Driftless Chocolates finds new home in Mt. Horeb
Mt. Horeb in Dane County Wisconsin, well known for its Scandi Hovian Winter Festival and plethora of unique shops, has a new Chocolatier in town.
Although new to the Mt. Horeb business community, Driftless Chocolates has been making chocolaty delectables since 2019. Stan Kitson Chief Chocolatier & Co-Founder, and his wife Robyn, President & Co-Founder, back then, were new to the confection world but certainly not entrepreneurship. “Robin is an entrepreneur. She has an entrepreneurial spirit that just keeps going,” said Stan. He shared that in 1987, Robyn started Kitson Marketing and he joined her in the business in 1990. The business performed a lot of marketing in the Madison area for local companies.
Robyn having a knack for entrepreneurship, Stan admitted he had his knack as well. “Now me, I'm more of a little creative, and I like being in the kitchen. To me it's a good time spending a half a day making chicken pot pie, or roasting chicken, and you know, pulling it apart and making a roux. I just love that, it's how I release energy and get comfortable,” he said.
So, what do you get when you combine an entrepreneur and a cook? Well, chocolate of course.
“Robyn being an entrepreneur, she's always got ideas. So, about six, seven years ago, I lose track, we had this chocolate tasting in our house between Christmas and New Year's. We have a lot of good chocolatiers in the area and outside regionally. So, I went out and I got five or six different boxes of chocolates from different chocolate companies. We sat down as a family. It was Robyn, myself, our three sons and what is now their three wives. We had the marketing company and were tasting the chocolates through the marketing lens. So, you're talking about how was the packaging, does the flavor come through the way your company promises, which one tastes better? We kind of really looked at it through that lens.”
Well, the chocolate tasting coupled with Stan’s love of working with food, led him to ask the question, “How in the world do you do this?”. “I love cooking and I like creating flavors and figuring things out.”
So, Stan bought some chocolate. He thought he’d give it a try and see what happens, and started just making stuff, and admitted in the beginning he made a lot of mistakes. “I made a mess of the kitchen for six months, maybe longer. And then finally, Robyn said, ‘you know, if you're really interested in this, you really should learn it or clean up your mess’,” he said laughing.
Stan said Robyn had a good point and he enrolled in an online course that he said was popular with other chocolatiers. The course called Ecole Chocolat, afforded Stan not only his certification in chocolatiering, but the foundation of the basics, introduced him to the science of chocolate making and the processes involved. Stan pointed out an important lesson he learned about making chocolate. “You can make a small batch of cookies, you can make a small cake, but you can't really make a small batch of chocolate. You need to have enough so that you can create a nice ganache and dipping, so you end up with 40 or 50 pieces.”
Stan and Robyn started giving chocolates to neighbors, friends and co-workers. “Pretty soon we started getting good feedback. People liked what we were doing.” At that time, neither he or Robyn were thinking of starting a chocolate company. With all the positive feedback and Stan’s time spent learning and experimenting with chocolate, Robyn’s entrepreneurial spirit was piqued. In 2019 the two decided to give it a try and see what happened.
Making some small investments in equipment, they started their venture at the Food Enterprise and Economic Development (FEED) Kitchens, a project of the Madison Northside Planning Council. After spending five months at FEED kitchens, Stan and Robyn looked for a space to house their venture. They found that space in Paoli, Wisconsin just southwest of Madison, in The Mill Paoli, a historic building that housed a stone mill that now houses an array of small businesses.
Honing and perfecting their chocolates, their business Driftless Chocolates, eventually out grew that space, and they started looking for a larger space. They found it in Mt. Horeb and opened up shop about a year ago.
Stan said the Mt. Horeb community has embraced them and their business, and stressed he and Robyn love the emphasis it places on supporting local and regional businesses. “We want to support local as best we possibly can. Our chocolate comes from several different companies around the world. We get our honey from Gentle Breeze Honey, right here in Mt. Horeb, our butter from Shullsburg Creamery, and our cream comes from Sassy Cow Creamery in Columbus.”
Back to the chocolate. Stan explained Cacao from different regions gives him different flavors to work with when creating. Terroir, or a certain region’s climate, soils and terrain affect the flavor and taste that chocolate carries, similar to grapes used in winemaking. “So, chocolate Belize tastes different than chocolate from the Dominican Republic or chocolate from Ghana. It kind of gets back to my love of cooking. So how do you take the flavor from Belize or Dominican Republic and maintain that flavor, but add other things to help enhance it? We have Dominican Republic chocolate that when you taste it, has a citrusy flavor, and that's what we use for our mango and our passion fruit chocolates. It's trying to create the real flavor that's in the chocolate. I think that helps set us apart. They're not really complicated flavors, but they're unique.”
Driftless Chocolates offers Bonbons/Truffles, Chocolate Carmel Creations, Ledges Chocolate bars and Chocolate Bark, in a variety of flavors, using both dark and milk chocolate. “We have anywhere from 25 to 30 different kinds. We don't make them all at the same time. That's just truffles and bottom bon bons. We're not trying to be everything for everybody. But we're trying to make it when you eat our Earl Grey lavender truffle, you taste the Earl Grey lavender. So, in that case, we're using Telsaan Tea down the street, and for all of our teas.”
Stan said that their ideas for chocolate flavors at times, may be inspired by customers or coworkers. “We started creating a Supper Club Collection. That was one we started working on over a year ago. For Christmas we had an Irish creme. Then, we came out with a Brandy Old Fashion. As I started talking to customers a lot, they were saying, you guys really ought to have a Grasshopper, and you ought to have a Pink Squirrel, and you should have a Manhattan and a Brandy Alexander.” Stan said that collection has been a great seller, and believes it does well because the drinks at a supper club represent a shared experience. “We all know what a supper club is, and we've all had those drinks. So, we use Driftless Glen bourbon when we make the Manhattan. We're using Christian Brothers brandy in the old fashion, and Jameson Irish whiskey in the Irish cream. So, you really get the flavor of what it is, and it's fun.”
A popular seller, Stan said it is very common for people to come in and buy a box of the Supper Club Collection to send to friends and family in different states as a taste of Wisconsin. He said they are working on, as he called it, “the next thing”, but acknowledged that they don’t think they will top that collection. “We can't keep this in stock. It's fun, it's so much fun. But we're going to come up with some other things. I know along the way, we can produce some other unique chocolates, like our chocolate Smokehouse Caramels.”
Finally, to the name, Driftless Chocolates. Yup, there is a story to that as well. “Actually, it comes back to family. Once we decided we wanted to start a chocolate business, this was in the summer, we had a family weekend and drove up to Gibraltar Rock. We hiked all over around that area. We kept running around the thought of what we should name the company? My daughter-in-law said we should call it Driftless Chocolates. Robyn and I, we live in Verona right on the edge of the Driftless area. We’ve spent so much time hiking around the Driftless. So, there's a sense about the Driftless area that we try to instill in our company, we have tried to be creative. We're not like a lot of other chocolates, in necessarily our offerings. If you look at our products, we have ledges in our bars. We have chunks in our caramels. We tried taking names that somehow are related to the Driftless area.”
Stan and Robyn have summed up their company with their signature phrase, “Chocolates bring us together!”
Driftless Chocolates are available online, at the Dane County Farmers’ Market on the Square in Madison during the warmer months, and the late winter market at the Garver Feed Mill, also in Madison. Retail locations include Metcalfe’s Market (Madison), Telsaan Tea, Brix Cider, Isaac's Antiques, and Jangle Soaps and Natural Living, all in Mt Horeb.
