We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Julianne Palumbo and Marina Brown. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Julianne and Marina below.
Julianne and Marina, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you come up with the idea for your business?
Since our family’s move to Texas three years ago, Marina has studied to become a natural health professional, and I have felt drawn to focus my energies on the effects of natural living on our health. As a family, we discovered that there are many natural ways to take our health back and began to pursue them. Step by step, we “cleaned up” our bodies, choosing real foods over processed foods and reducing our exposure to hormone disrupting chemicals and other toxins by replacing our cooking pans, home cleaning products, beauty products, and clothing. Through our town’s organic farmers market, we got to know our local farmers and now buy a lot of our food from people we know personally instead of relying solely on grocery stores.
One day, after Marina had prayed for guidance on earning a source of income while she set up her natural health practice, God spoke to her about starting an organic confections company. We were pretty shocked to receive this answer as we don’t eat a lot of sweets as a family, and neither of us had ever made candy. Since Marina had been pursuing holistic health with her time, this was quite a twist. But when she dropped the idea on me, right away I knew it was something we were supposed to do. We immediately began to define what it was that God was directing us to create. We brainstormed names for our entity. After a few days, we had defined our brand in a way consistent with how we already prepared our food at home–as a scratch-made, organic confections company using the best ingredients available and creating a product that is beautiful both inside and out.
Then, God nudged us again, flooding me with memories of the sweets I used to enjoy as a child at my Nonna’s house. As I shared with Marina my recollections of afternoons with my mom and sisters at my Nonna’s house eating Italian pastry and drinking tea, Sweet Nonna Confections started to take form. Those were warm, comforting times, and memories of them continued to come over the next few days. I was reminded of the Pizzelle cookies that Nonna made, and then I remembered that her old Pizzelle maker was sitting in my pantry closet, one of the few items we hadn’t left behind in our move to Texas. I even found Nonna’s old recipe!
Within two weeks we were incorporated, branded, logo-ed, insured, and in business. Only one major task remained—we needed to figure out how to make candy!
Over the next few weeks, we studied and worked long hours until we had cracked the code to the chemistry of candy making. Timing and temperature are keys to making candy harden just right. After some practice and many failed batches, we were gaining confidence. Soon after, we raised our banner at the Montgomery Farmers Market (MFM), and Sweet Nonna Confections was officially born. We were still not certain why God directed us toward candy making of all things. After all, the world has tried to convince all of us that all sugar is bad for us. But, we continued to move forward in faith, and things were easily falling into place.
We live ten minutes from an all-organic market where customers go to find foods made with the best ingredients. At the MFM, we have found our home and set up our store. Our customers are warm and wonderful! Many of them, like us, are seeking better health through clean eating, and we are greatly enriched by our interactions with them. Our small business has grown to incorporate a pre-ordering business, and we are seeking additional outlets for our products. It’s a highly creative business, and truth be told, sometimes we even create a great new candy by accident!
The other day while taking our afternoon walk, we prayed again on why God put this health-conscious family into the candy business. “It’s for the joy!” I heard. “Sweets bring joy, and joy is good for you.” That rings true. So, each week we make the caramel and stir the fudge, roll the cookie dough and temper the chocolate, assured that the joy of eating beautiful confections has its own role in our and our customers’ wellness journey.
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 am a mother of three and a recent grandmother. I have had a handful of varied careers, including attorney, poet and writer, editor, publisher of a literary magazine about motherhood, and teacher of both professional writers and teens. During the past couple of years, I have studied the restaurant business and was preparing to open a cafe at some point, so it is not entirely surprising to suddenly find myself in the food business.
Marina has always been passionate about the biological sciences and in the past two years has discovered a passion for food and nutrition. She has a Bachelor’s in Neuroscience and is a former medical student. Currently, as a certified natural health professional, Marina is launching Her Health Reclaimed, a women’s health and wellness practice with a particular focus on gut health and endometriosis, after having recovered from stage 4 endo and had success using natural methods to improve her symptoms.
At Sweet Nonna, we define our brand as organic sweets with a seasonal flair that are beautiful both inside and out. Sweet Nonna Confections was born out of a passion for real food and a desire to share our Italian-New England heritage with our Texan friends. We pour our love and our knowledge of natural health into the confections we create, sourcing the highest quality, least processed ingredients. Our confections will always be free of industrial seed oils and artificial preservatives, colors, and flavors. We apply the knowledge we acquired about eliminating toxins to our recipes and cooking methods. For example, because store-bought baking powder often contains aluminum, we make our own. We use stainless steel or glass equipment, baking pans, and utensils instead of aluminum. As confectioners, we go through parchment paper like it’s water, and many conventional brands contain “forever chemicals” that can accumulate in the body and cause potential harm. We have found a brand that is forever chemical-free. Each ingredient and process that goes into our products is carefully researched and chosen with health in mind. We have learned that many of the old teachings have misrepresented the truth about the food we eat. It is often not the foods themselves that are harmful but the chemicals they are treated with. We want parents to be comfortable purchasing our products for their families.
As confectioners, we love the idea of changing our products to reflect the seasons. We feel that humans were intended to eat local and seasonal produce–strawberries in early summer, pumpkins and squash in the fall. New England offers defined seasons and a well-developed food culture that tends to reflect them.
Sweet Nonna’s weekly offerings include the American staples of fudge and chocolate bark, as well as the classic Italian pizzelle and a Dutch classic–stroopwafel. We also bring the joy of the four seasons to our customers with a rotational menu featuring gourmet dipped apples for fall and gingerbread house kits for Christmastime. Our goal is to bring our customers that small-town-New-England-Hallmark-movie feel, hopefully with some less predictable plot twists!
A new specialty we are developing is themed, seasonal cookie kits that make the perfect gift. This Christmas we created an all organic, handmade Gingerbread House Kit with cookies, homemade icing, and a variety of candies. The kit did quite well. Our industry themes include cookies for Valentines Day, Galentine’s Day, and profession-specific themed cookies for teachers, lawyers, financial professionals, and realtors.
Moving forward, our hope is to get into the event venues, offering our products to brides, new moms, and business events to help celebrate their milestones.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
We will let you in on a secret: candy making is not for the faint of heart. And, cottage vending is even less so! When we first began making candy, we became frustrated by the difficulty. For example, in order to achieve the perfect texture for caramel–not too creamy because it will drip, and not too hard because it will become hard cracked–you must reach the right temperature and for the correct amount of time. The difficulty with organic candy making is that the ingredients are expensive, not leaving a lot of room for error. In the beginning, we made batch after batch, sometimes overcooking the caramel, sometimes not cooking it enough. With each lost batch, we’d calculate our losses and silently wonder if we’d ever get it consistently right. But, a few times we’d miss the mark but then realize we made something new–like when too soft caramel because lovely caramel sauce or too hard caramel turned into caramints. You have to be easygoing and resilient with candy making. You can make the same recipe exactly the same way ten times in a row, and on the eleventh time, it will come completely different. Maybe it’s the weather? Another challenge is that the large-scale candy maker or chocolatier is working with equipment designed to make the task easier. Oftentimes, you can’t pour candy by hand quickly enough into the mold before it hardens. But then, when you finally master a candy technique, and it makes a beautiful product, it’s very rewarding. As is often the case when you venture down a new path, there are additional benefits along the way. Marina is planning on formally opening her natural health practice at the beginning of 2025. Because we sell Sweet Nonna through an all-organic market, Marina finds herself in a perfect place for networking with others in the naturopathic field and also to respond to the demand created by the many women who are seeking natural methods to take back their health. And so, as God would have it, just as Sweet Nonna has found her stride, “Her Health Reclaimed” has been birthed!
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
When we were just beginning our candy business, we had to come up with labels for each item. Texas law requires that food produced by cottage vendors for sale be labeled in a specific way. We went online and used an online design platform to produce our own labels and had them sent. It was a cumbersome and not-so-economical process. The labels were expensive, adding about 60 cents to the product, and they took two weeks to arrive. We learned quickly that we wanted to produce our candy and confections by inspiration, and we were inspired often to create new items. The labelling requirement hindered our creative flow as we were often stuck using up 200 labels for a product that no longer inspired us or our customers. Seasons change quickly in Texas; labels need to change quickly too. We inquired of other vendors at the market, and most of them used the same process we did to get their labels made. Then one day, our lovely egg farmer was remarking how she couldn’t get her printer to print her labels that morning. We inquired further and learned how she made her own labels online. We had considered that when we first looked at labeling, but for some reason it didn’t seem feasible at the time. Marina ended up designing the labels easily online and printing them herself. The labels were just as pretty as the expensive ones, and now we could move with our mood and make caramels into caramints on a whim! A very simple change in how we do things made all the difference to our small business. What is your particular challenge? Don’t accept it as is, but ask your peers what they are doing until you find a way to do it better.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sweet-nonna-confections.square.site
- Instagram: @sweetnonnaconfections
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61568295060657
- Other: Marina Instagram for Natural Health Practice: @herhealthreclaimed
