Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisa and Toni Richardson.
Lisa and Toni, please share your story with us.
Blonde Biscotti was founded from the roots of a strong mother-daughter relationship. My mother, Toni, and I have been close since the day that I was born. We spent a lot of our time together in the kitchen baking. Toni, born into an Italian family, loved to be in the kitchen during the holidays. Her memories of her grandmother baking pies and cooking with everyone near was a memory she cherished and passed along to me.
She still has an old video of me on the kitchen counter with a mixer while she taught me to properly mix a cake batter. With each new recipe, my mom taught me new baking techniques: how to pack brown sugar to lightly measuring the flour. We baked everything from cookies to cakes to brownies to cheesecakes.
We always talked about owning our own bakery one day. My grandma even signed us up for cake decorating classes which led to baking custom cakes for all occasions – birthdays, weddings, engagement parties, baby showers, and so many more.
However, it wasn’t until I went off to college at Texas A&M University during the sophomore year that my mom called me saying that all she wanted to bake were soft-baked biscotti cookies. Her first recipe ended up becoming one of the signature biscotti flavors currently on our biscotti bar called the Natural Blonde. It’s a classic vanilla cookie with a subtle hint of sweet almond. From there, the Nutty Brunette (named after me) was born since my love for chocolate goes deep.
As our biscotti recipe collection grew, we kept pondering about opening a storefront, but who would walk into a store only selling biscotti, is what we thought.
After graduating from Texas A&M with my degree in Nutrition, I spent the summer studying abroad in Italy. Returning back to Houston on a flight that I wasn’t originally scheduled to take, I landed my first corporate job in the oil and gas industry – not remotely related to my nutrition degree. I spent the next ten years building valuable business skills, all the while dreaming up the concept of Blonde Biscotti on the side.
During my corporate career, I decided to pursue my MBA from the University of Texas. During the program, I came up with the name Blonde Biscotti. Not only is my mom blond, but it also named the signature, traditional biscotti – the natural blonde.
My introduction and love of coffee, plus the pairing with biscotti, came to be from a job transfer to California in 2014. California has a diverse and renowned coffee culture, and so every weekend I would travel to different coffee shops (a personal favorite being Blue Bottle), read book after book, and learn as much as I could about specialty coffee. I mean what better thing to pair with biscotti than great coffee?
As I continued to develop my passion for coffee, my mom and I continued to talk daily about opening our own store introducing Houston to the concept of my mom’s soft-baked biscotti paired with specialty coffee. When my time in California came to a close with a direct job transfer to Salt Lake City, we decided that it was time to branch out from the corporate world and travel back to Houston to begin a journey. My mom and I both resigned from our corporate jobs. I moved back to Houston and began looking for real estate for our biscotti bar.
We landed in Montrose, just outside of downtown, opening our doors in June 2017. Ever since then, we have spent countless hours at the shop from well before open to well after close everyday baking biscotti and keeping up with the coffee bar’s daily demands. Our soft-baked biscotti are showcased inside a delectable 5 tier, glass biscotti bar where you can choose from a variety of rotating flavors. In addition to finding biscotti in our store, we are teaming up with local shops. Our first account is Peli Peli Kitchen, a delicious, local South African concept, where we have crafted a special South African influenced, sticky toffee biscotti.
Our next project involves rolling out biscotti mailer gift boxes where you can shop online via our website, select the biscotti box you would like, and we bake them fresh to mail.
The best part of this whole concept is that instead of calling my mom on my way to work every morning, we car pool into the shop together. While owning your own business is the hardest journey to travel, doing it with my mom has been the best part. The part that I will never forget or regret.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Definitely, not a smooth road at all! For us, it has never been any one serious catastrophe but rather the daily occurrences/challenges that keep you brushing up on your problem-solving skills. The ones that make it are the ones that never give up on solving the problem no matter how big it is.
Here are just a few of the obstacles and challenges we have faced as business owners:
– nearby construction taking out our internet connection for 3 solid days preventing credit card processing… no revenues = no pay. We made it through this one, but our internet provider was absolutely no help and offered no temporary fixes without additional costs being incurred – we have switched providers since then.
– the air conditioning going out on us in the middle of summer – which involved me trekking up a straight ladder to the roof to investigate. Being female, it took three technicians to come out to fix it. Each contradicting the previous one.
– the heater crashing on the coldest day of winter
– learning recipe conversion the hard way and always when it is least convenient. Baking in your home kitchen is nothing like batching and baking in a commercial kitchen. We have encountered problem after problem in the kitchen after creating mass batch recipes. All of which we have solved to date, but one of the most frustrating was when we switched to cage-free eggs, a requirement by Whole Foods that we were happy to agree to until the change in eggs left massive air holes in our baked biscotti loaves. We learned quickly that we had to change EVERY recipe we had batched and reconfigured the dry to liquid ratio. (my mom is more patient than myself on this one!
– employees – you discover that you can’t count on them when they either no-show the day you have an extremely important business meeting scheduled – forcing the meeting to be canceled while I work the coffee bar without alternative cover or call in “sick” from food poisoning which must have been contracted after drinking at the bar the night before.
– surviving Hurricane Harvey’s threatening flood only just months after opening
– getting woken up at 3:30 am to the burglary alarm going off – a burglar had smashed our door window in order to rob us…. unfortunately for him, we had instilled a cashless policy – only accepting electronic payments 4 months prior to his break-in. Still, it resulted in him damaging a $2,000 door, another bathroom door which he kicked in, and me spending all day on Monday installing a temporary board. By the way…. we are #stillcashless (we posted this on social media to remind patrons to love and support our decision to go cashless!
– dealing with a constant plumbing leak that took 4 plumbers back to back in order to fix it – this was such a pain especially since everyone (but the last) tried to cut corners on a simple fix just so as not to fix it in order to secure another bill for returning. This issue seems to be an issue across all maintenance requirements. Being a female-owned business, they don’t think we know much about proper maintenance. Little do they know, I have the background of an engineer as well as the experience of remodeling my own house by myself – little to no hiring out of manual labor.
Most of these all occurred within the first 8-10 months of operating. The list continues as each new day unfolds. It’s tough, but you can’t focus on it or it will prevent you from building the business you love and created.
Blonde Biscotti – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
At Blonde Biscotti, we are a specialty, soft-baked biscotti bakery paired with third wave coffee. Rarely will you see a specialty coffee bar that truly prepares all of their items from scratch.
ABOUT OUR COFFEE BAR
We not only train and practice alongside the best coffee bars in the specialty coffee industry, but we take real pride in serving high-quality coffee. All of our milk is Whole Foods quality milk. Our dairy (MILL-KING) is non-homogenized, low-temp pasteurized, and local.
Our non-dairy milk are all natural, and made in-house for various options – essentially, if it’s a nut that we carry in our pantry for the bakery, we can also make nut milk with it -> walnut, pistachio, almond, hazelnut, peanut, etc.
All of our milk is unsweetened with no additives or preservatives.
Nothing on our coffee bar comes from a package – our mochas and hot chocolates are made from real chocolate from the bakery in lieu of syrups or powders which contain high fructose corn syrups, additives, or preservatives. Our bakery carries semi-sweet, mint, and white chocolate so we can make any type of all natural mocha that you desire.
For flavors – we offer house-made vanilla, house-made lavender, raw honey (local honey farm), and organic maple.
ABOUT OUR BAKERY
In our bakery, we use only the best ingredients. Pairing my nutrition degree with my mom’s expertise in pastries, we are able to produce the best quality and all-natural soft-baked biscotti. Most cafe’s claim that they “bake fresh”, but this typically translates to purchasing the frozen item from a distributor and baking it in their oven. At our bakery, we truly bake from scratch with windows surrounding our bakery’s kitchen. You can see Chef Toni or me measuring, mixing, and baking all of our loaves by hand. We use and support local vendors such as 3 Sister’s Farm – cage fewer eggs, Houston Pecan Co for our dried fruits and nuts, and are always adding new ones with every new ingredient that we source.
The best part of our biscotti bakery is the fact that because they are all SOFT-BAKED, not traditional twice baked, crunchy, everyone can enjoy the – kids to adults.
OUR BISCOTTI BAR
A little about the biscotti flavors on our bar…
We offer a full glass bakery case of a variety of soft-baked biscotti every day. The three signature flavors that always stay on the bar are: natural blonde (a vanilla, sweet almond), nutty brunette (chocolate biscotti, almonds, dipped in dark chocolate, and named after the “Pastry Chef’s daughter (Lisa)), and the rich red (a dark chocolate red velvet).
There are a few classics that are also committed to the daily bar: chocolate chip, breakfast cinnamon roll (this is soft like the inside of a cinnamon roll), apricot oat (tastes like a granola bar), lemon poppy seed, and two gluten-free flavors that periodically rotate. My favorite gluten free flavor is Confetti – a close sister of birthday cake.
Other popular flavors that rotate from week to week or season to season are: lemon blueberry, black forest (valentine’s day special), orange-cranberry walnut, mint chip pistachio, pumpkin spice, peppermint mocha, brambleberry crisp, and a few savory biscotti: bacon cheese biscuit, goat cheese and herb, and black pepper parmesan.
We are currently most proud of our newest partnership with Peli Peli Kitchen (as seen on Food Network). The South African concept was created here in Houston and launched a new location on Aug 22, 2018, inside of Whole Foods 365 in Houston and invited us to join by baking their very own S African influenced biscotti, called Sticky Toffee. We only offer that biscotti flavor exclusively through Peli Peli. We have had such a great experience working with the Peli Peli team that we can’t wait to grow into more relationships through our soft-baked biscotti!
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Success is achieving the goal that you set out to do regardless of how many times the goal changes. Sometimes the original goal led you to where you need to be today but isn’t what you were meant to achieve.
Success is definitely in the eye of the beholder. No one can define your own success than you!
Contact Info:
- Address: 1000 W Gray St #100
Houston, TX 77019 - Website: www.blondebiscotti.com
- Phone: 713-955-2952
- Email: contact@blondebiscotti.com
- Instagram: @blondebiscotti
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blondebiscotti
- Twitter: Blonde Biscotti
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/blonde-biscotti-houston-2
- Other: Blonde Biscotti
Image Credit:
Lisa
Getting in touch: VoyageHouston is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
