Grocer’s Daughter: “a sweet little business” grows under new owners

By F. Josephine Arrowood
Sun contributor

As Grocer’s Daughter Chocolate celebrates 10 years in Leelanau County, it also fetes the new ownership of the business under Jody Dotson and D.c. Hayden of Traverse City, who acquired it from Mimi Wheeler on April 1. The ingredients of a successful business in Leelanau County would seem to include: a unique, high-quality product, community-minded entrepreneurial spirit, the ability to identify trends, a strong network of employees, like-minded business owners and customers, and a pinch of good luck.

D.c. Hayden is a 30-year-old filmmaker and videographer who brings storytelling skills, a keen eye for detail, and a dedicated foodie’s enthusiasm to the venture. Jody Dotson co-founded (with Chris Treter) the Higher Grounds fair-trade coffee company a dozen years ago, at about the same time the local foods movement was gaining momentum in northern Michigan.

She had earned a degree in cultural anthropology, then attended an alternative graduate school in Brattleboro, Vt. The School for International Training taught organizational management with a focus on social change (the Peace Corps model originated there), and its curriculum included study abroad.

“I ended up in Chiapas, Mexico, and got to know some farmers there,” she recalls. “We were trying to figure out a way to bring coffee that was fairly traded to Michigan. It was so new and seemed so strange to others. We decided to make a business plan and my grandmother loaned us $3,600 to get Higher Grounds started.”

“After two years we moved into the Grand Traverse Commons. We always used Mimi’s chocolate. We formed, and Mimi was part of, a business group of like-minded entrepreneurs in the area — Timothy Young of Food for Thought, Angela Mackie of Light of Day (organic teas), and Naturally Nutty’s Katie Kearney — food businesses that had a similar mission. So we knew what Grocer’s Daughter’s troubles were and what the strengths were.”

The group helped each other with, “big picture questions to philosophical questions: ‘How do you provide year-round, living wage jobs? What are the best accounting practices? Best shipping methods?’ And other mechanics of operating a business.”

“Mimi had the best chocolates in the state,” says Dotson. “She was always focused on the quality. “When the opportunity to buy the business arose in the fall of 2012, she was more than ready to carry on, as she puts it, the “stewardship of a sweet little business.”

As with Higher Grounds, Dotson continues the ethos of fair trade at Grocer’s Daughter, which Wheeler also practiced.

“It’s really important to us to have good relationships with all our vendors,” says Dotson. “Fair trade is still a relatively new movement. Coffee and chocolate are very similar in the ways they’re traded traditionally, usually through third parties (who keep most of the profit). Some companies are just users: ‘fair trade’ as a marketing tool. We’re saying, ‘This trade is happening in a just way for everyone,’” including the customer.

“When we go to South America, we have the opportunity to deepen relationships with (suppliers) down there. Locally, in northern Michigan, we use a lot of honey from Sleeping Bear Farms. In that way, that’s what we did with Higher Grounds; it was the first fair trade coffee in Michigan.”

“Food for Thought was one of the first fair trade companies domestically,” Dotson continues. “It’s about coming from a whole organizational philosophy: not just your business partners, but also staff, paying livable wages, having minimal impact on the environment. If our farmers are paid well, they’re going to continue to provide us with quality products. That’s what sustainability is.”

Dotson shares future plans for Grocer’s Daughter. “We’re only three months into it, but we’re going to continue sourcing, really focusing on the good stuff, the good cacao beans,” the high-quality heart of the business.”

She and Hayden also plan to continue leading eco-tours to Ecuador sometime between January and March, “to see beans and trees that are high-yielding, no GMOs, harvesting pods, fermenting. We’ll also go to Colombia and Venezuela this fall to scout new sources for beans.”

Asked if she worries about the volatile political situations in these countries, she responds, “We’re always on the side of the small farmers. Typically the governments are in support; we’re helping their economy. Ecuador has one of the strongest indigenous cultures. Their government is supportive of eco-tours; they put in better roads and infrastructure for farmers. We work with the Kallari cooperative, which is completely farmer-owned in the upper Amazon. They own everything, from the trees to the brand; there’s no intermediary between us and the farmers.”

Back at the company’s headquarters in Empire, “We certainly have a great little support system; if our model was concentric circles, in the middle would be our staff. So we’re super-lucky.

“Mimi left us with a very talented staff. We have about 12 right now, and we’re opening a second store in Grand Rapids, in late August. It’s a brand-new artisanal food market downtown. We’ll double or more the employees we have; that will help us to stabilize our year-round (operations). Here, there are certainly months when it becomes a little trickier — not just Grocer’s Daughter, but other small businesses. This community is particularly sympathetic, both to (businesses like) Higher Grounds and Grocer’s Daughter. We make profits in this community and we give a lot back.”

As Grocer’s Daughter continues to grow, she says, “We’re keeping a family business going, consistent with Mimi’s values. We’re just really grateful to carry on the spirit of that business.”

“I have always adored good chocolate,” Mimi Wheeler announces, perhaps unnecessarily.

The creator and former owner of Grocer’s Daughter Chocolates, laughs, “After all, I was a grocer’s daughter. I grew up in a small farm community in northern Denmark, in Jutland. Danes have always eaten a lot of chocolate; I grew up in a culture where chocolate was part of most celebratory meals.”

The route from grocer’s daughter in a remote village in Europe, to nurturing foodie and social worker, to award-winning, profitable, small business owner in northern Michigan was a spiral journey of sorts.

She met her future husband (Glen Arbor Sun co-editor) Norm Wheeler in Christiania, a “hippie community” in Copenhagen in 1976.

“He was reciting poetry to me and I just took to him! After a lot of visiting and corresponding — I finished my social work degree in 1977 — he came back, and we married. In 1980 we moved to the United States.” Norm taught at Olivet College for a couple of years before the couple moved to northern Michigan.

“Place is always the most important to me,” says Wheeler. “I found a social work job right away, but … whatever jobs we took, we would stay here.” With Norm’s work as an educator at the Leelanau School, earning her Master’s in Social Work at Grand Valley State University, working and raising two children (Jacob and Julia), life for the Wheeler family was abundantly full. Through it all, Mimi and Norm always loved to host and entertain, and she earned a well-deserved culinary reputation in the area.

Fast forward two decades. Mimi was feeling restless to try something different from the career she’d been immersed in for so long. Her children were out of college, in the world and pursuing interesting lives of their own.

“Our mortgage was almost paid, and I have a tremendously supportive husband who was fine with me,” pursuing a new venture, she explains.

“I knew that I had a bit of the entrepreneur in me, and really wanted to see if I could start a business and succeed.” Friends and family who had experienced her cooking also encouraged her exploration into the food business.

While on a trip to Denmark with some social work students from Grand Valley State University in 2003, “I had time to research chocolate — little excursions — and saw what others were doing. I went to (the French region of) Provence, and there was a specialty chocolatier that had a rosemary-infused truffle. For the first time, something clicked in my brain when I [experienced] these unusual herbal infusions: I could do something like this at home! Provence especially was really a window for me.”

Back home in Empire, she realized she had found a special niche.

“We were becoming a foodie area more and more. I tried dried apples, buying them locally and dipping them in chocolate. We had preserves, local spirits — I was so excited to collaborate with others in the area, do cross-marketing. I saw myself going to Jody [at Higher Grounds] and other food vendors, bringing in their beneficial food products.”

Wheeler discovered that using these products had other benefits as well. “To me, flavor, quality, local — these are more important to me than [strictly] organic; Zingerman’s (the famous bakery, deli and food emporium) in Ann Arbor was very inspiring to me in this. Using local maple syrup, or honey from Sleeping Bear Farms … I could use less refined sugar,” in Grocer’s Daughter products.

But cacao or cocoa (the terms are often used interchangeably, although technically, cocoa is a dried powder made from the cacao beans), her main ingredient, doesn’t grow on trees in northern Michigan, or anywhere else north of 20 degrees latitude. So she faced two huge challenges: how to create fair trading relationships with suppliers in far-flung places like South America, and how to assure the highest quality cacao with which to make her chocolates? She needed a certain type of product, called couverture chocolate, which carries a certain amount of cocoa butter.

“I stumbled on an Ecuadoran chocolate supplier, one I used for the first six years exclusively. I wanted companies that had high ethical standards. I also chose not to go all organic,” which was difficult to find, as the organic certification process could be cost-prohibitive to farmers.

In addition to her travels to South America, and creating fine dark chocolates, Mimi was also learning how to run a small business, whose momentum was gathering speed at an astonishing rate.

“It was exciting, but also scary,” she confessed. “The food vendors, small business owners — I paid attention to them and their advice: printing labels at a greatly reduced price, getting a website, photography … I got so many deals early on. By asking for advice, being humble — people really reached out to me. I always love to tell and advise” people who are looking to start their own businesses, “Hey, this is what I did.”

About running a business successfully, she admits that it was an exhilarating ride, but one whose demands over time “took away a bit. It became so intense,” that she found herself with less time for family and friends, or pursuing interests such as cooking that she used to love.

“A couple of years ago, I wanted to be doing something else. I find in my life, I have about a 10-year-period of time, then I feel there’s something else I want: to travel more, maybe grandchildren. So I started preparing last fall,” for the idea of selling the business.

“I knew I had to have a net profit, and we had a 40 percent growth for two years in a row, which is almost unheard of,” in a small business, especially in the food market, which is subject to fast-moving trends and customers’ discretionary income.

Coincidentally, Jody Dotson had just returned to live in the Traverse City area after a sojourn in Minneapolis. She called her friend Mimi with the idea of, “Let me know what you need, I can come help.”

“At some point, (Dotson and Hayden) said to me, ‘We’d like to buy Grocer’s Daughter’,” says Wheeler. So I sold it to a woman who I really, really admire, who co-created Higher Grounds, who has a lot of energy and foresight, and more business skills than I had. I felt incredibly lucky. It’s been an amazing transition — no conflicts. They remain dear friends.”

“She gives me little assignments,” Wheeler continues. “‘Will you teach a class for a Zingerman’s group coming in?’ or doing product demonstrations. I’ll do extended education at Northwestern Michigan College, working out new recipes. My brain is going berserk. I’m very excited about it — like strawberry-rhubarb cocoa nibs.

“I’m working on a blog called ‘Mimi’s Chocolates’ that will be out by early August. Telling stories comes naturally to me. I love to communicate with people; maybe it’s from my roots in social work. I’m always going to be spreading the word about Grocer’s Daughter and chocolate!”

This story is part of a year-long series in the Glen Arbor Sun about the positive impact of local economic development in Leelanau County. Read previous stories about Baabaazuzu in Lake Leelanau and the Empire Asparagus Festival benefiting from economic investments.