We were lucky to catch up with Jessica Washburn recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jessica , thanks for joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

I fell in love with chocolate about 6 or 7 years ago. I became super interested in chocolate itself—where and how it’s grown and processed, the chocolate industry, the chemistry of chocolate, the craft chocolate movement in America and throughout the world. I think I read every book in my local library system about chocolate, I listened to podcasts, I watched YouTube videos. It was so fascinating to me and I thought that maybe when all of my kids were out of the house I’d go to pastry school and really learn about chocolate as my attempts to master it on my own were fairly unsuccessful. Eventually I found an online professional chocolate school and took a handful of classes, made lots of chocolate, made lots of mistakes, and took some in-person classes with various pastry chefs and chocolatiers throughout the country.

I started my business as a cottage food business in 2019 out of my home, which was great because it was low risk, but which was also fairly frustrating because the kind of chocolate products I make are quite involved and take multiple days to complete. It’s also incredibly inefficient to make small batches of bonbon, bars, panned items, etc. When COVID hit, I just took a step back. I had very little overhead so I had the luxury of watching how other businesses were adapting to COVID and brainstorming how I might go about running a business during such uncertain times.

Eventually my frustration with the limitations of a cottage food chocolate business overrode my fear of risk and I found a commercial real estate agent and began looking at rental properties. By this point my mom had come onboard as my partner, which was huge. She had money that she could invest into starting up and I knew she would be great at interfacing with customers which would free me up to focus on production. We found a space, drew up plans for the buildout, spoke with contractors and collected bids, and wrote up our offer to the landlord. It turned out that the space had been listed incorrectly and the landlord wanted almost twice the listed rent. I was heartbroken. The space had not been ideal—it was small, awkwardly shaped, and 20 minutes from my home—but the rent was something I felt confident we could commit to. I cried for about an hour and then got in my car and just started driving around my town looking for spaces we hadn’t looked at yet. I found a vacant space that had belonged to a friend of mine who had owned a cupcake business, I took down the phone number of the landlord and texted my real estate agent asking to see it.

The moment I walked in, I knew this was our space. It had a commercial kitchen in the back with all the requisite plumbing and electrical that we would need. It had a retail area up front that already coordinated with our branding. I called my friend who had been a previous tenant to find out about her experience with the space, and she confirmed it was a great space. We took the space and took off running. It was early October and we decided to try to be up and running before Christmas.

My good friend is a graphic designer and she took us on for almost of our branding work. I found an interior architect in an entrepreneur Facebook group I was in who designed our cash wrap counter, chocolate display case, and retail area. I found a gently used gelato case, a used batch freezer, blast chiller, and oven. We ordered all the other equipment we would need like refrigerators and freezers and dedicated chocolate equipment, such as a continuous tempering machine and an enrober. Luckily I had worked for another chocolatier for about 6 weeks one holiday season and I was able to draw on that experience when I laid out my kitchen. We found a company to make our exterior signage. It was an incredibly busy time of making a lot of decisions very quickly.

The other challenge was figuring out how to have an exciting grand opening in the midst of the height of the pandemic. In December of 2020 things were no longer locked down but almost no one had received any kind of vaccination against COVID. We decided to do both an virtual opening week and an in-store opening week. The week before we opened we highlighted one of our products each day and hosted a giveaway for that product in which entrants would have to share our business in some way. That started getting people excited about the actual opening. The next week we had a grand opening week in which people could sign up for 20 minute slots in groups of 6 or less to come in, learn about our business, taste samples, and shop at a small discount. After a day or two, word started to spread throughout our community and by the end of that week we were almost completely sold out. We had planned to be open Tuesday -Thursday of the next week, so I basically lived at the shop that weekend, napping on piles of cardboard when I couldn’t stay upright any longer, and restocked the best I could. By closing on the Wednesday before Christmas we had 4 products left in the entire store and we closed a day early because we had nothing left to sell. That next morning someone called the shop to say they’d heard about us and met my mom at the shop to buy our last four products.

That first year was rough. It felt like a scramble from Christmas to Valentine’s Day to Easter to Mother’s Day. I did not sleep very much. My family really had to step in a fill in the gaps. It was hard to plan production without data to inform my decisions. Eventually, we found good staff to help out and started to better predict customer behavior. We have slowing learned how we can work ahead to make the holidays less of a scramble. It’s been a wild ride, but there’s nothing better than watching someone’s face light up when they taste one of our products.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I fell in love with chocolate after we moved from upstate NY to the KC area. I had been a newborn photographer in NY and assumed I’d started a new business in KC but it just didn’t feel right to me at the time. I started looking for something new to learn about and to challenge myself with and I found chocolate.

I went to college for Chemistry and ended up graduating in Art History, and chocolate is a perfect blend of art and science. Chocolate work demands incredible precision and attention to detail as well as creativity and artistry. Every product we make at Bliss is the result of that two-pronged approach.

We specialize in painted bonbons, which are thin chocolate shells with different fillings inside ranging from ganache to marshmallow to nut pralinés to fruit fillings. Our bonbons tend to be inspired by favorite desserts, and I love introducing multiple textures into a single bite-size piece. My mouth hates to be bored. Each bonbon takes 4-5 days to complete—they are truly a labor of love. We also make chocolate bars, panned (chocolate covered) fruits, nuts, and malt balls, as well as confections like chewy caramels and sponge toffee. We use all real ingredients: real nuts, fruits, and dairy, and make almost every ingredient from scratch because we believe it makes a real difference in the flavors and textures of our products.

We put our hearts into every single product we make and we feel that our customers can taste that in every bite.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

When I was younger I would shy away from things that were difficult because I was afraid to fail. I thought successful people were the people who were good at what they did. I believed that if something was worth doing, it was only worth doing well. Life and parenting 6 children has taught me that perfection is not possible and that the fear of failure inhibits growth. I had a friend say to me once that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly, and that has stuck with me. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing whether I can do it well now or not. And it’s by doing something poorly that I learn to do something well.

Younger me could never have been a chocolatier. Chocolate is too finicky. There’s too much failure in the beginning, too many ways things can go sideways. I wasn’t brave enough to risk failure. I had to grow into a more courageous person, into someone who embraced the knowledge that is gained by failing, before I could become a chocolatier.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When we bought our second tempering machine, it was intended for white chocolate. In between when I ordered the machine and when it arrived from Italy, the sales associate I had been working with left that company and was replaced. I didn’t think to make sure the new sales associate knew to test my machine with white chocolate before sending it to me. When it arrived, it was clear it had been tested with dark chocolate. In order to clear that residue out of the machine I went through about $500-600 of white chocolate. I was so frustrated and just sick to my stomach. The discarded chocolate was fine and usable but it looked like milk chocolate while tasting like super sweet white chocolate. I hated to thrown all that product away. I decided to experiment. I put the chocolate into a sous vide for about 12 hours and caramelized the milk proteins in the white chocolate. The resulting caramelized chocolate tasted delicious and had a beautiful rich color but was very thick and gloppy. I ran the caramelized chocolate through a melanger with additional cocoa butter and was able to create caramelized milk chocolate and caramelized white chocolate that we then used to coat caramelized almonds. We made a beautiful, delicious product out of a bit of an equipment disaster.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.blisschocolatier.com
• Instagram: Bliss.chocolatier
• Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/100042687416564/

Image Credits
Jessica Washburn (I took all the photos)