“If you ever start to feel inadequate at what you’re doing, don’t let that stop you.”
Ranny Starnes is the co-owner and head chocolatier at Chocobella in Florence, SC. She develops and designs new chocolate bonbon flavors and makes them by hand with her team.
Interview
Transcript
Ranny Starnes
Ranny Starnes, I’m originally from eastern North Carolina, a small town called Ahoskie, North Carolina. I currently live in Florence, South Carolina. I’ve been here for about 17 years, and I am the co-owner at Choco Bella, a small little Belgian chocolate shop. We also sell gelato in downtown Florence.
Haley Hansen
Can you tell me your official job title?
Ranny Starnes
I’m a chocolatier.
Haley Hansen
Nice. Can you walk me through your typical work day? Like, maybe what you did yesterday or last week or something like that?
Ranny Starnes
Well, for our bonbons, we sell hand-painted colorful bonbons. And, to make those, they’re made in molds. And so, it’s typically a five day process depending upon how many that we’re doing in a week. And so, we kind of have our production broken up by days. So it’s very, very structured. So every Monday we do the same thing. Every Tuesday, we do the same thing. On Mondays, is our big day. That’s the day that takes the longest. And the most artistic part of our job is our paint day, where we use colored cocoa butters; they work very much like paint. Except for their solid at room temperature. So, you have to heat them in small increments to get them in the liquid state and kind of keep them warm throughout your painting process. So, that was a long, long part of it. So, Mondays is our paint day; we use airbrushes, we use paint brushes, we use gloves, a whole different variety of styles to get the different designs on the different flavors of bonbons, so Mondays is our paint day.
Ranny Starnes
Tuesdays are typically our shelling day, where once the paint has set overnight, then we’ll shell the molds and just put a thin layer of chocolate in them to kind of give it, you know, something to pipe our fillings into. And so, a lot of times on Tuesdays, we’ll shell and then maybe make caramels for the next day. Wednesday is our filling day or our ganache day. And that’s where we make all the different flavors of ganaches to go into the bonbons. And then, Thursdays are kind of like a free-for-all day. We’ll typically put the bottom layer of chocolate on the bonbon to seal them. We’ll crack and dump the bonbons either Thursday or Friday, depending upon how many we’re doing, and sometimes it rolls over into the next day. But that’s pretty much our structure every single week that, you know, we do the same the same production schedule.
Haley Hansen
How did you wind up working in that field?
Ranny Starnes
That’s a very interesting question. I grew up in food. My background is in food. My family owned a restaurant growing up. So, I have been in the food and beverage business since I was born; I would have to go to work with my parents, you know, age three, age four, and like hanging out at the restaurant. That’s what we did: grew up working in the restaurant. And so, I knew that food was definitely going to be something that I did. I didn’t. I didn’t. It’s what I knew. And I really enjoyed it. I loved it. Most of my, you know, passion was towards the front of the house. You know, I always worked in the front of the house at the restaurant, either managing or, you know, I waited tables. I paid my dues, you know, through high school and through college, and I worked in food.
Ranny Starnes
So, I majored in Hospitality Management at East Carolina and wanted to do something in food management. I wasn’t really sure exactly what at the time. I was working in fine dining, I had worked at a restaurant that’s no longer open. But back in the 90s, it was called Chef Stop at Five. And, it was the nicest restaurant in Greenville, North Carolina, and I had been there for eight years. So, I already had the management job that I wanted while I was in school. And then after that, I kind of, you know, once my husband and I moved, I relocated, we relocated to Pennsylvania for a short while. My brother lived up there. And he wanted to get back into the food business, our family business. And so, I ran a deli with him for about a year. But it’s expensive to live up there. So I needed a part-time job. And so I got a part-time job working at Starbucks. So I’d have some benefits. And then that’s where, you know, I turn, turned a corner. So I worked there. And after a year of being in Pennsylvania, we were like, you know, let’s move back south. And so I transferred here to Florence with my job, and he transferred with his job.
Ranny Starnes
And then I worked in coffee and food at Starbucks and was a store manager and a cafe trainer for, you know, six to nine years between, you know, Pennsylvania and Florence on and off.And then I was tired of corporate America. And I was burned out and I had two small kids and needed more quality of life. And I had a friend who told me that there was a place downtown. They closed during the pandemic called, Dolce Vita. And it was a wine and chocolate bar, which was different for Florence. Um, It was owned by Dr. Keith. He had lived after college, he had lived in D.C. for a while, and when he came back home to start his practice. He started the renovation process in downtown Florence and started buying buildings and renovating them, and he just kind of had this vision to bring some culture back into Florence. And so, he took some of his, you know, things that he had seen and ideas from living in the D.C. area and wanted to kind of bring that to Florence.
Ranny Starnes
And so, he had opened a chocolate and wine bar in downtown Florence, and he was looking to add the coffee to the business. And I had a friend who worked as a chef for him at his other restaurant, and he introduced me to him, and we hit it off right away. And I came in and started working on a Dolce Vita. And brought in, and launched the coffee program there.We had a chocolatier at that time. He didn’t necessarily work in the store; he would come in and make chocolates and then leave. He had his own business that he would do, but it’s my business partner now, Marvin. He would come in and make the chocolates.
Ranny Starnes
But, I was really intrigued by the whole chocolate business. They didn’t do the painted chocolates, they were just, you know, simple chocolates with simple flavors with a few different shapes. And I just kind of was very curious and wanted to learn more about it. And so, just to help Marvin out so that he wouldn’t have to come in. I asked, you know, John, who was Dr. Keith, who’s the owner, you know, hey, I want to learn how to do chocolate. I think that’s something that I would really enjoy. And he had his brother, who’s also a chocolatier who had trained with Marvin, come to the shop and just kind of give me like a day; it was a one day Crash Course. And this is how you shell. This is a simple ganache with just a chocolate buttercream, you know, not really even any flavor. And it’s just this is, you know, how you, you know, this is the building of a bonbon. And that’s what I started with. And then I was like, I need to know more.
Ranny Starnes
And, at heart, I’m an artist. I’ve always been a maker. I’ve always been a painter. My mother was a painter; my husband was an art major. My daughter is an art major. So, we’re always making, and we’re always creating. And so, as the process of me wanting to learn more, I just started following chocolatiers, basically, on Instagram. Googling forums, you know, I would research different things. And that’s when I discovered the whole world of the colorful painted bonbon. And I was like, guys, like, this is a thing. Like, why aren’t we doing, you know, why aren’t we doing this? And they were like, you know, go for it. And so, I pretty much, it was a crash course in teaching myself. I would watch tutorials. I would watch how people did it. I would research, and I started playing with just simple colors, like I think I ordered, like maybe six colors, and would just do a swipe in the mold and then shell the chocolate and like this one’s now our pecan, is now yellow, or this now has a blue accent. And then I just decided that that’s, that’s where my passion lies, I really just love doing that. And I’d always been front of the house, but I really enjoy kind of being in the back of the house. And I love the creative process, I’m a foodie. I’m curious, I’m creative. And that kind of combined everything for me.
Ranny Starnes
And, you know, Marvin, and I just kind of joke, you know, like, let’s, let’s just do chocolate, you know. And Dr. Keith, at the time, was renovating a building a block away. And, we had joked with him, about, you know, hey, you should let us move the production down to there. And we’ll just be chocolatiers and we can, you know, supply the chocolates for over there. And we kind of between the three of us, we just kind of decided you know, there’s a lot of renovation going on in downtown. There’s grants available for new businesses. And with Dr. Keith’s investment, Marvin and I decided to branch out on our own and open up Choco Bella. So that’s kind of how we got from that to there, to back over here. And we opened up in the middle of the pandemic in November of 2020.
Haley Hansen
Oh, wow. The timing was crazy.
Ranny Starnes
Yeah, it was supposed to be earlier. We had plans, you know, prior to the pandemic, and then that just slowed everything down. It was harder to get equipment. It was harder to do, you know, all kinds of stuff. And, you know, once we moved in here, was when I really dove into…my vision was to have all of my bonbons be colored. I had to teach myself how to do, you know, using an airbrush. It’s just, you know, a regular old airbrush, but use it with colored cocoa butter instead of paint and that kind of thing. And then, during the pandemic, I used that time to take a professional chocolate two-year course. Marvin had gone to Belgium to do his, um, during the pandemic. I couldn’t do that. But the chocolate schools called Ecole Chocolat. And so I was able to do the three-month Chocolatier program online. There’s videos, there’s tutorials, there’s lots and lots of reading, and lots and lots of research. And then, you know, you would be given a task you’d have to perform, perform a task, upload your pictures and do like this is my takeaway from this, this is what I would do different, this is what I learned and that kind of thing.
Ranny Starnes
And that kind of filled in all the gaps that I was missing on how to really, you know, temper chocolate properly and temper cocoa butter properly and troubleshoot a lot of the issues that that we were having. But that’s kind of how I put, put it all together. You know, during that time.
Haley Hansen
What do you think was the biggest adjustment or challenge you faced when you started your current role at Choco Bella?
Ranny Starnes
Well, for us, it was more timing. And not to say that pandemic, but the pandemic was really the biggest the biggest part of it for me. I think that I have opened restaurants, I’ve opened cafes, I’ve opened coffee shops from the ground up several, several times, so that part wasn’t challenging for me. I you know, that part was, you know, hey, I’ve done this before that’s just going through the motions. But, the pandemic gave a whole nother level of challenges of, you know, is it smart to open a boutique chocolate shop during the middle of a pandemic when we don’t know where this is going. Are people, you know, because during that time we had to social distance. We could only allow because our shop is really small; I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but we have 750 square feet, and you can’t really social distance. So we can only let three customers in at a time. And so for us, it was more like, can we be sustainable? Can Florence support, you know, a box of chocolates that cost $20 or a gelato that’s $5 and $7? And so for us, that was our biggest challenge was overcoming that. And also, to getting the supplies we needed.
Ranny Starnes
The first year, there were times where I didn’t know if we were going to have cups to put our gelato in because everything was sitting in barges in the middle of the ocean. So I’d say COVID, really, but in another way, you know, it was also a blessing for us, because what we found is that during that time, Florence really came out and started supporting small businesses, they were like, Let’s keep our small businesses, you know, open, let’s make sure that we’re supporting, you know, local. And so there was a large group of or a community of people that really focused on local small business owners during that pan- early pandemic time. And that was, you know, a scary and also a blessing for us. At the same time.
Haley Hansen
If someone is aspiring to have a similar role to yours, are there any specific skills you’d recommend they acquire?
Ranny Starnes
My, path here was so different from so many other paths. But I think that the biggest thing that people need is a curiosity about food. First of all, and, you know, I grew up with that. Grew up with, you know, cooking and the family. And you know, that has always been a part of my life, throwing the recipe together, or following a recipe, we’re experimenting with flavors, so you have to have a palette for that, I think, to begin with.
Ranny Starnes
If you’re not curious about food, or curious about how to break the rules, or what if I do this, then, you know, it’s I don’t think it will take you to the next level. But, first of all curiosity about food, you know, and you can do chocolates without all the paint. But for me, I’m already an artistic person, like I have to be able to create, or I don’t, you know, if I wasn’t doing this, I would have a painting on the easel at home when I got home from work. Like, I’m just always kind of creating skills that that need. But the biggest thing is just a creative niche. I think a lot of people do come to this route through, maybe, and it would have been probably a lot more helpful for me if I hadn’t gone through like a, you know, like a pastry School and been a pastry chef first. And I had a lot better understanding of the, you know, the recipes. As far as cooking is one thing baking and pastries are another thing. Everything has to be an exact science, everything has to be weighed for everything to balance correctly. But I think that, you know, having a, you know, at least a curiosity of it and being willing to learn how recipes go together. It’s a lot of technical things for chocolate. So, you know, there’s a lot more math in it than you think that there is, you know, so a lot of things come together. But I would say, first of all, curiosity about food and, you know, a creative mind.
Ranny Starnes
And then yeah, so you can do a lot of the stuff like I did online, I taught myself pretty much from the beginning. And I was kind of introduced to it, and did my, you know, did the best that I could until I was able to, you know, take some classes and kind of you know, fill in those gaps. But it’s a long process, even after I’ve been doing it for about six years now. I still learned stuff every week, and just being willing to continue to learn and fill in those gaps.
Haley Hansen
You mentioned pastry school. Are there any organizations or programs that you would recommend in South Carolina for people who are interested in doing this sort of thing?
Ranny Starnes
I’m not sure about pastry schools because I didn’t go that route. So I don’t have information on that. But there are a lot of chocolates here programs that are online. Now a lot of things that you can, you know, classes that you can take live via the computer. And with with very little physical investment, you can start with nothing like we all learn how to hand-temper chocolate, as part of our original, you know, beginning lessons. Like, now we have a chocolate tempering machine. But in the beginning, now we have two. We have one for dark and one for white. When we started, we only had one, and all of our white chocolate was still tempered by hand. So you don’t have to have big equipment; you can start by melting your chocolate in the microwave and learn how to temper chocolate by seeding by just adding more you know, tempered chocolate to that. So I’m not really sure about the pastry chef route and they don’t have to go that route. I just think for me, I would I think that that would have helped me, you know, in the beginning, I would have gotten to where I wanted to be faster probably but I don’t go I don’t go straight anywhere I tend to you know go around and figure out what I like because I’m a creative person does not always clear, you know.
Haley Hansen
Do you have any advice for current students, students who are pursuing a career in, like, the creative world or the culinary field?
Ranny Starnes
Keep, keep being creative, keep being curious, you know, and try. So much of what we do is because we have failed so many times, especially with recipe development, like, you’re not always going to get it at the right time, but you don’t know until you do it. I think during my chocolate school, I read a quote somewhere that said; you have to learn the rules so that you can break them. You know. You got to know the standards and the structure and then know what you can play with. And then do your own thing from that. But just be creative and try and just keep trying. Um. if there is any, any food person, or even any restaurant that you can get into, or bakery where you can kind of see the backside of the house, kind of work ethic.
Ranny Starnes
Working in restaurants, I’ve done all my life. And I think it’s something everybody should do at one point in time, the pressure from the front of the house and the back of the house, and the timing of it all is a different skill set to develop. And I think it’s really, really important and it goes… you take it everywhere in life with you those skills, but I would definitely work in food somehow or another while you’re in school, or when you can, prior to picking this as an obligate, you know, an occupation, because it’s not always what you think it is. And that’s not always shiny bonbons and rainbows. It is super repetitive. It is ruling you, you know, you will have back problems, you will have neck problems from standing over, you will be airbrushing wearing masks and glasses and headphones, and it’s very repetitive. And so you have to really, really love what you do to paint for eight hours every single Monday for five years straight. Knowing that next Monday, you’re gonna have to do this all over again. So I would, you know, see if you can, you know, even if you don’t, you know, work and get paid at it, see if you can stop somewhere or I know when I was at Dolce Vita, our high school here at South Florence how to their career center had a little program where they could put a student in your shop for like two hours a day for like two weeks if that’s something that they were interested in. And I think that that was a great program, they got credit for it through school, and they didn’t have to commit to a job, but I think…see, see the backside of it and make sure that that’s what you want to do.
Ranny Starnes
Because while it is a whole lot of fun, it’s also very repetitive and grueling. You know, you might not like that aspect of it. Like my daughter, at one point in time, wanted to major in biology, the art major, and I was like, Where do you see yourself working with that? Do you see yourself working in a lab? Like, is that really where you want to be? And she was like, No, and I was like, then don’t major, don’t do that. So really, you know, get a good picture of what your life is going to look like in that environment and then try it out and see if there’s a restaurant that’ll, you know, let you work in the back of the house as a prep cook for, you know, a certain amount of time. But anyway, I think that’s a good idea. I kind of got to see all sides of the food and beverage business and so by the time I was ready to make this decision, I knew that I was okay with that. So.
Haley Hansen
Great. Well, finally, Is there anything else you think is important for you to say?
Ranny Starnes
You know, like I said, we love what we do. it is a labor of love; it’s very repetitive, but if you truly love it; which we do. You know, it makes it worth coming back in here every Monday and painting and, you know, shelling, and when you… when it gets to the point where it’s in your customer’s hands, and they light up that’s what it’s all about for us. I’m mostly back of the house now but I get that, you know, I guess what would you call it, reassurance from the customers when they’re like, oh my god, my daughter loved this gift and was such a great gift, or these chocolates at the wedding everybody was doing and I and so that’s what it’s all about sharing, sharing, you know our passion through food.
