Cheese Nuts

Smith says Van Pelt's financial troubles were because of her lifestyle and that she stuck him with thousands of dollars of unpaid expenses on a joint American Express card.

In April, though, he agreed to sign over 100,000 shares of the Save the World Air stock. He says he wanted to bankroll Playfood with a sizable sum that would get the company off the ground, teach Van Pelt some money-management skills and get her out of his hair.

Van Pelt claims that he gave her only a stingy portion of what they had jointly earned during their marriage and that he said he wanted nothing more to do with her cashew cheese.

She tried to dissolve their business partnership, asking Smith to step down as CEO and sign over all trademark rights to Van Pelt.

He refused. He suggested that the company needed an independent board of directors to make clearheaded decisions, which the dueling couple was unable to do.

Van Pelt didn't heed his advice. Her California lawyer, Dan Cross, recommended that she set up a second company to cover the Parkville operation. When she incorporated Playfood Manufacturing LLC in May, Smith was not a signer.

"He was never around, never worked a day in his life," she says. "He was a little prince. So why would I put him on the LLC?"

Six months later, Smith would answer that question in court.

By the end of 2006, Playfood was on the verge of going national.

On an icy December day, Van Pelt was bright with enthusiasm, bustling around the painted cave as industrial blenders buzzed with the sound of crunching cashews. At the sink, Rozzo washed the raw Sri Lankan nuts in a massive silver bowl. Behind them, a cast of Nepali exchange students from Park University squirted the bright-orange spread into plastic bottles, slapped a Playfood label on the front and loaded the order onto a pallet in the walk-in refrigerator. This would be the first pallet to be shipped out of state.

Around Kansas City, Playfood was already available. Eden Alley was using it for menu items. More than 50 Price Chopper, Balls and Hen House stores were stocking it in their refrigerated sections. National chains such as Whole Foods were interested in carrying it as soon as Van Pelt could get the production plant certified as organic.

Better yet, she felt she'd finally landed on her feet. Tension with Smith had eased, she said. As she dipped organic blue-corn chips in a still-hot batch of "Nacheezmo," she said he was doing his thing in California — opening the still-unfinished restaurant in Studio City — and she was handling the commercial production in Missouri.

"I'm being responsible, and all the earlier efforts are paying off," she said. "Now it's actually happening. We have a building that we're working out of that's legal, and we're putting bottles out in grocery stores and coming to work every morning at 8 a.m. Here I feel really grounded, like I'm in a good, wholesome place."

Even on that upbeat day, though, she and her mother were butting heads. Duncan was the general manager, and the two disagreed about how to run the company. They also didn't see eye to eye when it came to Rozzo's role as the production manager. Van Pelt said that for her whole life, she'd felt abandoned or antagonized by her mother.

In December, she asked friends to call her Solei because she was so sick of hearing Duncan bark her given name.

Duncan agreed that she clashed with her daughter but emphasized that the two had been managing to compromise.

By the start of 2007, Van Pelt was convinced that Duncan and bookkeeper Kay Honeycutt were running Playfood into the ground financially and trying to wrestle away control of the business. On January 6, she fired her mother in what she describes as "a gentle e-mail."

She wanted to clean house and install new employees who shared her passion for Playfood.

Instead, her past caught up with her. On Monday morning, January 8, Smith was waiting for her. He'd gotten a call from Duncan with the news that she'd been fired — and that a camera crew from KSHB Channel 41 was filming a segment about Playfood that day.

Smith says he discovered that morning that Van Pelt had created a new company without him. He says Van Pelt defrauded him by taking $13,000 he'd sent in October and $7,100 he'd sent on January 2 for a company in which he held no authority.