Chocolatier finds a tasty niche in Amesbury After NYC career

Tag:/www.chinatopsupplier.com/Ingredients_For_Chocolate/src_product/" title="Ingredients_For_Chocolate">Ingredients For Chocolate      She could crunch the numbers all she wanted. But when it came time to make a dramatic career shift, Barbra Vogel kept coming back to one simple conclusion.more stories like thisWho doesn't love chocolate?After 18 years as a publishing executive, the Newburyport resident was ready for a major change. Her weekly commute to Manhattan had become a real chore, and she longed to start a business of her own.Growing up in rural Wisconsin, she had an affection for the kind of artisan foodmakers that once defined small-town life. "Every town had a butcher, a bakery, a produce market, a confectionery store," she recalls.A few years ago, Vogel went to Wisconsin for an extended stay with her sister, who had opened a European-style chocolate shop with her husband. By day she learned fine chocolate-making; in the evenings, she studied the industry with her brother-in-law.On the surface, it seemed like a drastic switch for Vogel. A cartographer by training, she is the former head of mapping and geography for Encyclopedia Britannica."But as it turns out," she says, "chocolate is amazingly like maps. It's a fabulous blend of art and science. It's a very left-brain, right-brain kind of thing."Vogel's four-year-old company, Ovedia Artisan Chocolates, recently celebrated its first anniversary in an old mill building in downtown Amesbury. If she has given up her globes and atlases to return to small-town America, she has undoubtedly retained some of her knack for conjuring foreign lands."People come in and they say, 'Oh, this is like Paris,' " she says, taking a look around her refurbished, brick-and-beam factory store on the Powow River.On a recent weekday morning, wearing chef's whites and sipping coffee from a Green Bay Packers mug - some old habits die hard - Vogel took a break from her tempering machines to discuss her fast-growing business. She now has four employees and a backroom shipping operation that hummed almost around the clock last holiday season.Before hanging out her shingle, she had to test her chocolateering skills. At the Newburyport home she shares with her partner, Deb Burns, she began "noodling" with recipes for chocolate barks and caramels using real cocoa butter, not the waxes and oils that mass manufacturers use. Handing samples out the window, she quickly became known in the neighborhood as "the chocolate lady."Sufficiently satisfied, she rented kitchen space in the back of the old Bumblebee Market and set up shop. Steady sales growth in local food stores and by special order led to a search for her own space.The Ovedia storefront and kitchen in Amesbury, named for the owner's maternal grandmother, occupies the back of a historic building on Main Street. The entrance, a few dozen yards down a hilly side street, is easy to miss, so Vogel puts out a sandwich board to make her presence known.