Brazilian Cocoa

Vacation for us also means business. In search of the best recipe, we need to have the best ingredients to achieve the most amazing taste of our Brigadeiros. I, Danielle, Candy Rockstar at Doce B Shop, took advantage of my time in Bahia, Brazil and went after the most amazing 100% natural cocoa that I could have ever find - I couldn’t miss that opportunity.

Itacaré, Bahia, Brazil is part of what it is called “Cocoa Coast”. I had to take advantage of my time while there and look for the opportunity to find the best key ingredient in order to make our handmade Brazilian candy with a 100% organic Brazilian cocoa.

Here are the results of my search:

Marly, known as the Cocoa Queen, buys the Cocoa seeds from local farmers and does the rest of the process herself; Toast it, peel it and makes things you would have never imagined could be made with cocoa: jelly, honey, juice and different types of candies. Everything she sells in her store is a 100% handmade production. The fact that it is old school and rustic, is what makes it even better.

That’s the Cocoa Jelly – delicious!

“Café Cacau” is a much known Cocoa business in the region, they have good reviews on Trip Adviser, plus I found a lot of news in the internet about Marly and her amazing Cocoa business.

In one of the articles I found online, Marly says that she considers it a gift the fact that she was raised by her father on a farm.  She learned how to preserve the nature and take advantage of it. Beca, her father, used to gather his kids and show them all the hard work the ants do, and then tell his kids that the humans have to do the same in order to survive. 

I had the chance to talk to her and tell about our business here in Michigan, she is a sweetheart and will be more than happy to do business with us here at the Doce B Shop.

We know it is a long way for the toasted seeds to travel, but Marly said they last up to one year. J

So here it is:

Straight from Brazil

 

To our kitchen

Especially for you!

The 100% Brazilian organic cocoa will be used to make our Special Edition Dark Chocolate Brigadeiro. We hope you enjoy it! J

 

Special Edition Dark Chocolate

 

Flavor Ideas

After the name was chosen, Doce Brigadeiro, we decided to work on the Brigadeiro flavors we would like to offer. Even though it is a Brazilian candy our target market are the North Americans. We have to make sure we will fulfill their needs and won’t be doing anything too different from what they love, but still  include some of the traditional Brazilian favorites as well.

Me and Marina spent a few weeks talking about it, between meetings and in cooking/baking sessions we came up with all these flavors to start up our menu. In the long-run we will probably be taking some out and adding others in depending on sales.   It will be all about the customer preference!

Here are the flavors we came up with:

From the top left to the bottom right: The Traditional Brazilian with chocolate sprinkles, peanuts, peppermint, pistachio, almonds, dark chocolate, strawberry flavor with sprinkles, strawberry flavor with sugar, roast coconut, coconut, mix coconut, dried cranberry with Cajun,  white chocolate with rainbow sprinkles, s'mores, and chocolate mint.

After deciding the flavors we then decided to name them - but not a random name. It had to be a name that would have a meaning behind it. Therefore we decided to give them names that were related to the most beautiful beaches in Brazil!  However, they are hard names to pronounce - but they have a meaning and we hope our customers like it, if not, we will change it! Do you have an opinion about that? Check it out the name on our facebook page.  Guess which flavor is my favorite?!

The name and logo choice!

The business idea was done, so now we needed a name. That sounds like the easy part! I already had a name picked out: “Sweet B”, but on our first meeting with Blackstone Launchpad they suggested we do some research on names to see what was out there first. Turned out that the name “Sweet B” was already taken, so we had to come up with another name – how disappointing!

Broken hearted, we did some brainstorming with the team but nothing was as satisfying to us as the name “Sweet B”.  I had to get over that name and accept the fact that I had to have another name for the business. “Yummy B”, “Yum B”, “Bite B”, “Sweet Bite”, and some other names came in mind but not catchy enough.   We finally came up with the name “Doce Brigadeiro” !! In order to use "Doce B" to facilitate the pronunciation for the English speaking customers, and then since the business plan includes having a shop in the long-run with coffee and some other Brazilian goodies, we added "Shop"to it.

The name was finally picked out, now we had to have a logo.  Something that would somehow represent Brazil with the colors green and yellow and also give the customers the impression that it was food related.

I am the type of person that doesn’t sleep very well when I have too much going on or am too excited about something. So guess what happened? A couple sleepless nights, waking up in the middle of the night with ideas. So I left a paper and pen on my nightstand so I could write it down and/or draw whatever I had in mind.

And that’s what I came up with! I know – don’t judge! I was never good at drawing but it helped me sleep better!!

Marina took on the responsibility of doing the logos.  She has a MacBook and the perfect program for this project.   She came up with really good and cute ideas.

 

That was the first logo idea she sent me.

 I liked it - but she still wanted to work on it more. Obviously there were still room for improvement. So she kept working on it, and came up with the ones we will be using today. J

Tcharam!!! Here are they!!! 

 

I particularly LOVE them!  What about you?

The Business Idea Part II

Hi everyone! This is Marina Lauand writing, I am Danny’s partner . Born and raised in Brazil, 28 years old, with a dream that is about to come true!

Since we have already started to tell you our story, I am also going to talk about my journey in the United States and how our friendship and later on, our partnership started.

As many other Brazilians I came to the US in 2010 for the Au Pair Program.  I lived in Connecticut for one year and within that year I met a special man that would later become my husband. After my au pair year was over, we decided to continue with a hard overseas long distance relationship, until I finally moved in to the United States permanently.

                                       That is me and my future husband Michael

During one return visit to the lovely State of Michigan, I met Danny through a North American friend, who is one of my husband’s best friend.  Believe it or not, she was the first Brazilian I met, and that was a big  deal for me  since I was pretty lonely and missing my friends from home. As good traditional Brazilians we knew without asking each other that we had something in common: we both love and know how to make the delicious “little chocolate balls” known as Brigadeiro.

Girls night out

Even though we lived 45 minutes away, our friendship grew closer as time went by. The idea of opening a Brigadeiro business crossed my mind many times before I met Danny, but I've never had enough encouragement to do something like that.

One day, in one of our conversations, Danny said she dreamed about starting to make Brigadeiros to sell here and opening a business. Those lines sounded like a great idea to me! We figured out that every person that has tried out the traditional Brigadeiros love them and want more and more.

Since the candy is a ‘must have’ in the birthday parties in Brazil, we asked ourselves; why not make it a ‘must have’ in events here as well?

That’s when the idea became serious and we decided to put our efforts in making it happen.  So that is where we are in our journey right now.   We are feeling very positive and excited about and see it as another bright spot in our future!