When I was a kid , I fell on the woodstove and burned my arm (into a cool floral branding I might add), and my mother packed aloe vera in my lunchbox.
Not a snack, not a note. A fresh stalk of aloe wrapped carefully, so I could apply it to a burn on my arm mid-morning at school. Needless to say my potentially very cool scar faded away to perfectly healed skin. And this was just a way of life. Ailments were gargled with salt water, a pot of homemade soup, and a cup of herbal tea.
I didn't know it then, but this was my first education in formulation. The understanding that nature had already solved most of what we needed, and that the answer was usually in the garden, the kitchen, or the forest, long before it was ever in a bottle.
That belief never left me. It just took forty-some years, a farm, a clinic, an apothecary, fifteen years building one of the world's most respected clean beauty brands, two children, and a deliberate decision to slow down — before it became ZSAZA.
The Education That Never Stopped
I grew up on the move, literally and physically. High desert of the Sierra Mountains, temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, from wild meadows to eastern coastlines. Each landscape taught me something different about the relationship between place, plant, and people. I spent most of my childhood outside — gathering, exploring, making “magic potions” from whatever we could find.
I followed every breadcrumb of curiosity I could. Studied biology, chemistry, health science, philosophy, religion, and photography. Continued into clinical herbal medicine, nutrition, pharmacology, herb-drug interactions, pathophysiology, and traditional systems of assessment. My love of learning has always been lifelong, and every rabbit hole gave me more questions.
That curiosity eventually led me to open Taking Root Apothecary in Vermont — a farm, herbal clinic, product line, and apothecary that provided healthcare resources grounded in nature for my community. It was one of the most meaningful things I had ever built. Real relationships. Real plants. Real people getting better.
Fifteen Years at the Frontier of Clean Beauty
I spent fifteen years as a founding employee at Tata Harper Skincare, a pioneering Vermont brand that proved you could have clinical efficacy without toxic ingredients, sold in over 80 countries without ever compromising on what went into the formula.
My roles over those fifteen years included Product Development, Operations Manager, and Director of Quality. I learned, at an extraordinary level of depth, what it actually takes to formulate something that works. How to read a clinical study. How to evaluate bioavailability. How to ask the right questions of suppliers. How to say no to an ingredient that looks good on paper but doesn't hold up under scrutiny.
I learned that the difference between a product that genuinely performs and one that merely claims to is almost always found in the details most people never look for. The form of the ingredient. The sourcing. The processing. The integrity of every decision made before the product ever reaches a consumer.
The Chapter That Changed Everything
In the summer of 2023, I made a deliberate choice to leave the pace I had been living at for most of my adult life. The first half of my life had been a chapter of expansions. Big adventures. World travel to experience cultures, food, medicine, history, religion, and ceremony. Building, buying, moving, rebuilding. Always outward. Always more.
I have two children now that are 8 and 6. I have lived in this house longer than any other house in my entire life (5+ years). My roots have grown deeper and I have cultivated something I can only describe as a sanctuary. I have built a sauna with an outdoor clawfoot tub. Near the garden sits a bell tent with a wood stove. I wake up early to weed the garden before the kids are up. I make a point to eat breakfast and dinner with them every day.
The world trips have evolved to the frog pond down the road. I photograph the same maple tree each season. Something shifted. The questions I had been asking outward, what's out there, what's next, how far, have became quieter questions. What matters. What lasts. What do I actually want to give my children, my community, myself.
ZSAZA was the answer.
How ZSAZA Began — And Why It Took Eight Years
Danhee and I met during my years at Tata Harper, when she was at WhistlePig. Our science minds and holistic ideologies made us fast friends — two somewhat type-A perfectionists who found they had exactly the same vision for what a truly clean supplement could look like. When Danhee couldn't find what she needed in the market for her own children, she had an idea: fortified honey, using the cleanest, most bioavailable, clinically studied actives, vitamins, minerals, and botanicals she could find. She knew my reputation as an herbalist. She knew I had just become a mother myself. The conversation started in 2018.
(You can read Danhee's side of that story in her founder post — she tells it better than I could.)
What followed was eight years of building and discovering, repeatedly, that we couldn't outsource a single part of it without compromising the thing we were trying to build. Ingredient sourcing. Formula development. Packaging. Branding. Manufacturing. Website. Every time we tried to hand something off, it just didn't meet our standards. So we did it ourselves.
Eight years later, we're still doing it all ourselves. I suppose that's just what happens when you're two mothers who refuse to settle for anything less than what you think your families deserve — and who know that when you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
Why Honey?
When Danhee and I began formulating what would become ZSAZA, I wasn't starting from scratch. I was drawing on everything — the aloe in the lunchbox, the herbal clinic, the fifteen years learning what clinical integrity actually looks like, the decades of studying how nature delivers nutrients in ways that synthetic systems can't replicate. She had her own experiences growing up in South Korea with Chinese doctors and her own mother’s kitchen remedies, as well as her mother in laws folk remedies from Ireland. She too studied biotechnology and drug pharmacology, and was now a mother herself trying to find the best combination of it all.
Honey was never a question for us. It was the answer we already knew was the foundation.
Real honey is not a sweetener. It is a functional food with naturally occurring enzymes, antioxidants, and bioactive compounds that have been used medicinally across almost every culture in human history. As a delivery system for nutrients, it is something that no capsule or powder has ever successfully replaced — because the body recognizes it as real food and responds accordingly.
We source exclusively from Champlain Valley Apiaries in Addison County, Vermont, a family beekeeping operation founded nearly 100 years ago by the legendary Charlie Mraz, now tended by his great-grandson Curtis. Some of those hives live on Danhee's land. The honey in your jar traveled from Vermont soil, through four generations of one family's hands, into ours. That is not a supply chain. That is a relationship. And it is the foundation of everything we make.
What Goes Into Every Jar and Why
Formulating what goes into that honey was, honestly, the most fun I've ever had.
I love puzzles. I love deep research. I love the logic of figuring out which nutrients amplify each other… at what doses, from what sources, in what combinations. I felt like a detective, tracing every ingredient back to its origin: verifying bioavailability, confirming safety across all ages, making sure nothing came from compromised supply chains, and asking whether each ingredient actually worked with honey as a delivery system. Every nutrient in these jars earned its place through clinical research, not marketing trends.
The full story behind each ingredient — why elderberry and beta-glucan work together, why we chose algae-derived D3 over lanolin, why vitamin C and zinc are paired, and every other decision we made — is documented in detail on our ingredient page. The short version is this: we optimized for actual efficacy, not label appeal.
Where Every Jar Is Made
When it came time to manufacture, we hit the same wall we'd hit everywhere else. No one could do it. Dietary supplement GMP facilities are built for pills, capsules, and gummies — not honey. The concept was so unconventional that every manufacturer we approached either didn't understand what we were asking or simply turned us away. We were starting to wonder if we were crazy or geniuses. So we did what we always do: we figured it out ourselves. The old sports offices at the former Green Mountain College gymnasium — now owned by Danhee — became our lab and GMP-compliant production facility. When I say we know exactly what goes into every jar, I mean it literally. We built the room it's made in.
The Messy Middle
Formulating a fortified honey sounds poetic. The reality was humbling. Getting taste, texture, and efficacious dosing right — all at the same time — turned out to be one of the hardest puzzles I'd ever tried to solve. Honey isn't a stable, predictable medium. It varies in flavor depending on what the bees are foraging. It varies in viscosity season to season. And ensuring that every spoonful — from the first one out of the jar to the last — delivers a consistent, replicable dose within a six-month shelf life? That's a formulation and manufacturing challenge most supplement brands never have to think about, because they're making pills. We were making something alive.
We're still fine-tuning. We'll probably always be fine-tuning. But what we have right now is something we're genuinely obsessed with — delicious, safe, consistent as nature allows, and made exactly the way we said we'd make it. That feels like a pretty good place to be.
What I Want My Children to See
I want my children to see me playful and grounded. To see what it looks like to work with purpose rather than just ambition. To understand that real nourishment is something you look forward to, not something you endure.
ZSAZA is the product of every version of me that came before this one. The child making potions in the forest. The student who couldn't stop asking questions. The formulator who learned that integrity is found in the details. The mother who wanted something better for her family and built it herself.
I hope I continue to find not a work-life balance, but work that is my life's purpose. The path I walk feels uniquely true to my gifts. And for the first time in my life, I am doing less and feeling more.
Who This Is For
If you've ever stood in a supplement aisle reading labels and walked out empty-handed because nothing met your standards — this is for you. If you've fought the daily vitamin battle and wondered whether any of it is actually working — this is for you. If you're the person in your family who reads the ingredient list, asks where things come from, and refuses to settle for "good enough" when it comes to your kids' health — you're exactly who we built this for.
ZSAZA isn't for everyone. We're small, we're premium, and we're not trying to compete with the brands that optimize for price and scale. We're trying to be the most thoughtfully made immune support your family has ever used. If that's what you've been looking for, then you’re welcome. You found it.
-- ZSAZA MAMA -- Leilani McNeill
