sweet mona's

Langley – Sweet Mona’s Chocolate Boutique

One evening my husband, Tony and I, were talking about chocolate and how it invoked memories of childhood and we didn’t really have a place like that here on the island to go to. My son, Phillip, overheard us and somehow he got the notion in his head that we wanted to make chocolate. At the time, he was working for the local bakery. So he went to work the next day and told his boss that his mom wanted to make truffles for the bakery. Honestly, I didn’t even know how to spell truffle…. Was it le or el? Anyway, I believe that when a door is opened, I should at least walk into the room. I don’t need to live there if I don’t want to but I should at least give it a try. So Tony got on the phone looking for a chocolate supplier. His first call was to Venezuela which brought us back to a distributor in the US…. In Auburn actually. And I got on the internet looking for recipes. I treated the truffle recipe like a cookie recipe—wet vs dry ingredients.

We had to pick up the ingredients and since we didn’t have a storefront we opted to meet our “supplier” on the side of the road. He pulled up. We pulled up. He opened the trunk. We took out money. And exchanged product for money…. If you know what I mean. He indicated how easy it was to make truffles. I found out later that was not exactly the case.

So one long weekend I made truffles. It took me 36 hours to make 120 truffles. I thought this was never going to work. I was going to have to charge $20 per truffle just to make any money. But after I was finished making all the truffles, I delivered them to the bakery. They sold for $1 each. The bakery folks actually gave them away with each lunch they served.

One of the gift folks in the village decided that they would ask me if I could put them in a box to sell them. And of course, I did. This was the beginning. We moved right away into a kitchen renting space by the hour and I continued to work full time. It was hard to find out information about how to make truffles and candy as a living so I joined several professional organizations to become a part of the candy crowd. We started selling at the farmer’s markets, and started talking about opening a shop. That was nearly twenty years ago. There have been many challenging times as well as rewarding times. I love being a business owner in Langley and love making candy to Sweeten the World!

Sweet Mona’s Chocolate Boutique

Mona Newbauer

221 Second Street, Langley

360-221-2728

www.sweetmonas.com

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