the straws so much, he decided he wanted to help.
The funding discussed was $110,000, and it bought, among other things, a roughly $35,000 extruder—10 nozzles feeding onto a conveyor belt, replacing the hand crank that had defined the first act. Hence, Joanie’s Cheese Straws: A Taste of New Orleans relaunched in August 2025.
Then Christmas arrived. She had no employees. She was in the kitchen every single day, some days running 12 batches. “I was just on
adrenaline, doing it, doing it, doing it,” she says. The company sold roughly $100,000 worth of cheese straws over the holidays—every dollar of it built directly by Mulkin through retail relationships and corporate gifting, with no distributor and no sales team. One client ordered 300 tins for Thanksgiving with about three weeks’ notice. She took it. The whole family ended up in the kitchen, grandbabies included. “It was just beautiful,” she says.
Mardi Gras brought purple, green and gold tins, and they were a hit.
Demand Grows
Interest continued to build. Taste of the South named the cheese straws among its top 50 items for 2026, which led to an invitation onto a New Orleans food radio show. Biz New Orleans
featured her too. But Mulkin will admit her weak spot without prompting. “I need to get
my face out there more,” she says.
Working from a shared commercial kitchen in New Orleans, Mulkin is figuring out how to meet demand and expand while having a life outside cheese straws, all while keeping that family recipe character. She hopes to expand production and, perhaps someday, leave a
business one of her children might want to run. And she continues to explore potential partnerships that could both expand her brand and reshape how she manages the business.
Meanwhile, Joanie’s Cheese Straws continue to sell briskly through private orders, her
website and retail locations in New Orleans
and Birmingham, like Amano and ALKMY. The holidays get very busy.
For now, the company connects the two cities she calls home. Birmingham is where Mulkin first offered her straws for sale and discovered how many people love them. New Orleans is where she learned to make them—and where she is building the business that bears her name.
Joanie’s Cheese Straws are available through joaniescheesestraws.com.
