Transcription of Kate McAleer for the show Eat Maine #181
Announcer: You’re listening to Love Maine Radio with Dr. Lisa Belisle, recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture, and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See the Love Maine Radio Facebook page or www.lovemaineradio.com for details. Now here are a few highlights from this week’s program.
Kate: The way that the business community has embraced me and helps me grow my business here in Maine, has been just fantastic. I think that the opportunities for small businesses and even startup businesses in Maine are huge unlike other places where I think you would never have the access to the help, resources, networking, in a way that you do in Maine. That’s something, I think, unique to Maine.
Luke: Whiskeys are very regional. They’re very specific to a region. We use a Maine grain. We also use some peyton seaweed from down east. We’re putting a really regional quality to our product. It’s coveted in the Whiskey world to have uniqueness to it. We really feel like we’re able to showcase that Maine quality throughout this product.
Announcer: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Mike Lepage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage, Tom Shepherd of Shepherd Financial, Harding Lee Smith of the Rooms, and Bangor Savings Bank.
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 181, airing for the first time on Sunday, March 1st, 2015. This week’s theme is Eat Maine. Maine has a well-deserved reputation for creative and satisfying cuisine. Some of us also enjoy the little extras that make a meal complete. Today, we speak with Kate McAleer of Bixby & Co. and Luke Davidson of Maine Craft Distilling, about their adventurous and specialty food and drink. Kate tickles our taste buds with tales of all-natural chocolate bars while Luke describes how his company distill spirits for Maine Grain. We promise to leave your mouth watering. Thank you for joining us.
From the coast of Maine, many sweet things come. One of these is chocolate. Today, we have with us in the studio, Kate McAleer who is the founder of Bixby & Co., a chocolate-making company that uses organic, wholesome ingredients like real fruits, nuts and cocoa. Kate’s chocolate Factory is on the Water in Rockland and she sells to national and local stores including Whole Foods, Belfast Coop, Westmont Market, Aurora Provisions and Lois’ Natural marketplace.
Kate, what a great job you have?
Kate: It’s very exciting and chocolatey.
Dr. Lisa: Chocolatey, which is, I think that’s the nest thing. You get to do things that make people happy. There’s really not, unless something went wrong with the batch I guess, there’s really nothing that you could do that would present people with any problematic conundrum in their life.
Kate: Hopefully, not. No.
Dr. Lisa: Hopefully not. I was interested to have you come in and talk to us today because you are in an article written by Sophie Nelson from Maine Magazine called Maine Kind of Candy, Bixby & Co. Chocolate and its clever creator, Kate McAleer. She just writes this glowing article about you and your journey, so I wanted our listeners to be able to experience that as well. You’re only 27 years old.
Kate: 27, yes.
Dr. Lisa: That’s pretty young to be in charge of a good size company.
Kate: It’s really exciting how, I started this company when I was 23 turning 24. My mom had always said, “You have a unique opportunity in your 20s to work really hard for yourself. Try and launch something and build something. If it doesn’t work out, you still have your 30s to [inaudible 00:04:18]. That was really, incredibly powerful thing that she had told me at a pretty young age and had encouraged me to go, this completely non-corporate path and learn everything about starting a company and then everything about chocolate from the ground up, literally from scratch. It’s been an incredible learning experience and growing experience for myself. That was the point, in a way, that it was about taking just a giant leap and risk and work really hard and learn a lot about myself and about business and food. It’s been an incredible experience. Challenging but exciting and fun and stressful, all combined together.
Dr. Lisa: I love that idea that your 20s are the time where you can experiment and you can take risks and you can work hard and you have the energy to work hard. But also, it’s not like anything’s lost if you take a risk and it doesn’t pan out.
Kate: Right. You don’t have as many commitments as people further down the road. One of these business classes I was in, one of these men asked a question. He was saying, “I’m in mid-40s. Is it too late for me to become an entrepreneur?” That was a really interesting question to me. I’m not saying that you can’t be an entrepreneur in any age. But there’s a particular time in my life right now where I’m not really committed to anything but Bixby & Co. So I can put a 150% of all of my time and energy. At 1AM in the morning I can be researching freight companies because I’m slightly sleep-deprived and obsessed with finding economic freight out of Maine. Which, I think, is unique to my own characteristic but also probably my age.
Dr. Lisa: You have a connection that is lifelong.
Kate: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: Although you’ve lived for just the past 2 years.
Kate: Full-time, right.
Dr. Lisa: Full-time
Kate: As a Mainer, the past two years.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me about, what was that initial connection? Why did you start coming here?
Kate: My mom’s family has roots in this Bruce and Rockland area. My parents had bought a second home in the Rockport area before I was really even born. We started coming here for, not just the summer periods, but for Thanksgivings and Winters and year-round second home vacation experiences. We’d always love the foodie scene, the beautiful scenery, the breakwater is one of our favorite family walks with our dog. My parents had retired two years ago. When I was starting up this business, they had said, “We want to move to Maine full-time. We think you should come with us”
I said, “Okay that wasn’t maybe necessarily what I was thinking.” But it’s an amazing place to live, amazing place to eat food and then as it turns, an amazing place to have a business. The way that the business community has embrace me and helps me grow my business here in Maine, has been just fantastic. I think that the opportunities for small businesses and even startup businesses in Maine are huge. Unlike other places where I think you would never have the access to be helped, resources, networking, in a way that you do in Maine. That’s something, I think, unique to Maine.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve had the opportunity pretty early on to share some of your work, we’ll call it, with Cellar Door Winery.
Kate: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: That must have been pretty important.
Kate: Absolutely. Cellar Door Winery is an example of a successful business but also a successful woman on business. A role model, quite frankly. When I moved to Maine, I don’t recall specifically, when I believe Cellar Door Winery reached out to me before I even reached out to them and they said, “Can you drop us off samples of your product?” I ran over there, did the sampling, and they open up some wine and we’re already pairing which bars go with which of their wines. They invited to come and do samplings, which are incredible experiences at the Winery in Lincolnville. Many fascinating people walk through that location in Lincolnville.
Some of my biggest networking for business opportunities actually occurred at Cellar Door Winery. Again, you have to be open to doing these things but then things come together unexpectedly and in exciting fashion.
Dr. Lisa: You, originally, were going to focus on chocolate. You weren’t going to focus on real food at all. You’ve traveled a lot. You spent time abroad in China and France where there was a candy focus of course. But, originally, you graduated from New York University with a degree in East Asian Studies and minors in Art History and French. Then you began graduate work at the new school studying the history of decorative arts and design.
Kate: Yup.
Dr. Lisa: There’s a lot of interesting things.
Kate: Yeah. I like to call myself a fan of cultural history. Be it through objects, art or history, history. In high school, I lived abroad as a high school student in China and in France, living with host families, being immersed in those cultures. Those were incredible experiences that had major impacts on who I am and, obviously, what I’m now doing.
For me, I was trying to figure out how to tie together all of these widespread interest. What could be this one thing that would tie it together? I was pursuing, in Art History, Decorative Arts career. Then decided to just take a total pivot. Some of my friends called it a quarter life crisis. But I think it was just … You start going down something then you realize, “Okay this is really interesting. It’s intellectually interesting but it’s not going to be enough to fulfill everything that I’m looking for in terms of a full-time impassioned career effort.
Thinking about how am I going to wake up every day and want to work incredibly hard at something and tie in so many of my interests, owning your own company was one medium to which you could do that. But then in the mode of food, which is such an interesting medium through which so many things can be expressed. Then, chocolate, as a lifelong chocolate lover, then having been exposed to chocolate in France. The French, they’re very opinionated. They have a lot of opinions that Americans don’t know what real chocolate is they don’t know how to even eat properly and all these stereotypes about Americans. I learned about what it means to eat good food and appreciate good food in France. That translated into, eventually, the launching of Bixby & Co.
Dr. Lisa: What about this whole cultural element of chocolate? You had a [inaudible 00:12:05] in the history of Decorative Arts and Design, was there anything interesting to your as far as the historical aspects of chocolate?
Kate: Chocolates are super food. It comes from the cacao bean, which is grown along the equator. It’s, literally, fruits from the cacao trees that are pried open with [inaudible 00:12:26] and these little cocoons of mushy white stuff are taken out and then the beans are inside of those little cocoons. Then they’re fermented in the sun. They’re broken down what becomes what we know as chocolate. It’s a super food, number one, with full of anti-oxidants and interesting properties. It has an amazing history just in terms of, the very first chocolate, people drink it as opposed to eating it.
It’s had a really interesting history not only in Europe but also the American role of developing what became chocolate candy. It was fascinating ingredient. Also, it’s an interesting chemistry process. Chocolate is full of cocoa butter, which is the fat from the cacao bean. Cocoa butter is a polymorphic substance. These different fat crystals form because of cocoa butter. The art of chocolate making is really the art of tempering, which is forming the correct crystals. There is this heating and cooling and heating process that you have to do to make chocolate, to have it be in temper and have the right snap and taste.
Just the art of mastering, tempering of chocolate, was the extreme challenge at first and something that I’m still becoming a master of. That was really interesting from a just like a chefing point of view. Having to learn how to temper and learn all the history of chocolate and how it interacts with different things. I learned about that in pastry school and then really dove into it. How do you make chocolate? How do you make real chocolate.
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Dr. Lisa: Tell me about your decision to go to pastry school. That’s a very specific thing that anyone would choose to do in her 20s.
Kate: Yup. When I decided to leave the Art History path that I was headed down, started brainstorming about type of business I would want to run because I’ve decided I wanted to run my own business. Started coming up with these ideas of being interested in chocolate and candy. I knew nothing, really, about how to make. I knew how to eat chocolate or candy but not how to make it. Instead of returning to graduate school, I did a 6-month pastry program in New York city, dove into that. In pastry school, they have different sections like baking, cake making, then there’s chocolate.
The chocolate section was for one week. I became very enamored with it. It was very challenging and difficult. A lot of my other fellow students just said, “I’m never going to work with chocolate”, and decided to pursue it [inaudible 00:17:20]. Began prototyping what became Bixby Bars while also trying to network within the business realm of how do you start up a business, because pastry school doesn’t necessarily focus on how to run a food business. It’s more of how do you make food. It’s not even how do you make food on a larger scale either.
There was a big level of, “Okay I have training but how do I translate that into scaling up?” One of the resources in Maine that’s been incredible to help with that as an example was Maine manufacturing Extension partnership. It’s this group of, I call them consultant experts that help you scale up your production facilities and to help you figure out what types of equipment you need to help increase your batch sizes, etc. There is those types of transitions from just being strictly artisanal pastry chef to becoming a larger producer.
Dr. Lisa: That’s an interesting consideration because there are many people who would do something entrepreneurial for the love of the product, let’s say in your case chocolate. But maybe not have quite the experience of the right connections to do as you described, scale up. It’s a business that it is its own thing, it’s got a very specific set of skill that you wouldn’t necessarily have from just focusing on the part itself.
Kate: Correct.
Dr. Lisa: Do your parents have background that might have been helpful to you? I know that your mother was in the health care administration, they call that industry. They both been working with you on your products since she moved to Maine. What has there, I guess, presence meant to you as you worked on this?
Kate: It’s been critical from just a personal and then business point of view. They’ve been incredibly supportive in both ends. Yes, they do bring a level of business acumen that I didn’t necessarily possess. But then I sought out all these amazing programs in Maine and outside of Maine to come up to steam in terms of business knowledge or education, if you will. I attended the top gun program here in Maine put on by the Maine center for entrepreneurial development, which is an incredible program. It only costs $500. It’s highly subsidized. It really costs more than that and that’s startup business education. I attended the Goldman Sachs 10,000 small businesses program through Babson College, which is like a mini-MBA.
Then, just through some of my other certification agencies, attended various webinars or conference, just trying to gleam as much as I can about … There’s general business knowledge, but then, the food industry is actually very complex, far more complex than I ever knew it to be. There’s people who make the products but then there is this whole supply chain of, most products out there should just qualify. Don’t make the products themselves. They are really brands that have it made by manufacturers or co-manufacturers. Then it goes into distributors and then it goes on the retail shelves. Actually, the manufacture rate, we make the product, we ship the product and then it goes through distribution and to retail shelves.
That’s a very complex chain of interactions that is not obvious to me before getting into the business. Then navigating that complex world of distribution and just even the complexities of how getting your product on the shelf is was something I had to learn from the ground up. Both my parents, didn’t have background in that either. But we all approached it with a certain amount of educated approaches to general things and then trying to figure out the nuances of the specific industry. But we’re still learning. Nothing is immediate or perfect but I would say the important thing was tapping into as many resources and networking helped as possible so that you could navigate those complexities in a more potentially smoother fashion.
Other small manufacturing companies are some of my best friends now. They make amazing products but then we also talk about the complexities of shipping or freight or bar codes, etc.
Dr. Lisa: It’s really interesting for me to hear you talking about this because I think you’re right. I’m just your average consumer, go to the grocery store, there’s something on the shelf, pick it up, look at it, go to the cashier, buy it, and then if it’s chocolate, I eat it.
All of the steps that you’ve just described and the knowledge that’s associated with, I guess, each of them. That’s a process that really must have taken some time to learn about.
Kate: Absolutely. I love to ask questions. I’m not afraid of asking questions. I think some of the people I’ve interacted with in the industry think it’s funny how many questions I have. Sometimes they don’t even have answers. It’s very complex. You have to keep asking the questions and keep trying to navigate the complexities. But it’s certainly not an obvious business structure whatsoever. In terms of going to retail shelves, if you are to open your own store, that would be direct to the customers in a much different interaction of how your project gets into hands of customers.
My very first customer was Whole Foods Market. I had this dream of being in Whole Foods. One of the NYU dorms has a Whole Foods Market in it. I’d been shopping in Whole Foods, observing Whole Foods. I developed this relationship with Whole Foods and had to learn about the complexities of that network a little bit as we went along, which was interesting and scary at the same time. Certainly, I think the key was networking with other people to help you navigate the complexities.
Dr. Lisa: As you’re doing this, you’re simultaneously continuing to develop great tasting chocolate bars.
Kate: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: Which is probably even more important to your goal.
Kate: Yeah. The very first order with Whole Foods I made entire by hand. Every single bit of hit was handmade, hand wrapped, hand packaged. In the past, just 6 months, we’ve had an incredible infusion of some much needed equipment to help us with the production of things. I won the the Gorham Savings Bank launch pad, $30,000 cash price. One of the very few food companies to actually win a prize. Most of those funds really go to tech companies. It was really cool that they thought we were a serious business. Let it be, a food business. We purchased chocolate melting tanks. Chocolate comes in solid form and you have to melt it to use it in the production form. These big bats now have melted chocolate that we can access all the time which was, if you don’t have the melted chocolate, you can’t keep producing this. We had this constant issue of just not enough liquid chocolate, as I call it.
The Gorham Savings Bank launch pad [inaudible 00:25:31] were just an amazing addition to our little factory. Then I received a loan from Whole Foods Market and purchased a wrapping machine which we fondly called “Bix the Dragon”. You have to keep feeding it bars so he’s happy. Going from hand wrapping which used to take days to machine wrapping which is a huge improvement on, not only my time in the factory and the other people’s time in the factory, but just efficiency-wise, it was like an 1800% improvement. It enables us to grow further.
There’s definitely bottlenecks that you have to overcome when you’re in a growth period with your business. That’s been really exciting additions the past 6 months. I look back on it and I think you’re always planning strategically for these big moves and if they hadn’t actually come through I’m not sure what I would have done because the production that we’ve been doing over the past 6 months, it’s just been incredible compared to when we were planning for it. It all worked out and all came together in time for just a big increase in demand.
Dr. Lisa: How many bars are you selling on a regular basis?
Kate: We’re making any more from 3,000 to 5,000 bars a day. Then, selling them across the country into Natural Food Stores and Coops Grocery stores, those types of outlets, as well as online. More and more people are caring about natural foods, natural products and it doesn’t necessarily have to just be a in natural food stores. Could it be at airports, or could it be at trains. I’m just giving you examples of just other, even golf courses. More outlets for the products so that some more people can have access to Bixby bars which is healthier candy or healthier chocolate.
Plans are, I hope to expand our factory in the future in Rockland and continue to grow our production abilities. I think another personal goal is play more golf, get out there. When you start up a business, you make a lot of personal sacrifices to, not only your hobbies, but just personal time in general. I think trying to claim a little bit of that back from chocolates so I can go play golf instead of make chocolate would be good for me in the future.
Dr. Lisa: Kate how do people find out about Bixby & Co?
Kate: We have a website. It’s www.bixbyco.com. We’re on Facebook. You can like our Facebook page, facebook.com/bixbyco. We’re on Instagram, we’re on Pinterest and we’re on Twitter, all sort of outlets on which you can find us. Or, in your local health food store or coop, you can hopefully find Bixby bars there.
Dr. Lisa: People who are listening can also read about Bixby in Maine Magazine in the March issue, our food issue. It’s great to talk to somebody who who is as passionate as you are clearly about not only what you’re producing but also just the process of producing and being in the world. It’s wonderful to spend time upon who is enthusiastic as one could possibly be about life. I appreciate your coming in. I’ve been talking with Kate McAleer. She is the founder of Bixby & Co., a chocolate-making company that uses organic wholesome ingredients, located on the Water in Rockland. Available nationally and locally. I’m certain, internationally at some point. Thanks so much for coming in.
Kate: Oh thank you for having me.