OUR STORY

Oh, boy. It begins with our graduate student days back on the East Coast, putting in many a late night studying and working. During the summers we would often head out of the apartment for a "cooling off" that focused on ice cream. And who (we thought) could eat ice cream without chocolate sauce?

We grew up in households where cooking was an activity shared within the family, and where food was not necessarily fancy, but did always taste wonderful. With that in our background, we began to experiment with making homemade chocolate sauce as a part of our love of cooking. The experiments continued for over thirty years.

We raised our daughter on chocolate sauce. It became so much a part of our lives that when we built a new home for ourselves, our celebration involved moving in and unpacking just what we needed to make some sauce! It even became a core element of our daughter's early cooking efforts. We still have her first experiments in printing, consisting of a "recipe" for chocolate sauce on frozen waffles!

By now our tastes have become refined and lighter. When we decided to produce our sauce commercially, we taste-tested scores of chocolate brands, deciding on Scharffen Berger© artisan-made chocolate. When we began using Scharffen Berger in our products we felt we had hit the proverbial jackpot of chocolate gold because of the radical improvement in flavor and mouth feel.

Coming to market with the sauces has been the most fun and hardest work of our chocolate odyssey. During the summer of 2007 we all regularly attended the small farmer's market in our hometown of Castle Rock, Colorado. We became hooked on the fresh, seasonal vegetables, fruit, and other homemade products being sold, especially a local salsa. We then had an epiphany. Why couldn't we share our beloved sauce with others in the way these local vendors were doing?

By the time we figured out all that we had to do to go to market, the season was long over. We signed up to sell our sauces at the holiday markets, and it has been a wild ride ever since. These days, we have a third generation family member, Brooke Noel, to bring up on chocolate sauce (she already loves it on mini waffles)!

We all have discovered how much we enjoy meeting new people and seeing the looks on their faces when they get their first tastes of our products. It's fine with us that people tend to remember us less than they remember our sauce. Enjoy!

Jim and Karen Day, owners of Izzybelle Chocolate LLC