Small-Batch Story: La Nef Chocolate

At Narrative Food, each of our gifts is designed to tell a story. We have worked with hundreds of vendors over the years, listening to their stories and sharing them with you. In this new series, we are honored to spotlight a few of our favorite small-batch makers in their own words.

Read our interview with Mandy Metrano, the Co-Founder of La Nef Chocolate.

Tell us a little bit about you and the work that goes into your role at La Nef. 

I just spent time with a friend who has worked for the same company for 22 years, since she graduated from college. That is not at all the case for Dylan or I. Dylan is a bit of a Renaissance man. He's a musician, a writer, and a paper-cutting artist in addition to being a business owner and chocolatier. He is self-taught and is always challenging himself to learn and do new things. He illustrated a children's book for Scholastic a few years ago, started a record label with his friend, Guy, with over 100 releases, and is now working on two different podcasts with friends. He formed his band, Tiger Saw, in 1999 and though the members have changed, they are still writing new music and putting on shows. He and I also put on and promote shows for other people wherever we've lived; music, comedy, sometimes film viewings with Q+As, Pecha Kucha events . . . Aside from all that creative stuff, he's worked retail in bookstores and record stores, managed the Barnacle Cafe on Monhegan, and was an excellent sous chef at the Island Inn on Monhegan as well (he makes the best seared scallops I've ever eaten. All other scallops are ruined for me forever) . . . all the while always pursuing his creativity.

My resume is pretty wildly diverse, from waiting tables and retail, to sterning on a lobster boat on Monhegan, to being a sales rep in New York City. I earned my BFA from USM in 2001, with a concentration in sculpture, but didn't pursue a career in the arts until on a particularly fruitless sales call in Brooklyn, I noticed an ad on a subway car for the NYC Teaching Fellows Program that said, "You remember your third grade teacher's name. Who's going to remember yours? Teach." I quit my job immediately, moved to Monhegan year-round, and started pursuing my art teaching certification (after a couple of years of being a sternman). I'm an art teacher and general education teacher now. I have about 15 years of teaching under my belt and will be teaching 3rd grade next year in Bath (full circle). 

All of those varied life experiences and influences have absolutely informed how we've pursued entrepreneurship. Dylan is sharp, efficient, and organized. He is just good at so many things and is incredibly productive and disciplined. He’s really good at keeping on top of inventory, creating a production schedule, and shipping orders out to customers quickly. He thrives on routine and wakes up, exercises, showers, eats breakfast, and gets right to work, every day. He has the patience and discipline to learn the parts of the business that neither of us had experience with, like filing our estimated taxes and figuring out Quickbooks. His calm, organized brain can keep up with all of that. I bought the Adobe Creative Suite for a graphic design course I took while pursuing my art teacher certification, but it’s Dylan who really learned how to use it. He figured it out on his own. He does all of the layout and design work for the company. He even built our website. He just sees a problem and figures out how to solve it, without complaining or getting frustrated. 

I work on a completely different level. I don’t have the discipline or the patience for all the details that Dylan has. I do think I bring a lot of the big picture, systems thinking to the business. I spend a lot of time thinking about each choice we make and the impact of that choice. I have worked in sales and trained sales reps, but I would never sell anything that I didn’t think added value to the world, that I could believe in (which is why my sales job in NYC was such a failure). I feel very strongly that we have to believe in and stand by whatever we put out in the world. (I know that, as a B Corp, you understand that.) When Dylan had the idea for La Nef, I knew from the beginning that if we were going to have a for-profit business, that we needed to be very thoughtful about it and give back in some way. Our very first bar, the Drexler Bar, was created as a benefit for the Monhegan Museum of Art and History for their 50th anniversary. We’ve continued to collaborate with nonprofits, on Monhegan and off, to create bars that benefit their organizations. 

"I feel very strongly that we have to believe in and stand by whatever we put out in the world. (I know that, as a B Corp, you understand that.) When Dylan had the idea for La Nef, I knew from the beginning that if we were going to have a for-profit business, that we needed to be very thoughtful about it and give back in some way."

I think I have eaten something chocolate every day of my life since being able to eat solid foods (except 28 days many years ago, when I was trying to practice self-discipline by making it an entire month without eating chocolate . . . it wasn’t February. I didn’t succeed). Though we absolutely do chocolate tastings with friends and family to get their feedback when we’re doing new product development, ultimately if a flavor combination doesn’t suit my palate, it doesn’t get made. Dylan, and our customer base, have been pushing for a dark chocolate hazelnut bar for a long time, which you may think is a no-brainer, but none of the chocolate/hazelnut combinations we’ve tried have passed my taste test. We finally found the right hazelnuts to work with a milk chocolate bar (the Jennifer Davis Bar), so I know we’re close. Keep your eyes peeled!

Something else to know is that we are chocolatiers, not chocolate makers. A lot of people don't know the distinction. That means that we work with what is called couverture. This is chocolate in callet form from chocolate makers that have already done the processing from bean to usable, blended chocolate. We then work with the couverture by melting it, tempering it (which is the heating, cooling and agitation process at specific times and temperatures for the chocolate to have the right look and texture), adding inclusions or flavors and molding it to make bars. We also dip fruits and confections and make truffles for special occasions.

Can you tell us more about the story behind La Nef? (How did you get started? Any anecdotes from the early days?)

The idea of the business came from Dylan. I was working year-round on Monhegan and plenty busy. I wasn’t looking for anything else to put on my plate. I was the one-room schoolhouse teacher from 2015-2020. From May to October every year, we also worked at the Island Inn. In the off season, he was able to pursue his creativity, but wasn't making much money doing it. In the spring of 2017, after two winters on Monhegan, he started to think about what he might be able to do on the island where he could use his skills to make money year-round. He wasn't going to be a carpenter or a sternman, and there weren't really other options. He’s so creative, always thinking about the next thing he’ll do or create, so it made sense for him to become an entrepreneur.  

Dylan was inspired by the success of Matt and Mary Weber at the Monhegan Brewing Company. Our friends, Mott and Carley, were starting to explore coffee roasting. He thought about what niche the island was missing that he (we) could fill. He thought: beer, coffee . . . chocolate. What a triumvirate! Kate Shaffer, from Ragged Coast Chocolates, wrote a book: Desserted: Recipes and Tales from an Island Chocolatier (Down East Books, 2011). Dylan read it and It made him think that he could become a chocolatier on an island, and even be successful at it. 

When he approached me about the idea in the beginning of September 2017, just as school was about to start, he had already done so much research. I remember so distinctly that he met me at the school to take a walk after I’d spent the day getting the classroom ready. When he told me the idea, it was that WE would take a chocolatier course and that WE would start a business together. My immediate response was “Absolutely Not!” Teaching every subject in a one-room schoolhouse with such a wide age range was no joke. I had already told the Island Inn that I would not be returning in the spring. It felt like too much on those shoulder seasons, plus I wanted to enjoy Monhegan in the summer without working, for the first time since starting to work there in 1996. I was not interested in adding anything to my plate. I was trying to take things off.

Dylan is very organized and does his research. On his second attempt to convince me, sometime in October, he had a thoughtful response for every counterpoint I made. I still said “You should do it. It’s not for me.” Finally in November or early December, he convinced me to just take an online chocolatier course with him through Ecole Chocolate, which started in January. It’s the same course that Kate Shaffer took, as well as Kate McAleer of Bixby Chocolate. He promised he would write all the papers, and I would do the hands-on experimenting and making with him, the fun stuff. The lure of working with chocolate every day, my favorite food, roped me in. 

The next thing you know, we’re at a party with Mott and Carley, and Dylan is convincing them to go in on renting a space on the island with us to build out a commercial kitchen that we’d both need to sell wholesale. It all happened pretty quickly from there and we started making and selling truffles and confections on the island in June 2018. Monhegan Coffee Roasters was born at the same time. The rest is history.

(We know you have relocated from Monhegan to Bath, but...) as fellow islanders, can you talk about founding a business on an island and how "Isle La Nef" has inspired you?

As I said, we were totally inspired by the success of Monhegan Brewing Company, as well as Kate Shaffer’s success on Isle au Haut. People who love Monhegan really want to support Monhegan businesses. That support was really highlighted during the COVID pandemic. Island businesses were supporting each other doing mail order collaborations and subscriptions, and annual visitors were ordering Monhegan goods to ship to their friends and family across the country, to try to keep business coming our way, even though the hotels and businesses remained closed. We moved off Monhegan on July 1st, 2020, in the height of the pandemic. That mail order support is what kept us afloat during that really difficult year. It was a slim one, but we made it through.

"People who love Monhegan really want to support Monhegan businesses. That support was really highlighted during the COVID pandemic. Island businesses were supporting each other doing mail order collaborations and subscriptions, and annual visitors were ordering Monhegan goods to ship to their friends and family across the country, to try to keep business coming our way, even though the hotels and businesses remained closed."

We continue to be supported by our island community. La Nef is sold in several island shops during the summer season and at the Monhegan Store year-round. We collaborate with the Monhegan Museum of Art and History for their gallery exhibition every year, and continue to contribute to several nonprofits on the island through the sale of benefit bars. Dylan and I both continue to sit on boards of Monhegan nonprofits, so we keep a deep connection to that community. 

I will say that Bath has been an amazing community to land in. I think we really lucked out. It goes without saying that all of the logistical stuff is just so much easier on the mainland. On Monhegan our ingredients were often palletized with other businesses’ on the island for transport on the boat, so we would often have to track down our supplies, running from one business to another to find things, then haul them back to our “factory” in our garden cart, because we didn’t have a vehicle. In Bath, UPS delivers directly to our door. We don’t take the ease of it all for granted. 

Tell us about your chocolate and how you deal in direct trade for fair treatment of farmers. 

For our dark chocolate, we work with small chocolate makers that process and make the couverture in the regions that the beans are grown. They both work directly with farmers. The beans are completely traceable and the farmers are paid above market rates. Both chocolate makers also support programs for young farmers and work toward environmental and economic sustainability in their regions.

Collaboration and community building is absolutely the best part of being a business owner. On top of collaborating with nonprofits, as mentioned before, we also work to promote artists and musicians. We use original art made by artists we admire, most of them friends of ours. We name the bars for the artist and have their name and website on each label. We also have artist bios and links to their work for each artist on our website. We also collaborate with musicians to release albums in chocolate bars with MP3 downloads (something that Dylan thought up as a musician trying to get his music out there in the digital age).

There are so many collaborations we’re proud of, but I’m most proud of the collaboration we did with my 7th and 8th grade students last year. One of my students was at Just-in-Time Recreation in Lewiston for his youth bowling league on October 25th when the shootings happened. He and his family survived the attack, but it was obviously devastating. When he returned to school days later, in a class discussion processing the events, I asked him what the class could do to help him and the other survivors. He said that his friend, Gavin Robitaille, had a lot of surgeries ahead of him, and asked if we could raise funds to help with those costs. Such a thoughtful and selfless gesture.

The 8th grade had been working on fundraising for a trip to DC at the end of the year. The biggest fundraiser planned for that trip was to sell La Nef Chocolate bars, each decorated in their unique art. The class decided to redirect their DC fundraiser to donate to Gavin’s GoFundMe . I opened up the fundraiser to my 7th grade students as well, who also contributed their amazing talents. It’s a group of particularly artistic kids. From December until the end of the school year, Dylan and I sold the bars at our winter markets for $20 each, with $15 going to Gavin’s GoFundMe. We sold 117 bars, raising $1,755. I am just so moved by the selflessness of my students. That was a big sacrifice for them to make. They spent a lot of their free time at school drawing and painting the box designs, and got nothing in return for themselves. They didn't even know Gavin, but wanted to support their classmate. I’m so proud of who those young people are. They truly give me hope for the future.