While reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the sense of flair and craftsmanship in Willy Wonka’s creations make it almost impossible for your imagination to start drooling and craving for some of his chocolate delights.
But one pharmacist is doing her best to come close to Willy Wonka’s genius with her own luxurious chocolate side hustle.
Venessa Liang is a Chinese Canadian pharmacist based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and has been specialising in oncology since 2019.
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When she isn’t calculating chemotherapy doses or counselling patients on their medications, she’s often found in her garage producing food art through the science of chocolate making.
On her website, she displays a rainbow of intricately shaped chocolates. Whether it’s ‘Love’ written in squished typeface covered in gold, brittle designed in pink, geometric ridges, or bubbly blue bars, it’s hard not add to your cart immediately.
But her chocolate “studio” is only open to the public “once a year, every year during the holiday season”, she tells C+D.
It’s for her chocolate bar launches, and her latest one arrived on November 22 this year. It’s become an annual thing for “sanity reasons”, partly due to the demand people have for her chocolate and for her own “pure enjoyment”.
“Making lots of varieties, different flavours and different styles, that's what’s most satisfying for me instead of making one design, then 1000 of them. I have no interest in that."
And the range of flavours give you a peak into her curiosity of introducing new recipes: pistachio, roasted black sesame, rhubarb ganache, Genmaicha rice tea, and miso all feature in her chocolate.
Gold coating and cacao shortages
This year, Liang put these flavours into 45 advent calendars, 200 bars of chocolate, and 16 packs of bonbons which had four per pack.
“It’s very crazy. This year I made way more than I have ever made. I've been trying to slow the sale down for years now, because it's so hard for people to get their hands on chocolate, especially for people that have never had it before. The people that have ordered it in the past, they know what they're doing.
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“I also do this special thing that's called the Vault, which is essentially a specialty box that contains every single flavour of bar that I make from the collection, plus a bonus bar. I decorate it with 24 carat gold, then put a little jar of caramel that I've made or pistachio brittle.
“That's one of the biggest ticket items, and the most expensive thing you can buy. The reason for that is because anytime anyone attempts to buy and add to cart every single flavour, they end up losing out because one flavour will sell out too quickly.”
Her prices range from CA$35 to CA$600, which is equivalent to a range of £20 to £335. It’s expensive, but with food supply chain prices notoriously rising over the last few years, it hit the chocolate market too for Venessa.
“I priced a lot more people out this year. The chocolate was already expensive to start with, but this year I had increased my prices significantly with the cacao shortage around the world and chocolate doubling in price. So, I increased my prices accordingly to that.”
But Liang still sells out her chocolate bars within hours of them going online, with the bars gone in “15-20 minutes” and the calendars “by the end of the day”.
TV success
This is helped by her loyal online following. Liang has a very active @Foodiepharmbabe social media account with her Facebook, Instagram and TikTok accounts combined reaching nearly 40,000 followers.
It’s not just chocolate-related content she posts, often mixing it with lifestyle videos showing what her day-to-day life involves. But her popularity has led her to having fans far away from Canada.
“I have a returning fan every year that always orders from the Netherlands,” reveals Liang, and apparently “she doesn’t care” about the extra delivery costs.
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“Because of the time difference for the launch, she’s setting her alarm to wake up at 01:45am to get her orders through for 2am. She got two orders through and was trying to put her third purchase through, and her bank locked her card. She called her bank in the morning, had everything unfrozen, and then ordered one last calendar that morning.”
Liang’s introduction to food has come through growing up in her family’s restaurant, and from there she’s “been baking my entire life”.
It led her to baking cakes and to an incredibly high standard, often baking signature pieces for weddings centred around her speciality of buttercream.
Images from her website show these magnificently tiered creations, as Liang admits “I was known to make elaborate, fancy cakes before the chocolate”.
But when Liang was asked to participate in a new Canadian baking show that aired in 2020, titled ‘Great Chocolate Showdown’, this was when her chocolate journey started.
“I never would have done chocolate without being on that show for sure, so I'm thankful that it happened. Ever since, I felt very motivated to become better at it.”
“There’s a lot of behind the scenes that happens on TV baking shows that people don’t really know about. They don't understand how much learning and teaching you actually get prior to an episode.”
“I had a lot of professionals teach me things that I would not have learned on my own, so I got a very good basic knowledge of how chocolate worked.”
“It was a very stressful experience. TV is not as glamorous as people think. For sure, it looks all sparkly and beautiful and colourful, but it's actually very, very stressful to film. And you're up for 19 hours, doing all these interviews.”
“Seeing people crash and break down on TV makes so much sense now. I'm grateful for the experience, but I think that the last five years of myself learning, and trial and error have helped me grow compared to the show itself.”
Valrhona or basic bitch chocolate?
In the years since filming took place, Liang has been spending almost any minute outside of her pharmacy work perfecting the craft of chocolate making.
And when it comes to launch date, the schedule is gruelling. Her lead in time is just under two months in advance of the sale going live.
“I come home from work, I make chocolate until I go to bed, and then I make chocolate on the weekends.”
She never knows how many she will make, but it’s more a case of how many she can “get done”.
Sourcing the right ingredients is essential to the quality of what Liang produces, as she buys “exclusively Valrhona chocolate” which is “very high grade, what chefs would use in Michelin star restaurants”.
She has a community she uses to find this chocolate as “it’s not common to find this type of chocolate here (Saskatoon)”.
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“It is really not sustainable for a business to buy this chocolate because it’s so expensive. A 3kg bag of Valrhona raspberry inspiration is CA$300 which is crazy.
“Because I’m only doing this once a year, I have no margins. It’s for fun, and I don’t have to make a profit even though I am.
“I love food, eating, experiencing new cuisines. So, bringing that here and sharing it with my community is really important to me, and mostly will impact what flavours I decide on doing.
“There are flavours and speciality chocolate that most people here have never experienced."
Valrhona has a line of specialty inspiration couverture made with new chocolate-making technology that incorporates fruit or nuts into the process.
But rather than it being fruit flavoured, Liang explains the fruit will be “dehydrated, ground to powder and incorporated into cocoa butter to make its own form of chocolate”.
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“There's so many new varieties and special types now because of science and bringing those here has been one of the most exciting things for me, because it's the most delicious chocolate on its own without doing anything to it. It is so good!
“But then I'm taking that and using that as my base. So that's my chocolate shell, I create ganache out of it, all these other things with these really amazing baseline ingredients.
“It kind of turns into this piece of art for me.” Her favourite flavour is the Valrhona raspberry inspiration, but she likes the “punch in the moth” flavour of yuzu too.
She gets some help from her husband, who gets to design one flavour every year to “appease the basic bitches” with more common flavours.
“We’ll take something that is seemingly basic and elevate it. The latest one he did is the IG husband oolong infused cookies & cream. I infuse chocolate in oolong tea for about four days, [and] I make my own Oreos. It’s so delicious!”
The science in chocolate and pharmacy
And with such a long lead-in process for her chocolate bar launch dates, Liang feels her biggest achievement has been “learning to ask for help”.
“I'm getting people to do the tasks that I truly don't want to do, like making boxes, labelling, and essentially making those processes a bit easier so I can focus on the things I enjoy most, the actual creative side of things, the flavour development, the tempering.
“Finding that balance has been hard, especially when I'm working full time. It's made it so I'm able to make much more and also still enjoy the process.”
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With her pharmacy day job, there are perhaps more similarities with chocolate-making than what it seems.
Chocolate and medication both have to be stored at certain temperatures to be safe to consume. And shortages in the supply chain as mentioned with cacao are a constant with pharmacy as medicine shortages are rife.
“Chocolate is very much a science, so it does cross paths with pharmacy. I try to explain the chocolate process to people [as] the common thought is you melt it and pour it into a mold – that’s absolutely not the case.
“There's so much science behind it in terms of the tempering process, bringing it up to a certain temperature and breaking it down, seeding it with a certain percentage of the weight. So, it's similar to compounding.
“I would also say the practice of making chocolate has a very narrow window of success and a very wide window of error. So, there's a lot of ways you can mess it up, whether it's temperature, humidity, crystallization, time, emulsion. The water activity there is in a chocolate bar that will affect its shelf life, its stability, its smoothness or mouth feel.
“Otherwise, it's very much more of a creative outlet for me than cancer care itself. That is also attention to detail where you don't want to make mistakes, because it is very life threatening when you're calculating doses and taking drug levels.”
Chocolate wine tasting
Will she make the jump from pharmacist to chocolatier anytime soon?
“No, I love my pharmacy job! It's also what pays the bill, let's be honest. It's very fulfilling, and it's a big part of my life that I truly do enjoy.
“I probably wouldn't buy chocolate that's CA$300 a bag if I was only doing this chocolate as a business. I'm just proud of what I'm making each year. It's better every year.
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“A lot of times people think bigger is better. Quit your job, have a factory, and it's not always the case.
“The volume isn't really the big deal for me. If I have to make 1000 of something, I hate it. It's so boring. What's special to me is making something that's really unique and spending a lot of time on it.”
But Liang still wants a better balance where she can “work less” and “rest more”, although she has other chocolate adventures she wants to embark on.
“Doing things like chocolate wine tasting, having events where I could have people involved in the chocolate instead of selling my bars in eight minutes once a year.”
And she warns anyone attempting to become the next Willy Wonka “it’s way harder than it looks”.
“Chocolate is not forgiving. If something feels off, it’s not going to work. You have to respect the science, the temperature, and it really takes a lot of practice.
“I feel like I can get really good at something very quickly, but chocolate was still something that very much humbled me.”
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Nothing new: the founder of Belgian Chocolatier Neuhaus was a pharmacist who opened his business in Brussels in 1857 after his idea of making medicines more palatable by coating them in chocolate took off in a big way...👍
https://www.neuhauschocolates.com/en_LU/our-story/ourstory.html?cid=ourstory