range of artistic disciplines. She studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, earned an Art History degree from Smith College, returned to Vermont for a stint at New England Culinary Institute, and built restaurant experience from South Carolina to Boston. Eventually, she stepped away from professional kitchens and wondered whether the food industry was the right fit. The answer arrived in December 2018 during a holiday visit home, when she made marshmallows with her mom. It was a craft she had first experimented with a decade earlier, but this time, everything lined up.
Over the course of three days, Shuman developed three recipes, built a simple website, and told everyone she knew that she was selling handcrafted marshmallows for Christmas. Two weeks later, she had sold a thousand dollars’ worth of marshmallows from a single home kitchen, handwriting labels the first night, and teaching herself Photoshop the second.“ It was the hardest thing I’ d ever done,” recalls Shuman.“ It was also one of the most rewarding.” She launched soon after in 2019, with an official run that quickly gained momentum in the local food scene through sheer tenacity and organic, frontline promotion.
At the Burlington Farmers Market, Shuman learned how quickly an initially-skeptical“ no” can turn into a converted, loyal customer. Plenty of shoppers told her they hated marshmallows. She would respond with the following cordial invitation:“ That’ s cool … have you tried mine?” Ensuing conversations and marshmallow converts stacked up, and the business was in full swing.
Expansion: Spaces, People, Channels, and the Art of Refinement
True growth and expansion began with a simple step forward: more room to make marshmallows. About eighteen months in, at the height of the COVID pandemic, Shuman moved production after hours into the kitchen at Willow’ s Bagels in Burlington. A single batch jumped from roughly five retail bags to about seventeen. Shuman points out that when it comes to scaling marshmallows, it isn’ t just about pure arithmetic; a batch that is four times the size needs an entirely different approach. She fine-tuned temperatures and timings until the texture returned to her original standards.
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