When the world ground to a halt back in 2020, Gráinne Mullins was left to put her knowledge as a pastry chef to good use by making beautiful Easter eggs for her loved ones.
From there in her family home in Galway, Grá Chocolates was born. Now, almost six years later, it has become one of Ireland’s leading artisan chocolate brands.
Here we speak to Gráinne about starting her business and how she plans to take it to the next level…
I started Grá Chocolates because… I worked as a pastry chef for over 10 years in fine-dining and Michelin-star restaurants. It was only when lockdown hit, and I made lovely Easter Eggs for friends and family back in 2020, that I thought about becoming a chocolatier. When I posted these on social media, loads of people started reaching out asking me if they could buy them. From there, we started building up the idea. It’s been the most amazing journey since 2020.
The hardest thing about working for myself is… It’s all a challenge, but I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t enjoy every second of it. So I wouldn’t say it’s technically hard, but it is that constant drive of you always trying to juggle many, many plates and trying to get so much done. But having an incredible team makes it that bit easier. There’s a huge amount that goes in behind the scenes before any chocolate gets launched into for the general public.
A day in my life might look like this… I suppose no day ever looks the same. If I’m in the office, I start around 9am. We all do a little team meeting, a little catch-up on the day before and what’s going to happen that day. Then we will work our way through the day, it could be anything from tasting new chocolates to working on an edible carton for Oakley. Then it can be talking to suppliers, talking to retailers, organising, planning, looking at what our next big event is. No day is ever the same.
Food has always been… 100 per cent a part of my life. My parents would love their food. My mum always has a garden, my dad loves to cook and make bread. I was around that from a very early age, and it was an area that I always had a big passion for. That was really influential from a very young age.
I realised I could make Grá Chocolates my full-time job after… The response on social media in 2020. I started doing research on business plans and building them out as a business overall. It took me about four months of lots of intense work, making sure it was all correct. Then we launched in July 2020, almost as soon as everything sold out immediately, and that is when I thought this could have a lot of potential for growth.
What inspires you when creating a new product… Usually, we’ll have a theme for a specific box of chocolates or a specific product or maybe it’s following a new trend or jumping on something. But it can come from anywhere. Then it’s a matter of brainstorming out what flavours would tell that story and when you can tell that story then you kind of trace back and start trialing and testing flavours together. Some chocolates can be done in the first go but that’s very rare. So it can take five or six reiterations of the flavor to make sure it’s perfectly balanced before it gets a sign-off.
Picture Brian McEvoy
The favourite chocolate I’ve made… I think it changes all the time and depends on my mood. So I wouldn’t say I have one set one. I am very lucky that there’s lots of delicious chocolate for me to enjoy whenever I feel like it.
I dream of… I want to grow Grá Chocolates internationally as much as possible. That’s the big focus: getting new retailers internationally on board. That’s one big part of my role, making sure that that happens.
Grá Chocolates teamed up with Oatly because… We both thought of this idea quite a while ago to combine something a little bit silly with Oatly. So at Grá Chocolates, we thought, what could we do that would kind of encapsulate the fun and playfulness of April Fools’ Day? When we came up with the idea of an edible carton, it was just perfect. It was a lot of tough work to try and get it as perfect as we possibly could but it turned out so incredible.
Find out more about Grá Chocolates here.