Great Day! That’s how Chocolatier and owner of Lula’s
Chocolates, Scott Lund,
greets everyone in his path. With his energetic stride and
warm grin, Scott makes everyone’s day finer just by offering
his good wishes. And the good wishes are second only to the
great chocolates being made in small, perfectly delectable batches
at the Lula’s factory in Monterey, where Scott loves to
pull out some of his recently cooled chocolates for the unexpected
guest to savor. “What’s your favorite?”
he’ll ask. “Light? Dark? How about a
caramel, a crème, or a nut cluster? Or what about our
lavender truffle?” Because Scott is absolutely
passionate about delighting people with the fresh and heavenly
chocolate pieces he creates, everyone who walks through the door at
Lula’s is sure to leave with a chocolate-made smile and a new
obsession.
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Scott
learned first hand the art of chocolate making from his
grandmother, Lula, who for thirty years made chocolates in Salt Lake City
under the name of Mrs. Lund’s Personality Chocolates. Lula
Lund was born in Cowley,
Wyoming in 1901.
During her teenage years, her Home Economics teacher boarded at the
family home. This teacher taught Lula how to make confections in
her kitchen after school. In 1945 Lula began selling her homemade
confections. She developed a following among local wholesalers and
retailers. By the time she was 70, she was making candies only for
her friends and sold less than 200 pounds of candy a year.
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In 1996, Lula’s grandson, Scott Lund, moved from Texas
to Salt Lake City,
where she taught him how to make confections the home-fashioned way. “Confectionary
is really about the marriage of chemistry and art,” says
Scott. “My grandmother understood the art of it.
She was meticulous with quantities in a recipe but said things
like ‘now go ahead and stir it until it’s
done.’” According to Scott, she knew the feel of
candy the way good cooks do in the kitchen. But to learn the precise
chemistry of it, Scott enrolled in several confectionary classes,
where he mastered the art of “building crystals,” which
is the science of heating cream and sugar and then forming sugar
crystals that are no larger than 30 microns. At this level, the
fondant center becomes exceptionally smooth and creamy, and the human
mouth detects it as a wonderful ganache in flavors of vanilla,
chocolate, mint, penuche, or raspberry. From the time of Grandma
Lula’s death in 2000, Scott carried on the Lula’s
tradition by making chocolate confections for holiday sales, family
gifts, catered events, and corporate sales. Most notably,
Lula’s provided chocolates for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic
Opening and Closing Ceremony events. The event was extremely
successful and everyone fell in love with the hand dipped chocolates.
And thus was born the idea: move to a place on the coast where
there’s “chocolate weather” year round, where
locals will buy chocolates, and tourists will take them home and then
devotedly reorder them on the internet. In 2004, Scott decided to relocate
Lula’s to the Monterey
Peninsula, a community that
he had come to love during his teen years when his family lived in Carmel.
In November of 2006, Lula’s Chocolates
opened a factory in Ryan Ranch and in December of 2008, Lula’s
first retail store opened at The Crossroads Shopping Village in Carmel.
The dream became a reality and Scott’s passion for Lula’s
keeps growing as he seeks for new ways to please all chocolate
lovers.
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