Our Founder's Story

Some stories have a clear beginning, middle and end. This isn't one of them.

I was born in a small, remote town in Brazil. One day, when I was three and my sisters were two and one, my mother discovered my father was having an affair. 
She gave immediately gave him a choice: our family or her.

He chose her.

That afternoon, she packed her bags and left.
She had three babies and nothing else - no education, no job, no income.
To this day, when I think of courage, I think of my mother.

I can't imagine how frightening that must have been. My mother was young, isolated, and had no real support system.  Just a fierce love for her daughters and a will to survive.
What followed were years of uncertainty, hardship, and quiet heroism. My mother found odd jobs, sold what she could, and kept us going. 

One day, she took a local class on chocolate making and something clicked. She started experimenting, and eventually, a business was born.
Soon I pitched in to help and quickly became her best, most reliable production person - a role I played for over a decade. In high school, I even sold some treats to friends and other students. The best part was when friends came over to sample and have a good time.

But even then, I felt something wasn’t quite right. My mom believed in offering the lowest prices, trying to please the most people, gain the largest audience. I always felt she should go the other way and focus on quality, not discounts. I could never persuade her.

Years later, I left for college in the big city—São Paulo - to study nursing.
Chocolate became a distant memory.
I swore that I was done with it forever.

Or so I thought.

Love & Chocolate

My life was on track until, almost in an instant, everything collapsed.

I graduated top of my class in nursing. It was a career I loved—deeply human, caring, and full of purpose. For over a decade, I thought I’d found my path.

But in just a few weeks, everything unraveled.

I was engaged and my fiancé suddenly called it off.
The clinic where I worked and thrived eliminated my position.
I was shocked, disoriented and heartbroken. I needed space, so I booked a few months somewhere far away to study English: San Francisco.

And then I met him at a party. My future husband. He didn’t speak a word of Portuguese, and I had only basic English. Those first weeks were full of hand gestures, repetition, and frequent confusion… but also unmistakable chemistry.

I returned to São Paulo, thinking that was it. But a few months later, he followed me and moved in, learned the language, embraced the food, the culture, my family.
Two years later, we married and moved back to San Francisco to start a family of our own.

And that’s when the idea began to creep back in.

I noticed how open people in the Bay Area were to new tastes, new cultures, new stories. And no one had ever heard of brigadeiros—my favorite childhood chocolate, a staple at every Brazilian birthday, wedding, and celebration. Rich, fudgy, simple, and deeply nostalgic.
I knew, deep down, if people just tried one… they’d fall in love.

And so the seed was planted again. Quietly. Hopefully. And maybe, just maybe—this time, I’d do it my way.

Into the Deep End

You know when you've made an epic life choice if a few months down the road you start to think, “OMG, I was totally unprepared for this.” 

Having your first child is like this. So is getting married, or starting a new career - and definitely starting your first business.

Starting a chocolate company in San Francisco felt like coming full circle. I’d spent years running from the chocolate chaos of my childhood kitchen—and here I was, leaning right back into it. Only now, everything was different.

Very quickly, I realized I was in over my head.

The brigadeiros I grew up making in Brazil? They were far too sweet for American tastes.
And to be honest, many of the recipes I knew used lower-quality ingredients because that's what was available and affordable in Brazil.
That wasn’t going to work here—not in a place like the Bay Area, where people read labels carefully and expect clean, premium food, with a beautiful presentation.

It was clear that I had to reinvent the brigadeiro.

I’d keep the heart of it, but reimagine the texture, the sweetness, the ingredients. I could now access the best chocolate, the best butter, the best cocoa in the world—things I never even dreamed of as a child. It took six weeks and dozens of experiments. My kitchen became a lab. My husband and a few close friends became my test panel. Then one day, I got the thumbs up.

A Bay Area brigadeiro was born!

But that was only the beginning.

Packaging came next.
Then sourcing suppliers.
Hiring staff.
Training them.
Navigating regulations, food safety, permits.
Every small win was followed by three new challenges.

This wasn’t just chocolate anymore. This was entrepreneurship. And I was just getting started.

Making exceptional treats is the first step.
Packaging them? That’s a completely different set of skills.
And persuading people to try them for the first time—that might be the biggest challenge of all.

I had a vision of what I wanted the brand to feel like—elegant, warm, unexpected—but getting from mood boards to a final box that could survive cross-country shippingand leave us with a profit? That was something else entirely.

See what I mean?

Luckily, I wasn’t alone.

My husband jumped in to help. He had business experience from a few startups, so he took over sales, marketing, and finance—everything I didn’t know and didn’t want to fake. I focused on what I loved: the product, the experience, the brand, our Instagram... and, of course, dreaming up new recipes.

Together, we were building something that felt impossible just a few years earlier.

Something sweet, from scratch.
Something that carried every part of my journey.
Something I never saw coming—but somehow always knew was mine.


Thank you for reading and for being part of this journey.
I am grateful to every one of our supporters, our clients, our brigadeiro lovers.

 
Let me know if you liked this story - email me atinfo@tinybchocolate.com

Obrigada!