Today we’d like to introduce you to Eric Keppler.
Hi Eric, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Growing up in a small town in central Pennsylvania, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen baking with my Nana. She taught me the joy of making things from scratch and gave me an early love of chocolate that never really went away. That love eventually led me to pastry school and a career that took me across the country, spending nearly 25 years in every corner of the baking and pastry world. I worked in retail bakeries, made high-end European desserts for wholesale, and eventually found myself in luxury hotels. Along the way, I had the opportunity to compete on Food Network’s Best Baker in America, Season 3, where I won both the title and the prize. Winning was a wonderful way to cap that chapter of my career, but it also made me stop and think about what I wanted next. I had been married for only a year, and after decades of working in an industry where hotels run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, I realized I wanted something I had never really had: time with my family and friends. Holidays had always been some of the busiest days of the year, and it was time for a change. Chocolate, however, was something I wasn’t ready to leave behind. I had already been taking a deep dive into the craft of making chocolate, and starting my own chocolate business felt like the perfect next chapter and that’s how Stache Chocolate was born. The name is a little bit me and a little bit Nana. “Stache” comes from the signature mustache I was known for at the hotel—and later on national television. But it also comes from the secret stashes of chocolate my Nana always seemed to have tucked away around her house.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
For Stache, I would say it hasn’t had too many major challenges. One pretty big one at the beginning, of course, was a global pandemic that definitely wasn’t in the business plan. We had also just moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Oregon, just outside of Portland, so having to pivot my initial plan to launch mostly online was not exactly how I envisioned starting a business. Luckily, I had a bit of a marketing push on my side from my Best Baker exposure, which helped give Stache some early visibility. It also took me a little while to relearn some of my chocolate skills in a new environment. Moving to Oregon meant dealing with high humidity something I had never really had to think about before. But chocolate is a dynamic creature, and honestly, the challenges are built right into this magical little bean. You’re always learning how it behaves and adapting to what it throws at you, so some of that was unexpected but also part of the fun. From a business standpoint, though, it has been relatively smooth sailing. Years of working with food costs, labor costs, budgets, P&Ls, and all the other realities of working in luxury hotels have definitely come in handy, even on the small scale of Stache.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m a craft chocolate maker, which means I make chocolate, not chocolates. At Stache Chocolate, we make nano-batch, seasonally inspired chocolate, and we love using locally sourced ingredients whenever we can. We source our cacao from small farms in Central America and Southeast Asia, and we generally avoid African cacao, which is where much of the world’s commercial cacao is grown. For us, it’s important to know where our cacao comes from and to support the farmers who put so much work into growing and producing this incredible crop.
I think there are a few things that really set Stache apart. First is my chef background. I strive to approach chocolate the way a chef would approach an ingredient. Cacao has terroir. Every bean carries a sense of place, the soil it was grown in, the weather during that particular harvest, and how the farmer fermented and dried the beans all influence the final flavor.And, much like I would in a pastry kitchen, I like to build around that ingredient rather than simply making chocolate and calling it done. We add some sort of inclusion or supporting flavor to our chocolate with the goal of highlighting what makes each cacao unique. If one cacao has beautiful red-fruit notes and another is naturally nutty and earthy, we want to find ingredients that make those differences even more apparent. Ultimately, we want to give our customers that little wow moment when they realize, “Oh, this chocolate tastes completely different from that chocolate.”Second, we put a seasonal lens on everything. If a cacao naturally tastes like red fruit, what does that flavor story look like in spring versus fall? What ingredients are available, what are people craving, and how can we use the season to tell a different story with the same incredible cacao?And third, I think chocolate should be fun. It should be interesting, playful, and always changing. I personally don’t want to eat—or make—the same five flavors day in and day out for the rest of my life. Chocolate literally comes from the seed of a fruit, and it can have an incredible range of flavors. I love exploring that range and seeing just how many different directions we can take it. I think that sense of curiosity is something our customers love about Stache, too. They’re always wondering: What’s next? What’s new? What makes this cacao different from that one?
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
This is an interesting question because, in a lot of ways, I feel like I’ve always been a risk taker.Growing up in a small, old-fashioned, conservative town as a kid who always marched to his own drum probably taught me that pretty early. Becoming a pastry chef as a career, traveling around the country, building a successful career, and then completely doing a 180 selling my house, moving, and launching my own business are all pretty significant risks. At the end of the day, though, I think everyone has their own definition of what risk is and what level of risk they’re comfortable taking. For me, it has always come from knowing who I am and having confidence in what I’m capable of. I trust myself to take the leap, figure things out when I need to, and accept whatever consequences come with the choices I make. Those choices haven’t always been easy, and I don’t come from a wealthy or privileged background. Early in my pastry career, there were times when I had to work two jobs just to pay my rent and put food on the table. I sacrificed a lot of weekends and holidays and missed time with friends and family because I was working. Even now, I’m still the only person in my family who lives outside of Pennsylvania. I’ve lived on the West Coast longer than I’ve lived anywhere else at this point. But for me, it has all been worth it. I think there is always a risk-and-reward equation. Sometimes the risk is financial, sometimes it’s time, security, comfort, or the possibility of failure. A lot of people aren’t willing to make those sacrifices, and I understand that. But I’ve always been willing to take calculated risks when I believe the potential reward is worth it. That’s really how I approached Stache. I knew there was no guarantee it would work, but I also knew what I was capable of, what I had already accomplished, and how hard I was willing to work to make it happen. For me, the bigger risk would have been never trying.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.stachechocolate.com
- Instagram: @stachechocolate
- Facebook: Stache Chocolate
