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The Chocolate Garden Tina Buck has an enviable life
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uck, the owner of the Chocolate Garden in Coloma, Michigan, works from home, making incomparable chocolate truffles from her commercial kitchen and tasting each batch of the rich ganache at the heart of the business. “I wanted to be able to get up, put on my fuzzy slippers, pad around and have a nice little existence,” she says. Buck, a native of North Adams, Mich., was introduced to the industry in 1984 when she landed her first job at an ad agency in Chicago, fresh from graduation at Michigan State University. Her first assignment was Sara Lee’s “sweet goods” products. While researching chocolate for the account, Buck read an article that described truffles as “the absolute royalty of the chocolate world.” Buck decided to make truffles for holiday corporate gifts and pored over recipes, taking a little bit from each and experimenting with ingredient ratios and techniques. “Every year, people said, ‘I’m a connoisseur of chocolate . . . I know what I’m talking about and these are absolutely fabulous,’” she says. Buck describes her truffles as “extremely creamy, unusually sumptuous.” Her truffles do not have a hard, waxy chocolate shell like some others on the market. You don’t bite into them—your teeth pass through them as the flavors melt in your mouth. “They are intensely chocolatey, very creamy and I like to take that to the ‘nth degree,’” she says. “It’s the extreme chocolate experience.” She was encouraged over the years to market the treats and in the fall of 1998, decided to give it a try. Her background in
branding for the ad agency led her to conduct a test market launch of the product at Chicago Place Mall on Michigan Avenue from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day. “In the thirty-four days I was there, I saw firsthand how well people responded and decided it wasn’t the dumbest idea I’d ever had in my life,” Buck says. “I knew this was what I was going to do.” Next came choosing a location. “Part of what I wanted was to be surrounded by greenery and farmland like I was when I was growing up.” She settled in Coloma so she could be close to family in St. Joseph. At first, the company only accepted online orders. “We were only producing what was ordered, so there was no waste,” she says. “We didn’t have to turn the lights on if we weren’t working.” That was working fine, until they were discovered by the Food Network and THE CH featured on the show Food Finds. “Now OCOLAT all of a sudden everyone wanted to come GARDENE 2 6 9 1 F riday Rd here, but there was nothing to see.” 269.468 Coloma, Mich. So, she built a small shop but realized .YUMM (9866) chocolate quickly that it wasn’t enough. Buck Open 10a garden.com doubled the size of the store and the m-6pm d aily parking lot and now has a 600-squarefoot shop and 750-square-foot commercial kitchen. Until last spring, she personally made—and tasted—every batch of ganache used in her truffles by hand. With Buck serving as sole ganache-maker, she realized she was “limiting our ability to grow.” Recently, she taught one of her ten employees the technique and recipe. Ingredients include Rosa d’amore wine from Contessa Wine Cellars next door (used in the Lago Rosso truffles) and Solera Cream Sherry from St. Julian Winery in Paw Paw in the Solera Double Gold truffles. “We can’t always use local ingredients, but we do it whenever we can,” she explains. Other flavors include White Chocolate Strawberry, which boasts freeze-dried powdered strawberries for a fresh, intense flavor. The latest addition to the truffle palette, introduced in 2009, is Lemon Drop, a white chocolate truffle infused with pure lemon. While she does run a green business—using local products, providing biodegradable bags and using recycled content in packaging—she doesn’t scream it from the rooftops. “Every chocolatier has their own philosophy,” she says. “Some are so focused on the green or organic or fair-trade aspects that they lose the focus of what they’re doing. Isn’t this supposed to be delicious and fun? “My focus is I want the expression on their faces [when they taste the truffles] and I get it. If I can do that and be socially conscious and be eco-friendly, I do it.”
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–LAURI HARVEY KEAGLE
GREEN GROCERIES
Want to be a green gourmet? Buy locally. Farmers’ markets and roadside stands reduce transportation needs, thereby limiting auto emissions that create ozone. Buying fresh versus prepackaged, frozen or canned also cuts down on waste, reducing your impact on the environment. –LAURI HARVEY KEAGLE
photograph courtesy of THE CHOCOLATE GARDEN
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