Northshore Magazine

due Fudge Everything, Manchester-by-the-Sea north q+a For the Love of Fudge! Fun with Fudge Anne and Debra have a good thing cooking . From the tennis court to the saucepot, Anne Girian and Debra Bloomingdale, owners of Fudge Everything!, have shared an especially sweet friendship. By Kiley Jacques Can you describe your respective careers and how they led you to start Fudge Everything!? Debbie has been perfecting her fudge sauce recipe for the last six years while raising her family (before that, she was in travel sales and retail customer service). I have been involved in start-ups for the past six years, doing everything from product development to sales and marketing. Can you talk about your Kickstarter campaign? We launched it this past summer, after getting quotes on everything from jars to ingredients to labels to web design. We set our goal at what we would absolutely need to start our business ($5,000). We thought using Kickstarter would be a good way to test our idea out with the public to see if a high-quality fudge sauce was really something that "spoke" to people. We were amazed at the response and the fact that 35 percent of the backers are people we don't know. How does Fudge Everything! function now? We knew right from the start that working from our home kitchens would not work—not only because of space limitations, but because of [licensing]. We also didn't want to be up to our ears in pounds and pounds of hot fudge. Through a friend we were introduced to a man who is in the specialty foods manufacturing business. 272 nshoremag.com December 2013 KJ NBDec13 DueNorth.indd 272 We met him, and after one taste of our sauce, he told us he wanted to be a part of it. He became our co-packer; he does the measurement scaling, cooking, jarring, and labeling, which frees us up to explore new sales venues. What are your short- and long-term plans for the business? We just landed a few great accounts that will carry our sauce—Wasiks Cheese Shop in Wellesley, Lula's Pantry in Rockport, and Shubies in Marblehead—which is great because we want to get the sauce into as many hands as possible. Long term, we'd like to introduce new sauce flavors and expand...but slowly. What specifically do you want readers to know about Fudge Everything!? We do not use corn syrup—only pure cane sugar and high-grade dark Dutch process cocoa powder. Bottom line: Eating fudge is cheaper than therapy and, in our opinion, works just as well, if not better. fudgeeverything.com photograph by lauren poussard 10/24/13 5:35 PM

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