Transcription of Kate and Steve Shaffer for the show Heartfelt, #74
Lisa: One of our good friends Beth Shissler, the cofounder of Sea Bags, and she heard that we were putting together a Valentines Day show, said you know I’ve this group of couple people that you definitely need to meet. They were these two individuals you definitely need to meet and this would be Steve and Kate Shaffer who are the cofounders of Black Dinah Chocolatiers all the way up the coast or off the coast at the Isle au Haut which is always kind of exciting and the fact that you agreed to come down off the island and talk to us about what you’re doing at Black Dinah Chocolatiers makes me really happy. It’s a good way to start my day. Thanks for coming in.
Steve: Yeah, Glad to be here.
Kate: Thanks for having us.
Lisa: I know that actually you came up from New York City so or New York.
Steve: Yes.
Lisa: You’re not having to come down off the island today but what’s that like to live on an island?
Kate: Well, it’s a lot of scheduling. This time of year there’s only two boats a day which is pretty good for a remote Maine Island, but it’s still, you really have to plan your life around the boat schedule.
Steve: Yeah, the nickname of it is luggerhelp because you’re always lugging something on or something off.
Lisa: How long is the ferry ride out there?
Steve: About 40 minutes.
Lisa: How does that feel? Does that give you kind of then time frame in which to just hang out or you’re doing business stuff. What’s that like? I’ve always wondered, to live on an island and not just visit.
Steve: It’s … I’d say it’s to hurry up and rush. You get used to, rush to get ready. You have been like before, preparing everything so when you get up in the morning, you’re ready to go that morning to catch the boat and once you’re on the boat that’s that moment where there’s nothing else you can do but sit.
Lisa: Do you bring this sort of sense of, it sounds like just mindfulness and rolling with it and being kind of peaceful in the way that you approach your lives? Do you bring this into the work that you do with creating chocolate?
Kate: I came down to the island as acook for the inn out there with the keeper’s house. Actually it’s going to be open again this summer, but it is definitely, I won’t say fly by the seat of your pants, but it is definitely work with what you have and resources that you have and that was a huge factor in creating our business model. We wanted to make fine chocolate but we really wanted to use our local resources. Since chocolate is so not local, everything else we use really with all had to be. We took a look. We started right there in our front yard and started looking around at what we could use from the island, from Maine to create a really high quality confection that would resonate not only with gourmet chocolate lovers but with Maine as well. Yeah, definitely.
Lisa: What did you find when you were taking a look and I’m fascinated by the fact that you looked in your front yard and find something that might go into a chocolate?
Kate: Sure.
Lisa: Just tell me about that.
Kate: Well, Maine is very known for, for instance Kate’s Butter.We use butter in our truffles and local cream and milk. We use local herbs, fruits, and flowers so apple is right from the island, pumpkin is from neighbors across the water, blueberries of course, raspberries, strawberries.
Steve: We first moved out here Kate grew up in California and when she first moved out here her thought waswhat about the food because California has such great food and it’s abundant. Within I think the first couple of years when she was working at the having to source food, she found out that the food here was much better, than what she was able to find in California and she’s was very surprised.
Kate: Well, it was more accessible and I really developed a lot of personal relationships with the farmers here. For instance I was living on the island, when I was a cook at the Lighthouse I was living on the island five days a week. I would do all my farm runs on my way to the boat before my week hour. I developed a lot of personal relationships with this very dynamic network of farmers and home gardeners. When we decided to start our own business, it was a natural sort of organic movement to use the resources that we had already developed with them. It was fun, it was really fun.
Steve: Like I feel it is a organic process. We haven’t, we didn’t build the business with an idea in mind and then just let it develop with the reflection of that from the community and so this has been a very interesting process.
Lisa: That is very interesting because not everybody lives in a place that they will consider a community. You can call something a community because you live there and there’s other houses around you, but there isn’t necessarily always the back and forth. On an island, you kind of have the people who are on the island with you.
Kate: Okay.
Lisa: Even the people who are on the mainland, I mean, if it’s a small town in Maine, there’s only so many of them. You kind of have to learn to get along and to rely on one another.
Kate: Right.
Lisa: What’s that been like?
Steve: Well I think, one of the things that has been really interesting for us is as we’ve hired people from the community is targeting people as we go. Okay, who has the skills that they think will fit in here and then offer them the opportunity that they wouldn’t have had so that they may be doing something that they think is what they can do, but it may not be tapping into a skill or something of an interest that they have. I think that we’ve been able to offer up a different way of being out there and they’ve been able to actually propel us toward our goal. I am good at this, I can do this. So it’s been really fun to see that kind of interaction happening.
Kate: Right. One of the questions that lot of people ask us that there’s 40 people that live on Isle au Haut and when you start a business, especially a growing business out of there, people say well, what about the work force? Where do you hire from? Do you hire from off island and we have not because it’s sort of amazing we’ve found our perfect coworkers right there on the Isle au Haut. I mean, we couldn’t have asked for better people to work with, with more perfect skill sets.
Steve: I guess for me that … what was the crux was at the beginning was we sat there and said we want to be here, so what we’re going to do to be here and we just sat there and coming with an idea well, we’re going to move here and do this. We sat down and said okay what can we do here that is feasible given the community and the materials that we have at hand. That’s the thing about like it was very organic, that whole process on both ends with the design of the business and also in the production of the chocolate and how, creating things.
Kate: Yeah. It is definitely a different way to create something as being in a place that you want to be and taking different pieces from that and creating a model from your surroundings.
Steve: Often it’s like, look at how businesses are created and people say I want to move up to Maine and do this, and we came to Maine because we wanted to be at Maine and then we said what is it we’re going to do here in order to survive because we are on a remote island and so you kind of have to sit down. We spent a full winter working out the details about what we can do and what is possible there. We really thought about it.
Lisa: It makes perfect sense … it is a very different way of approaching things because I think people do often come in with sort of top down, “I am this that I’m going to sort of put myself in this place and expect things to kind of morph around me” and what you’re doing is saying you want to be in this place and let’s see what is already in existence and how can we create this collaborative group …
Steve: Right.
Lisa: To actually create a product. That is … and that’s something that I find really very touching because in Chinese medicine, they talk about food having an essence. They talk about specifically life. They talk about different plants and growing different fruits and vegetables and they have different essences. Like you’re creating something from food sources that are already, I mean, may be those foods don’t have the essences but you’re still contributing personal essences and the essence of the community into the chocolate that you’re making which is a very loving process.
Steve: Yeah. Right.
Kate: I think so and also chocolate itself is an extremely magical substance. I mean was never creative about chocolate before we started it and I wasn’t gaga about it but as an ingredient I was always fascinated by it and how it behaves and it is especially combining it with other things including energy and all that stuff. It’s magical.
Steve: That’s one thing too is when Kate was working for Lighthouse and she was having shoulder issues, I think it was and she went to see somebody who did some body work and said you need to stop putting stress into what you’re doing and so she really took it to heart and started coming in and say okay I’m go to put my love into this.
This is what I love and at the same time she started working with chocolate which was very frustrating because it doesn’t behave like any other products but she had to change her attitude towards it and I think it was an interaction. Chocolate has, you can make it beautiful. It’s also chemistry and it’s food and so combined a number of things that touched on what Kate liked to do and she said, I don’t want to put the stress because I’m frustrated with this product. I am going to learn to love it and work with it.
Kate: Yeah.
Steve: It totally changed how she did what she did.
Kate: Chocolate is definitely one of those ingredients that you have to learn from rather than learn to master and at least that’s the way I approach it at. May be other chocolatiers do it differently but I have learned a lot from working with it about pretty much everything that I think it is definitely related to our life and how we live our life from that also.
Steve: Kate has been able to laugh at a lot of the mistakes she has made. She has on her homepage I think it is first Facebook. A photo of the chocolate that she spilled onto the floor and it was really beautiful. It was the first kind of orange and pink any business chocolate Jackson Pollack type design, and it looks, it’s great. It’s sort of seeing the mess and being like well, that is still kind of beautiful, it’s not I wanted but …
Kate: Right. If we want every project that …. We got a really good photograph …
Lisa: Steve, are you from Maine?
Steve: I’m not. I grew up in Pennsylvania. I moved to Maine, graduated from UMO and then moved to California and then realized I really liked Maine. The community, how small it is and so forth, so I wanted to introduce Kate to it and when she decided, “Yeah, I’ll move back here. I’ll try it living here.”
Lisa: What is it about Maine that attracted the two of you? Why Maine? Why the Isle au Haut?
Steve: When I lived in Maine previously, I really liked the island, so I was always attracted to the smallness of the community and when I moved to California, I was kind of intimidated by California because it’s always just been a magical and big place, and stuff like that and I felt like I was living in Maine because I was kind of avoiding people.
I moved to California. I was like okay I was living in different places and so forth and I realized that I really wasn’t there because I liked Maine because of the values that people have, and one of things that I think about is how people came to America initially to design, to set up communities. On the East Coast, especially in Maine, the weather determines your values because especially when we know if you’re in trouble it doesn’t make any difference if you like somebody or not, you go and help him. The rules are based upon nature.
On the West Coast, it feels to me like people made a gold rush. They went over there for wealth and the whole system was set up on society. The rules when you base them on society are changeable. One minute it can be this rule and the next minute, it can be this. It wasn’t stable. People weren’t as community oriented even though living was easier, and I realized that I really liked this about Maine. I really liked the community and one of the things I really appreciated on the island is I developed friendships with people that I would never have developed. The opportunity has been that we live so close to the people that I feel so enriched by that where normally you can surround yourself with yourself and not have to challenge yourself in this way. So …
Kate: Can you tell he studied philosophy?
Lisa: Yeah … You’re very well rounded in …
Steve: I don’t know about that but …
Lisa: Why is it called Black Dinah?
Kate: Black Dinah is the name of the mountain which is actually really just a rock right outside our backdoor and on the old maps of Isle au Haut, they have it on the old maps but not on the new maps. It’s a rock. It takes about 10 minutes to hike up to the top of it and you get a great view of Penobscot Bay and Camden Hills and …
Lisa: What are your favorite products that you, we talk a lot about life and …
Kate: Living and …
Lisa: Coming back to the chocolate idea what are some of the favorite, your favorite creations?
Kate: That we make? Well, I love our chocolates and that’s our biggest product and I mostly love them because of the process of making them. They are fabulous to eat and all that but it’s just so, it is so rewarding to start from scratch. You’re creating your chocolate, your butter and make the best ganache you could make and then coat it in the best chocolate you can find and make it look beautiful. Still I love that process, but as far as products go, I think my favorite ones are the ones that have sort of sprung up from … by accident or just by innovation because we’re trying to figure how to use that that’s paramount that we cut off that would normally be composted.
It’s a great thing. We would hate to get rid of it, so Steve and I will sit there, we’ll be in the kitchen looking at it. Steve will stick a chocolate frog on a piece of caramel and be like hey, we could do this. This could be our frog on log. This was definitely one of our best selling products now so …
Steve: We do it like. There was one thing too is having to bring it because with our chocolates we would always take back what has them still because they’re fresh in their mold and so forth, so we didn’t want them in the stores beyond the certain dates, we bring them back and so then we were like what we’re going to do with these because it really it was heartbreaking to have to compost them so we started making ice cream. It’s always this thing of what do we do to reduce ourwastestrength. I have to say one of my favorite, not only for the taste which is the Varietal I like it because what it is, is a in South America this is a Peruvian chocolate.
What happened was they were down there they were growing cocaine because that was the only source of income that these communities had and they were on drugs, the government would come down and designate the communities. They started having to go into the rain forest, creating new fields destroying the rain forest, setting up again and the government would find them and make them move. You’re ruining the community, you’re ruining the rain forest. This organization came in and said okay we are going to offer them chocolate. We are going to teach them how to grow chocolate. We are going to buy it from them. We are going to make this high quality chocolate and we’re going to sell it. The Varietal is actually …
Kate: It’s a truffle.
Steve: It’s a truffle and it comes from its one source, so you really get the flavor of the chocolate. It’s our most requested truffle and it’s also supporting another community that is trying to make themselves viable. I feel like that is because I learnt philosophy. I don’t have a great power like Kate does so I think about the whole process is how we’re setting up things and how … what is the stream from beginning to end and so that’s one of my favorite products.
Lisa: How do people find out about Black Dinah Chocolatiers, the chocolates which you’re making?
Kate: Well, we have been very lucky to have had a lot of media coverage since 2007 when we started. Regionally we’ve been covering a lot of magazines around here. We don’t really do any paid up advertising. Nationally, we’ve been in Martha Stewart, Gourmet, and Austin Globe but also we do wholesale to certain outlets along the coast of Maine. Our biggest part of our business is our website where we do 75% of our business online so we ship all over the world. However, we really wanted to make our products affordable and accessible to people in Maine, so we are pretty well covered from North to South along the coast of Maine where people can find our chocolates in stores in their local communities and take them home and hopefully order them online.
Steve: So www.blackdinahchocolatiers.com or you can Google Black Dinah Chocolatiers or Black Dinah, you may get some odd things, when you do to just Black Dinah but we’ll be pretty much near the top.
Lisa: It has been a great pleasure and a very sweet pleasure to spend time with you both. We have been talking with Steve and Kate Shaffer who are founders of Black Dinah Chocolatiers up on Isle au Haut. Thank you for again bringing sweetness into the world and for bringing sweetness into my morning.
Steve: Thank you.
Kate: Thank you.
Steve: This has been great.