Liv Vasquez

Chef • Consultant • Restauranteur

Featured on High Times, Forbes, Conde Nast Travel , Thrillist, Passport Magazine, Netflix, TruTV, HBO Max and More!

Liv Vasquez is a chef and cannabis educator with a mission to help people develop a clearer understanding of Cannabis as a plant and industry in beautiful spaces. Liv travels the country hosting beautiful and magical popup events that act as a classroom for her to teach and answer questions about Cannabis in depth.

Her audience spans globally and ranges from home cooks who want to incorporate plant medicine into their lives, to some of the biggest beverage brands globally that want to add CBD to their product. Liv has been called the "Alton Brown" of cannabis,because she has a clear understanding of the science, strain heritage, plant cultivation and ethics as well as medicine and digestion.

Quotes from past event attendees…

"I never understood that there was even a difference between strains. After one brunch with Liv I felt like I had taken a Cannabis Sommelier master class!"

"Liv made me think differently about the cannabis products I was buying. I put so much more thought into the ethics, and how these products that I am putting in and on my body almost daily are produced. Down with unethical CBD!"

Experience

Liv Vasquez brings over 20 years experience as a chef, recipe writer, and restaurateur to the Cannabis/CBD space by using beautiful events and beautiful plates as an educational tool to teach about Hemp, Cannabis, this immerging industry and plant medicine. Liv began her career at 18, as she graduated culinary school and went right into a position that she was scouted for, to assist in building out, staffing and creating menus for a variety of restaurants for the new Universal theme park, and City Walk.

By 21 Liv had opened 15 experiential dining restaurants. Designing menus, staffing and helping with kitchen lay out and design, all with the guest in mind. "If I was spending my savings to come to a themed restaurant, what would i need to touch, taste, smell and hear to make that experience memorable?". After opening restaurants for fans of Emeril, Bob Marley, Jimmy Buffett and more.

Liv moved to New York at 21 and was scouted by the Gramercy Park Hotel to design and open a restaurant on their roof, which led to her opening two restaurants of her own in Manhattan by the age of 23.

Eventually she moved into stage management and restaurant consulting, working in New York, California and Oregon. Moving to Oregon in 2012, right before recreational Marijuana was passed for legalization.

She began working in a medical dispensary, helping them transition from a Medical to a Recreational dispensary as head of education and staff training. She spent time creating an educational database with product and strain information, while also staying up to date on daily changing law and regulation in order to educate staff and keep all sales compliant.

This was when Liv began working closely with Cannabis cultivators (farms) and doctor recommended medical patients to educate herself about Cannabis as plant medicine as well as it's Cultivation, Ethics, History, Lineage, Science and research around it. After 3 years of educating, researching and essentially taking on clients as case studies, Liv started Livvie Smalls Events. Building speakeasy style, pop up events in private residences all over the country as a beautiful and experiential way to engage and educate about Cannabis. Transforming "Stoner Culture" into "Cultured Stoners". In an effort to make more informed consumers and put ethics and science in the forefront, Liv began spending more time talking about effective and ethical brands and products and making a network of cannabis science researchers all over the world she has had access to new research and discoveries in the cannabis science communities. Talking about Cannabis and food from soil to ingestion, she makes this information comprehensive and passes it along to her clients and guests helping them understand efficacy, absorption, laws, and what makes a clean and effective products. Using food as an educational tool, she teaches about the science of absorption, how regulation and policy effects the consumer experience, information about cannabis business, cannabis science and more, ultimately making her the "Alton Brown" of Cannabis Food and events.

In 2019 Liv wrote her book Smart Infusion, sharing her perspective on what to consider to have the best possible Edibles experience, by helping to eliminate the "bad brownie experience" and put you in charge of how an edible effects you.

Liv partnered with ethical online sales platform BUSHL as a brand curator, and launched the first CBD dinner Party kit featuring recipes that incorporate some of her favorite ethical brands and products.

The world's first CBD Summer Camp for adults hosted on a gorgeous hemp farm, the East Fork Cultivars ranch in Oregon was one of Liv's concepts for Adventure Dining that could promote Oregon's Cannabis tourism. Campers from as far as Japan came to this beautiful part of oregon to submerge themselves in a Cannabis AP course with lots of extracurricular activities like swimming, outdoor yoga and ziplining.

CBDSummerCamp.com

"I truly believe that Oregon has the best terroir for cultivating cannabis in all of North America, so I am doing what I can to encourage Cannabis Tourism to Oregon. It is my hope that this will help boost the cannabis economy and to show the rest of the country where their cannabis will be coming from once we legalize nationally. Once we have interstate commerce, you will be looking for the Made in Oregon sticker on all of your cannabis products."

You can currently find Liv on Netflix's Cooked with Cannabis hosted by Kelis, featured on The Portland episode of 101 Places to Party Before You Die on HBO Max, and as a content creator, recipe writer and private plant medicine and psychedelics coach for clients all over North America.