Candy New Glendale Digs for Hometown Chocolatier Valerie Confections

This Saturday, and simply in time for vacation purchasing season, Valerie Gordon and her husband and enterprise accomplice, Stan Weightman Jr., will unveil a candy new behemoth within the type of Valerie Confections’s new 5,000-square-foot headquarters in Glendale. The 18-year-old model’s new house base at 1936 W. Glenoaks Boulevard, which features a retail space that’s open to the general public, will home the entire baking and chocolate manufacturing, and can function an workplace and occasions house down the road.

It’s an enormous step for the model: Not solely did Gordon just lately deliver on a brand new culinary director, Mozza Group alum Dahlia Narvaez, to run the manufacturing aspect of issues — due to this fact releasing her as much as give attention to the model’s artistic course — however she’s within the strategy of hiring extra key management positions. Plus, the brand new house will enable the corporate to vastly increase its wholesale manufacturing capabilities. (Whereas Gordon closed her 3360 W. First Road location in making the transfer to Glendale, Valerie Echo Park stays open.)

“Common interactivity is the factor that’s most enjoyable to me about this new house,” Gordon says. “We’ve created a spot for employees that feels stimulating, the place they really feel taken care of, artistic, and happy. And we’ll be inviting individuals in to collaborate on occasions and tastings. Quickly we’ll attain no less than thrice as many wholesale clients and launch house deliveries.”

The HQ’s retail part is stocked with an array of Valerie Confections favorites, starting from chocolate bars and build-your-own chocolate containers to petit fours, pies, fruit jams, house-made granola, Gordon’s cookbook Candy, and desserts just like the now-iconic Blum’s Espresso Crunch Cake. Extra retail alternatives will likely be out there in 2023, as will espresso and espresso service utilizing beans from AAPI-owned Sir Owlverick’s.

Accomplished up in crisp white subway tile with concrete flooring, the store incorporates temperature-controlled show instances and shelving made utilizing wooden from Valerie Confections’s older places, like its former Grand Central Market stall, plus brass and vintage fixtures. Weightman designed and common the entire picket shows with designer Derek Mabra. From the retail space, clients can see into the corporate’s chocolate manufacturing kitchen, which sits behind a row of home windows.

As for the house’s expansive kitchens, one will give attention to occasions someday subsequent yr, whereas one other will likely be primarily for baking and mixing. The house additionally features a eating room for personal dinners and tastings, in addition to an out of doors space outfitted with two Lettuce Develop stands for edible flowers and the like to make use of on desserts and pastries. There’s even three Large Inexperienced Eggs for grilling occasions, as Gordon is a grilling aficionado as effectively.

Valerie Confections’s opening hours will likely be Monday by way of Saturday from 9 a.m. to five p.m.