Black Dinah Chocolatiers founders Kate and Steve Shaffer are gearing up for their third holiday season with hand-crafted chocolates that tantalize taste buds and feed the soul. Their chocolates include Blueberry-Black Pepper, New England Pie Pumpkin, Down East Sea Breeze, Strawberry-Balsamic, Wild Raspberry, Hazelnut Latte, Maine Mint, and many more flavors.
Despite the busy season, Kate and Steve plan that this year will not be like their first holiday season, in 2007. Of that first Christmas in the chocolate business, Kate remembers, “We didn’t know what to expect and made every mistake in the book.” Kate credits Steve for “pulling three all-nighters in a row packing and shipping orders” to serve all their new customers that season.
Kate advises new business owners never to launch a Web site two weeks before Christmas. “It was a nightmare, but one of those funny nightmares . . . we laughed a lot, and then slept through Christmas. The second year we were so much more prepared. We hired help and it all went fairly smooth. At least we learned from our gaffes.”
Through their Web site (www.blackdinahchocolatiers.com), thousands of Black Dinah chocolates wrapped in designer gift boxes are mailed to every state during Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Christmas and New Year’s. While their specialty chocolates are shipped far and wide, the Shaffers’ Isle au Haut business helps support an island town and other local economies.
Since opening in July 2007, Black Dinah Chocolatiers’ sales have doubled every year. In addition to an active mail order business, the Shaffers supply their artisan chocolates wholesale to Maine gourmet food stores, wine shops and florists, and run an organic bakery and coffeehouse from May through September. Kate, a professional and master graduate from Vancouver’s famed Ecole Chocolat Chocolatier School, teaches chocolate-making at workshops throughout the state.
“At least once a week, I look at Steve and ask him if he ever thought he’d be making chocolate on a small island for a living. I mean, who does?” observes Kate.
To meet production requirements the Shaffers have two part-time assistants and plan to hire more. Island painters, sculptors, and photographers are featured in the café’s rotating art show curated by employee Alison Richardson. Local gardeners, fishermen, artists and authors showcase and sell their wares at the coffeehouse during seasonal Friday “farmers’ markets.” The café hosts occasional concerts, additionally contributing to a gathering place where customers can also go online via a high-speed wireless connection.
The way Kate tells it, it was “desperation” that pushed her and Steve into creating the business. “I found myself without a job,” said Kate. “Not suited to carpentry or lobstering, Steve and I started brainstorming business plans that involved shipping a product off-island, with the busiest times in the winter. It could have been anything really. Bagels, ice cream, fruit, leather . . . but thankfully I have this irrepressible romantic sensibility (if those two words can even be put next to each other) so chocolate, in the end, was really the only option.”
Kate and Steve met in California in 1994 and married in June of 1999. They moved to Maine shortly thereafter, a place Steve had lived for many years.
Explains Kate, “Steve loved Maine. He felt it was one of those places where if he wanted to try something new he could do it.”
The Shaffers initially lived in Bucksport. While Steve worked for the Institute for Global Ethics, the Green Store in Belfast and in carpentry, Kate commuted to Isle au Haut as the chef for the Keeper’s House Inn. In 2004 she convinced Steve to make a go of it on the island. That worked for while, with Kate as a chef and freelance caterer, and Steve as a carpenter and house painter. Kate was then told that the Keeper’s House Inn would wind down at the end of 2005, eliminating the need for an outside chef.
By this time, Steve and Kate discovered their love for the island community and wanted to stay. They hatched their new business plan, this one wrapped around the skills and talents of Kate as a master chocolatier and writer and Steve as a marketing guru. Steve continued to build and paint (including handling all the renovations for the café), and Kate catered gourmet meals while they planned the transition.
“The chocolate factory” (as Black Dinah Chocolatiers is fondly called by local residents) has been so successful that the Shaffers are planning to buy their rental home from the Island Community Development Corporation (ICDC) and expand, yet another contribution to the community and local economies. ICDC plans to use the funds from the sale to build another house for new year-round residents interested in positively contributing to Isle au Haut.
Asked what inspires him, Steve says, “I get to work with one of the best chocolatiers in the world while doing what I love to do-creating an organization. What’s not to be inspired by?”
As for what surprises him the most, Steve appears equally amazed as Kate over the effect Black Dinah Chocolatiers has had on the world around them:
“That people know we exist,” he replies, “Now it’s like getting a message in a bottle with your name on it every time the phone rings with an order.”
Kate Taylor is a freelance writer, carpenter, and fisherman. She lives on Isle au Haut with her husband and two sons.