click to enlarge - File: Jeb Wallace-Brodeur ©️ Seven Days
- Chocolate dipping at Laughing Moon Chocolates in 2008
Laughing Moon Chocolates will dole out its last truffles, salted caramels and melt-in-your-mouth almond bark on Saturday at its Stowe shop.
Owner and chocolatier Leigh Williams has sold her 21-year-old business to
Lake Champlain Chocolates, the family-owned manufacturer and retailer based in Burlington. It has purchased Williams’ candy-making operation and recipes.
“Whether or not they’re going to use them is another story,” Williams said of the formulas for her confections, “because their process is so different than mine.”
Jim Lampman, who founded Lake Champlain Chocolates in 1983, has also purchased the Laughing Moon building at 78 South Main Street in downtown Stowe and will lease the space to his sweets company, according to his son, Eric Lampman, who now runs the business with his sister, Ellen Lampman Reed. The new owners plan to renovate the space and reopen it as a Lake Champlain Chocolates shop, ice cream parlor and café in the fall, Eric said.
As they prepared to finalize the purchase next week, the Lampmans had yet to decide which, if any, Laughing Moon chocolates to continue offering, Eric said. So many of the products overlap between the two chocolate makers that they need to consider whether some items are "more unique to her than us," he said of Williams.
click to enlarge - File ©️ Seven Days
- Truffles
Lake Champlain Chocolates has retail locations on Pine and Church streets in Burlington and in Waterbury Center, less than eight miles south of the Laughing Moon spot, as well as a manufacturing center in Williston.
The Pine Street flagship store will close in August for its own overhaul to convert its production facility into an innovation kitchen where it will test and craft small-batch products — possibly including a Laughing Moon selection — and add a larger dining area to serve pastries, espresso drinks and hot chocolate, as well as the housemade ice cream offered there now. Lampman expects to unveil that project in mid-September or early October, around the same time as the new Stowe store.
Williams, 51, decided more than a year ago that it was time to leave her mixers and temperature gauges behind and take a breather. She launched Laughing Moon while pregnant with her daughter and has worked nonstop since. “I haven’t had a Christmas Eve off for 21 years,” she said.
With the increasing challenges of labor shortages and higher costs for supplies and transportation, Laughing Moon needed to grow to keep the business viable. Williams was averse to making that leap on her own, she said. She would have had to navigate the necessary upgrades to the current building or find a place to manufacture offsite while expanding production and sales.
Instead, Williams said, she opted to shoot off Laughing Moon when the right offer came along. She declined to disclose the sale price.
Growing steadily since it started, her business really hit its stride in the past five years with solid, predictable sales, Williams said. Lake Champlain Chocolates has the know-how to seize Laughing Moon’s success and run with it, she added. “It just comes down to being able to take the business to the next level,” Williams said.
Lake Champlain Chocolates has hired two of Laughing Moon's employees and is talking to others about joining the new parent company's team, Eric Lampman said. "We hope to be able to have a bunch of them continue on with us," he said.