As a 10-year-old girl, Gwen Thompson’s role model was Willy Wonka.
Now 54, Thompson and her husband, Ted Snow, are chocolatiers and own Goodness Snow’s Artisanal Truffles & Chocolate, a startup chocolate company in Gainesville.
In the six months since they started the business, UF alumni Thompson and Snow have become frequent vendors at farmers markets throughout the week.
Their itinerary includes the Tioga Town Center on Mondays, Union Street on Wednesdays, Flagler Beach on Fridays and Haile Plantation on Saturdays.
She said business has picked up with the holiday season. So far, best-sellers are the chocolate truffles, bark and Oreos.
“It was like as soon as weather got cooler, somebody flipped a switch and everybody wants chocolate now,” she said.
The couple also sells chocolate chip cookies and chocolate-dipped pretzel sticks and fruit.
The company registered with the state in June 2013 and participated in its first farmers market at the end of June. They forge their creations at Blue Oven Kitchens, a certified kitchen that is an incubator for small startup businesses to use.
“I’ve always loved chocolate. That’s my inspiration and that’s why I do it,” she said. “One of the other things I really like about being here at the market is I can get other foods (by) trading my chocolates.”
She said in the future she hopes to have a commercial space of her own where she can have her chocolate tempering machine to make the treats.
“If I had that in a place where I could go in every day instead of just once or twice a week, that would really rock my world,” Thompson said.
Suzy Schrimsher, a 20-year-old UF family youth and community science junior, said she took her boyfriend to the farmers market on Union Street Wednesday night, and they stopped at Goodness Snow’s.
“We were just walking around and it obviously caught our eye because all they sold was chocolate,” she said. “That’s my favorite food.”
She said Thompson and Snow were easy to talk to, and they let them sample different chocolates.
Schrimsher’s boyfriend, Harrison Collins, tried the chocolate when he visited Gainesville recently. The 21-year-old University of Tennessee marketing junior said it was the best dark chocolate he’s tasted.
He said compared to store-bought chocolate, Goodness Snow’s chocolates tasted more organic.
“You can almost taste every little ingredient that she put into it,” he said.
When he comes back to Gainesville, he said, he plans to return to the farmers market to get more goodness from Goodness Snow’s.
Schrimsher said she likes to support local business and would be likely to go back to Goodness Snow’s.
“Especially those chocolate lovers like me, I’ll definitely tell them about it because it was really good, and they were really nice people,” she said.
A version of this story ran on page 8 on 12/3/2013 under the headline "Local couple sells sweet business plan at farmers markets"
Gwen Thompson, owner of Goodness Snow’s, smiles next to the stand she and her husband sell their chocolates from. They frequently set up shop in the Tioga Town Center from 3 to 6 p.m. on Monday afternoons.
