Leave it better than you found it: A Change of Kitchens, A Season of Focus.

A Change of Kitchen, A Season of Focus

If you’ve followed Wildflower Chocolate for a while, you know how intentional space and sense of place are to me. The "terrior" of life. The everyday work that adds up over time at home, in the dish pit and over tempering stone, shoveling the sidewalk and tending to the green spaces, shaping who and how we are.

As we move out of our current chocolate kitchen and into new (familiar, spacious, filled with natural light) kitchens and spaces, I wanted to share a little context, as a reflection on seasons and choosing where energy is best spent. Oh, yes... the chocolate kitchen is relocating! I am excited and little nervous for the shift, we have a ton of work ahead of us. :-)

This change comes on the heels of another full and beautiful year learning and navigating as an employer, wife and mother, visionary, chef, gardener and small-batch craft chocolate maker. Each of these hats require finite resources of time and energy. Money as a resource will always ebb and flow - it is the other two I am clinging to.

After almost eight years of building, maintaining, upgrading, and tending to the physical space that became our Nisswa chocolate kitchen, it recently became crystal clear that this next chapter isn’t about managing those continued responsibilities. It’s about focus.

At this stage, reducing maintenance, repair and upgrade allows Wildflower Chocolate to focus on the long-term health of the business, and the other businesses projects taking shape around us (aren't LLCs fun? :-)). You may not know, my husband and I live on our family's gravel pit and he, too, has endless chores and jobs within his excavation company and our homestead in Nisswa. We are on a runway towards something big, something with longevity in mind that isn't built on leased land.

This relocation also overlaps with a broader season of life. Like many families, we’re navigating changing responsibilities, and the reality that time is deeply finite. We are prioritizing certain projects. Saying yes to the Hazelwood Drive location would mean continuing to say no to too much else.

To be clear: Wildflower Chocolate isn’t shrinking, down-sizing or stepping back. We will no longer be in our Hazelwood Drive location, which we love and did our best to steward properly, but I believe this this next step will serve our guests even better. This move is a strategic tightening with less distraction, fewer variables, and a clearer lane forward. We are still very excited about coffee, and especially the Wildflower Chocolate Tasting Club.

I'm looking forward to sharing how these next few months unfold, and the new places you can find us out and about in Minnesota. Once our next spot is finalized I will share about that as well!

-Kate

"Leave it better than you found it." Stewardship 101.

Wildflower Chocolate is a Minnesota-based, woman-owned, gluten-free chocolate and coffee company crafting small-batch goods with intention. Iver’s Roastery is our craft bean-to-bar cacao and small-batch coffee roasting branch.