Yummy Dummy Chocolate Company shutting down

Four of the founders of the Yummy Dummy Chocolate Company — from left, Rachel Foley, Bay Warland, Sara Pesavento and Rowan Foley — build a tower out of chocolate bars last summer. With three of the girls headed off to college in the fall, the company will shut down its operations. Sue Cockrell/Enterprise file photo

Six years, 30,000 chocolate bars and $7,000 in charitable donations later, Yummy Dummy Chocolate Company is closing down.

The girl-owned and operated company will see three of its seven founders heading off to college in the fall with the remaining four not far behind, so they’ve collectively made the decision to stop operations this month.

Remaining chocolate bars may be purchased through their website, www.yummydummy.com, through Saturday or until they run out.

It was around this time six years ago that sisters Risa and Sara Pesavento were making chocolate bars to give away as Christmas gifts, when they realized they just might have a product they could actually sell.

They soon teamed up with longtime friends Stream and Sedona Tuss, Rachel and Rowan Foley and Bay Warland to form Yummy Dummy. All of the girls were between the ages of 7 and 12 at the time, with little clue as to how few start-up businesses survive their first year.

“We were so young when we started,” said Rowan Foley, now 16. “We just assumed it would be successful. We didn’t find out until later that only a small percentage of businesses succeed.”

But Yummy Dummy did.

So much so that profits — 100 percent of which are donated to charity — totaled more than $7,000 over the course of six years. That meant donations to a Haitian orphanage, the Marine Mammal Center, the Food Bank of Yolo County, the Davis Art Center and so much more.

The girls — lifelong friends who are all in junior high and high school now — always loved to make and sell things.

“We were always the kids who would make random trinkets to sell on the street corner and only our dads ever came and bought them,” laughed Rowan Foley.

In making a product that would prove to be a hot seller everywhere, the girls invested in 100 percent natural ingredients, all kosher, handmade, individually wrapped and originally priced at less than $2 per bar.

They mainly sold to friends in the beginning, Rowan Foley said.

“Then they told their friends, and ordered more,” she said.

The girls began selling their chocolate bars at the Davis Art Center’s annual holiday sale and were selling there earlier this month for the final time.

They also sold regularly at the Davis Farmers Market and set up a website for online orders, shipping across the country and around the world.

That first year they donated 10 percent of profits to charity and invested the rest in materials and supplies. For the past couple of years, they’ve donated all profits to charity — dividing the funds evenly among the seven girls, each of whom chooses where to donate her portion.

The girls met once a month to make a batch of around 700 chocolate bars and to try out a variety of different flavors along the way. Bing cherry and toffee varieties proved quite popular. Not so much were ketchup, mustard and salt varieties.

Coconut and peppermint were both tasty, but finding all-natural versions they could afford proved too difficult.

The girls themselves liked the ones with potato chips in them.

“Those were really good,” said Rachel Foley. “But no one wanted to buy them.”

They used only dark chocolate — 71 percent cocoa — with popular flavors plain dark, dark with marshmallows, dark with almonds, dark with bing cherry and dark with espresso beans.

Now, aficionados will have one last chance this week to stock up.

— Reach Anne Ternus-Bellamy at aternus@davisenterprise.net or (530) 747-8051. Follow her on Twitter at @ATernusBellamy

Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=115605

Posted by Anne Ternus-Bellamy on Dec 13 2011.
Last Login: Sat 19 May 2012 03:43:19 PM PDT
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