HALF BAKED
OUTWARDLY, THE BAKERY on the busiest street in Fountain Square looked like a bakery. The scene inside, though, told a different story. There were no glass cases brimming with flaky pastries. No gooey brownies or fussy cakes or confetti-capped cookies. No warm sugar smells. Instead, customers who met the “closed” sign on the door could cup their hands and peer past the threshold to see little more than two folding tables and a poster-sized reproduction of a magazine article featuring a woman with a big smile. But, like the bakery, the woman in the image was not exactly what or who she appeared to be.
Rebecca Raffle, a Los Angeles transplant, had posed for the photo some months earlier. The picture of her had originally appeared in this publication with a story about her new venture, Elevate Bakery & Barkery. In the article, readers learned that Elevate was one of the first of its kind in the country—a shop that featured artisanal baked goods spiked with hemp-derived cannabidiol (CBD) grown on her own farm. The story went on to explain that as a biotech specialist, “Raffle spent a year and a half working with local chemists to develop a proprietary blend of tasteless CBD powder that can be incorporated into any recipe.”
Before the story was published, a number of discrepancies turned up during the fact-checking process. But Raffle herself explained them away, and the story appeared in the November 2020 issue of Indianapolis Monthly with little fanfare. After copies appeared on newsstands, Raffle joined the magazine’s Monthly/Weekly podcast as a guest, where she once again praised the virtues of Elevate and shared her story, which got better the more she told it.
Elevate’s mission was personal to Raffle. She was both proprietor and patient. Years earlier, she had been diagnosed with lymphoma and found that CBD alleviated the side effects of chemotherapy. On her social media channels, she told friends and followers that she suffered from a host of other maladies as well: ADHD, dyslexia, a degenerative blood disorder, “really progressive” lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and an unnamed condition that caused the bones in her legs and feet to break, forcing her to wear high-tops. Elevate wasn’t just a bakery, she said; it was part medical science lab, a marvel that delivered the healing power of the supplement via confectionery bliss. The spoonful of sugar helped the medicine go down—and made the pain go away for her target customers. She preached relief for busy moms, peace of mind for the anxious, and comfort for people who couldn’t afford their meds. “I have three old women, Barbara, Karen and Nancy. And I just drop them off CBD cookies, and they leave me cash or like an $8 check,” she says.
The bakery was just a small part of something much more ambitious. Raffle told others she was building an enterprise—a farm, dispensaries, tech firm—by and for a community with whom she shared an affinity. Jewish mothers. Gay women. Hemp enthusiasts. When Raffle moved here from the West Coast and left behind her consulting business, she started recruiting a team of women she met in Facebook groups, who in turn recruited their friends. Working with Raffle would have seemed like a can’tmiss opportunity. On paper, at least.
Raffle was raised in Calabasas, an enclave west of California’s San Fernando Valley favored by Drake, Justin Bieber, and the Kardashians. And like Kim, Khloe, and Kourtney, the 36-year-old entrepreneur gave the impression that she had found wild success at a very young age. Here’s how one of her online business profiles explains it: When she was just 8 years old, Raffle was tested by the world’s oldest and largest IQ society, Mensa International. In high school, she won a national scholarship competition for an essay on Ayn Rand and the themes of entrepreneurship and leadership in Rand’s novels. As an undergraduate at the University of San Francisco, she founded an “early Uber” called FSR Transportation and then left in 2007 for $1.3 million. She went on to work for a recycling startup called ECO2 Plastics in the Bay Area (and on a LinkedIn profile that has since been deleted, claimed to be its CFO). She left in 2010 for “an undisclosed amount.” After picking up a “post baccalaureate degree” in life sciences business and biotechnology from the University of California, Berkeley, she founded Raffle Consulting Group, which produced digital technology development and marketing campaigns
