She started helping her parents in the kitchen when she was just three years old. In high school, she won the Washington state 4-H baking championship. Now, with 30 years of food industry experience, she’s part of a team that provides personalized petits fours to celebrities and major corporations.
Megan (Peck) Leifson (’90 Food Sci.) is the food safety director and research-and-development expert at Dragonfly Cakes in Tacoma. The company makes petit fours for celebrities who perform at the Tacoma Dome, including Taylor Swift, Oprah, Maroon 5, and Lady Gaga. Corporate clients, including Tiffany and Chanel, use them for customer appreciation and other events.
Dragonfly Cakes and its sister company, Celebrity Cake Studios, are owned by two sisters from Guam. Dragonfly’s dainty and delicate petits fours are handmade with all-natural, plant-based colors and flavors without preservatives, explains Milana D’Aniello, marketing director and niece of one of the owners.
“We’re a small family business, and we wanted to start nationwide distribution,” she says. “To do that we had to pass an AIB (American Institute of Baking) audit for cleanliness and safety. Everything has to be written down and documented. We failed our first audit.”
The owners hired Leifson in 2022. “Megan was the smartest in the room,” D’Aniello says. “She was fine with all the documentation, and she pushed us into the modern era.”
They passed the last three audits.
Leifson says she especially enjoys the research, such as helping develop flavors: matcha-passionfruit, mango-yuzu, and piña colada. “Asian-inspired flavors were a new thing for me,” she says. “The most challenging was ube (a purple yam from the Philippines). When you bake it, it naturally turns blue. I had to figure out how to change the acidity of the dough to keep the purple color they wanted.”
Her knowledge and approach continue to impress. “Megan’s attitude is ‘We can make that,’ when presented with an idea from Filipino cuisine,” D’Aniello says. “She researches ‘clean label’ ingredients, like beetroot powder that we use for pink coloring. Once I was freaking out because some of the cakes looked purple. She explained that beets are red when harvested in summer and purple when harvested in winter.”
Leifson’s love for cooking began as a preschooler, helping her dad make bread and candies. 4-H, offered through Washington State University Extension in Clark County, “helped me build a foundation in cooking,” she says. “I entered every competition—baking, food preservation, canning.” Bread making became a specialty, and her cinnamon swirl bread was a winner for 4-H statewide.
A high school teacher sparked her love for the science side of cooking. “One of my 4-H projects was to use a camera mounted to a microscope to explore the gluten composition of different kinds of bread,” Leifson recalls. “I read an article about food science as a college major and realized I could combine my love of food with my love of science.”
She chose WSU for its food science program and because it was the alma mater of her father, Robert Peck (’53, MA ’61 Int. Des.), and her grandfather, Gilbert Peck (1923 Hort.).
Beyond her specialty in baking, Leifson studied sensory panels, blind taste testing, preserving and preparing meat and dairy products, and more. “I learned how to commercialize food preparation—making products that don’t fade under fluorescent lights and ones that can stay fresh longer under refrigeration.”
Her first job was running the production side of Le Panier, a French bakery in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. “The biggest challenge was cooking enough bread for the holidays. We had to figure out how to half-bake the loaves, freeze them, and finish baking them so that they tasted exactly the same as the fresh-baked loaves.”
She also worked at a company that makes imitation crab meat and another that makes pasta and potato salads. “We made our own mayonnaise and needed to keep it shelf-stable, especially if it contained blue cheese, which tends to mold.”
At Lucks Food Decorating, a century-old Tacoma company, Leifson worked on edible food colorings and edible paper. “It’s challenging to make it work with different kinds of icing so that it doesn’t bubble up and the colors don’t fade,” says Leifson, who patented an edible food paper that works on high moisture frosting, as well as laser-cutting technology for the paper.
Leifson also uses her expertise as chair of the board of Nourish Pierce County. The 50-year-old nonprofit runs six food banks and 15 mobile sites, serving more than 66,000 people in 2024. Her husband, Michael Leifson (’90 Accounting), volunteers with her.
“There’s good job security in food science,” she says. “This is my way of giving back.”