Paula Charleson puts a new spin on chocolate
Paula Charleson doesn’t make chocolate like most companies do. She makes it with honey rather than white or cane sugar and only uses four ingredients. And that unique spin on one of the most popular foods in the world, along with a $30,000 loan from the state of Rhode Island, has allowed the Cranston native to distribute her chocolate bars across the East Coast at stores such as Whole Foods and Zabars.
Charleson, a graduate of Cranston West who lived in Miami for some time before moving back to Cranston seven years ago, first began her business venture roughly five years ago in her own kitchen, with intention of creating a new kind of chocolate bar that she wanted to give to family and friends.
“I started with raw ingredients – cocoa butter, cocoa powder, and honey, because I thought it was the best sweetener,” she said. “I kept re-doing the recipe to make sure I had the least amount of honey. The whole goal was to create a chocolate that doesn’t set off a sugar addiction.”
Some of her bars, which now come in flavors such as almond butter, toasted coconut, toffee cashew, and organic virgin chocolate, and sell for $3.99 a pop, have only six grams of sugar, which she said helps people “get off of chocolate, but still have that little bit at night.”
Charleson said that the cocoa butter in her chocolates is also a draw for consumers because it’s a “good fat” and makes you feel satisfied when eating it. The honey, she said, tempers the bitterness of the cocoa, and she also is able to use less of it to make the chocolate sweet than she would with refined sugar.
After developing the right recipe with her ingredients, she realized that chocolate makers don’t hand make the bars, but rather let machines do it, and started working with Hauser’s Chocolatier, in Westerly, to produce a large amount of her bars.
But her choice to make with honey rather than raw sugar represented a problem – Hauser’s machines couldn’t handle the moisture of them – and the factory had to re-tool their machines to make her bars, which took a while.
“It set my business back almost two years,” Charleson said.
Once they perfected the machines, and her bars, she said she could do as much production as she wanted. The next challenge: sales.
“I could do as much production as I wanted,” she said. “But then it was just, let’s get sales.”
That’s where the Small Business Loan Fund, started by Governor Gina Raimondo almost two years ago, came into play for Charleson.
She said she first read about it in the Rhode Island Business Journal and found that she could apply for a state loan, which would have a fixed interest rate, and ended up getting $30,000 to help pay for production and marketing, which Charleson said was the most important step in getting her chocolate bars distributed.
She also hopes to get to regional trade shows that can potentially introduce her to other stores around the country. Now, she sells them in every Whole Foods from West Hartford to Portland, Maine.
She was able to start distributing in that Cranston location – a store that she said still accounts for roughly 15% of her total sales – because she called them up after she made her original bars and got them to distribute them at their constantly busy Sockanosset Crossroad location.
“Here in Cranston, they have to almost constantly restock the shelves,” Charleson said.
Raimondo said that Charleson represents the best of the Small Business Loans program, which she added hasn’t seen any failures yet (though she doesn’t promise there won’t be).
“This is exactly what we need,” Raimondo said. “They have a great product, a great entrepreneur, but they need a small amount of money to bring them to the next level. For her, it was the marketing and trade shows that got her into Whole Foods.”
Charleson said it costs a lot of money, because of a booth cost and for travel, to get to trade shows, but that’s the only way to get your foot in the door for a food distributor. She also lauds the state loan as one of the main reasons she has become a relative success.
“I probably wouldn’t have made it without the loan,” she said.
Raimondo said that there are few restrictions on what kind of companies can apply for the loans, they just have to be small businesses in Rhode Island that need money to expand their businesses.
“So far, so good,” she said about the successes they’ve had with the program.
For Charleson, she said the next step is getting to the national trade shows in order to get her chocolate bars picked up, and she posed to Raimondo that maybe the state could give another loan to a contingent of small food businesses to pay for the booth and travel expenses.
Raimondo said it was a good idea, adding that Rhode Island has “more food entrepreneurs than people think, with everything from pickles to mushrooms to chocolate.”
Charleson said that the process has been very challenging, especially because she didn’t have any major investors backing her.
“Money solves a lot of problems,” she said.
But she’s been able to chug along, get her chocolates distributed, and will continue her quest to get Cocoa Fuel bars all across the country.
“I don’t want to be just a small chocolate bar sold in Whole Foods,” she said. “I want to sell my business in four or five years. That’s the ultimate goal.”
