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Norman Love has won the hearts of chocolate and candy lovers all over in the last 15 years through Norman Love Confections, his Fort Myers-based Willy Wonka-esque company. The business makes at least 7 million chocolates a year, in addition to gelato and cakes. It includes a retail, wholesale and online operation.
Now Love has won the minds of thousands of Reddit users. Reddit is a social news aggregation site with a niche in user-generated content, including a popular feature called AMA: Ask Me Anything.
Love logged on to Reddit Feb. 6 with, in part, this note: “I'm chooclatier Norman Love, AM (and my guard dog Sid) A about chocolate/pastry/baking/entrepreneurship.”
Reddit users ate it up.
They bombarded Love with questions and comments, and then comments on the answers, over the next 24 hours. There were more than 8,000 viewers at one point, and at least 600 comments during the real-time interview. “You guys are awesome and this has been a blast,” Love wrote late at night. “I'm old and tired so I'm going to call it a night, but I'll try to answer as many questions as I can when I wake up in the morning!”
Highlights of Love's Ask Me Anything interview include:
• The toughest part about opening a shop: “When it was a small scale operation I could run it pretty much from the comfort of my home (and later a tiny medical building turned kitchen); when things took off and I'd outgrown that, getting all the infrastructure in place was really daunting.
Securing a production facility, outfitting it with all the necessary equipment, finding qualified staff to help me and getting big-time suppliers to take me seriously was tough. I was lucky to have made a lot of connections during my time at the Ritz that helped me immensely along the way, but making that transition was still incredibly difficult, especially with no guarantee of success.”
• His most delicious confection: “My favorite individual piece is definitely our Tahitian salted caramel. As far as cakes/entremets go, any combination of chocolate and hazelnut. Can't go wrong.”
• His favorite commercial store bought sweet: “Not exactly a 'store,' but I'll take a Dairy Queen cheesecake blizzard over just about anything.”
• Cannabis-infused chocolate: “If it were legal here I'd certainly consider it, although I don't know the first thing about cooking with cannabis so I'm sure there'd have to be a lot of trial and error involved to find a ratio that tasted good and still provided all the medical benefits.”
• The last thing he wrapped in bacon: “Dates at one of my favorite Fort Myers restaurants, Cru. One of my favorite salty/sweet pairings.”
• Favorite movie: “Godfather I. Or II. Never III.” (In response to that answer, a Reddit user posted this reply: “I will spend money at your store this week because of this answer.”)
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