The great chocolate tour continued: Fran's Chocolates

Today I went to Fran's Chocolates in Seattle. I was in the area for the annual Northwest Chocolate UnConference & Festival, and Marc, one of my mentors, recommended visiting them.

The shop was in a large building that used to be a brewery & maltery, and in the corner, there was a table and shelves with various imaginative products on them. There was a display case with a collection of truffles, and I would later lean that these had all been reworked dozens of times.

We then met Andrina, the daughter of Fran Bigelow, the founder, and we followed her into a little room that had a window into the kitchen, which had a very interesting lack of machinery. Andrina would later explain that their team was so incredibly talented, they could do almost as well as a machine could, to the point where it wasn't worth it to buy a machine that could do the same, for example an enrober. Now, they had a few machines, such as a single-shot dispenser, which is becoming an increasingly common piece of equipment that quite a few chocolatiers employ, but as far as chocolate kitchens go, this one had a comparatively low ratio of equipment to manual labor.

A discussion ensued about how Fran's came to be, as well as Andrina's (along with her brother's) role in it. Fran had noticed that French chocolate tasted very different from U.S chocolate, even though they were made with the same ingredients. She took a culinary class in California, and at the time, women were mostly being taught how to decorate cakes. So, when she made a few chocolates and showed them to her overseer, she was essentially told, "You'll never make it with these."

She opened a business that was mostly decorating cakes, which she was good at anyway, and the lines grew to the point where Andrina, very young at this time, was handing out the chocolates Fran had shown her overseer just to keep the customers entertained. Some took notice of their quality and came to Fran asking if they could buy them. This then became one of their most popular items, eventually overtaking the cakes, and Fran embraced this, becoming one of the first craft chocolatiers in the U.S. Later on, the same person who told Fran that she would never make it, called her and apologized.

Andrina originally worked for giants such as Johnson & Johnson, but then switched to her mother's business, becoming the C.E.O, while her brother was the head chocolatier, effectively passing on the business from generation to generation.

Andrina also explained how that same chocolate truffle, the catalyst of the reaction that would eventually produce Fran's Chocolates, had been reworked and tweaked dozens of times, and still, to this day, it is being changed and played around with, which just goes to show that nothing is ever "finished" entirely. There's an infinite (well, not really, but a very large number) number of possibilities, and you never really know if you've found the best one.

This is a plaque on the wall of the room in which we had our very in-depth conversation about the history of Fran's, how Andrina fit into that, and even a little bit about how it was up to my generation to carry the torch of the chocolate world.

This is one of the shelves, tucked away into the corner of the building. There's a spiral staircase next to it that goes straight into the ceiling, but that only adds to the overall vibe, which I think is really well constructed.