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In 1863, the founder Jean-Baptiste Camus understood that his quest for the utmost refinement in his Cognac required the creation of a dedicated, independent House.

Living in Europe among the chocolate greats created a desire to bring the high-end chocolate experience to chocolate milk.

Living and working in NYC as a 20-something year old is an absolute grind. Balancing work, social life and everything in between challenged me to insert healthy lifestyle habits into every facet, especially eating. During days that I didn’t indulge over a restaurant feast, I forced myself to eat as healthy as possible, which led me to buy frozen cauliflower crust pizzas. It was a way for me to add a fun twist to my usual (read: boring) salad-eating cycle. After experiencing numerous weeks of empty grocery shelves and failure to find take out options, I decided to start making the veggie-carb substitute pizzas myself. Naturally, the “Babson” inside of me identified a gap in the food service space and scrambled to figure out a way to fill it. From there, I haven’t looked back, because I enjoy the product and I enjoy the work. The best part is that I’m literally faced with a new problem every single day, which challenges me to think innovatively, logically and patiently. For example, when I first started crafting the brand, I targeted health conscious millennial's. But now, after interacting with consumers, affinity groups and mentors, we’re evaluating a shift towards focusing on a market with dietary restrictions since our kitchen is dedicated gluten-free and our pizza can be vegan. Working through these daily decisions is truly gratifying and fuels me to continue being an entrepreneur.

A key and a coconut. When we popped open a coconut and stuck a straw in it to drink real fresh coconut water we realized what we were being sold in the U.S. was not the real deal. So we stuffed our luggage with a bunch of them, brought them back to Miami and the craze caught flame! We were inspired to expand our product line into premium rum because we believe rum is a spirit that many people haven’t had the pleasure of enjoying the right way. Much like we have seen happen with tequila and whiskey, rum is the next category to “premiumize” and to offer new, exciting brands from all over the world.

Right after graduation, I started working for Chase Manhattan Bank in Istanbul. After 2 years, I realized that I didn’t enjoy working in an established company repeating similar tasks all the time. I was urged to create something from zero and grow it without any boundaries. After searching for a gap in a niche market, I noticed that there were no cookbooks published in Turkey which had pictures for recipes. So I found myself a partner who graduated from Cordon Bleu and who wanted to write a cookbook as well. After our second cookbook, we decided to create a trademark which would help sell our cookbooks and vice versa. At that point, we noticed that there were no artisanal chocolate shops in Turkey. Butterfly Chocolate was born to fill this need.

Experiencing the food and drink of Texas while working for Exxon, just after graduating from Babson. Bring these tastes to Boston.

I’ve been making mead since college. On my 30th birthday I decided to stop in to the Sunset Grill and treat myself to something different. They had mead there: $5 for 2oz and it was the worst mead I’d ever tried. I said that I could do better than that. The seed was probably planted then although I didn’t realize it. It wasn’t until I was at Babson that I started to think about this more seriously. I would brew mead when I needed to decompress. I started to think there could be a future here and started to research the market. When I tracked 5 meaderies over a 4 year data period and saw that mead was growing at 700% / year, I knew that it was on the cusp of a craft mead explosion like the craft beer explosion of the '90s. I wanted to be ready when that happened.

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