Video Transcript – Eric Torres-Garcia: From Boise State Student to Chocolatier
Video Transcript
(upbeat music)
[Eric Torres-Garcia:] A Cocoa Bomb is a new way to drink hot chocolate. It’s basically a hallowed chocolate sphere. You place this bomb inside of a mug, pour some hot milk over it and then you watch the marshmallows explode to the top, stir it around and it makes a really yummy cup of hot chocolate.
(upbeat music)
The moment I knew this was going to be a very viable product was when I started going viral. So I uploaded this video and within minutes it had a thousand views and then I refreshed it, it was 3000, 5000 and so on.
Shortly after that my first order came through, I remember thinking like, “Oh cool, maybe if I get a couple more orders throughout the day, I can start working on them tomorrow.” I completely underestimated that because by the end of the day I had over $7000 worth of orders. I had hundreds of customers to ship products to and I had to make over a thousand bombs and I had really only made one Cocoa Bomb.
I basically went back to my entrepreneurial professor at Boise State University, Kent Neupert, who guided me in the right direction of getting an attorney, filing for a trademark, registering the company and then from there, the rest is history.
(upbeat music)
During my degree, I was studying international business. A lot of that really is accounting, marketing and just the general things that a business needs to run and be successful. So, because of that program, I felt that I was able to manage a lot of the things when I first started to build the foundation for the business to then scale it up and move forward.
When we first started in 2019 and 2020, we were working out of a commercial kitchen that was maybe 1/20th of this size [his new, 6,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Blackfoot.] and that makes it really hard to scale up, take a lot of these really large orders and try to grow the business. But now that we have our own space, you know it makes things a lot easier. We keep all of our stuff here and this is where we ship, make, package and distribute all of our items out of.
Really just coming back to the hometown I was raised in, is sort of a tribute to me to give back to my community, give people jobs. Here in this area is really only work in a lot of agricultural sector, potatoes, animals and stuff like that and I really wanted to bring something that was untraditional to that. Candy is something that is completely different and the people that are working for us here and my family are having a lot of fun with this along the way.
(upbeat music)
I owe a lot to my parents, my mom, my dad, my brothers and sisters, all of my family. All my life they really sacrificed a lot. They’ve given us everything that we needed and this is just something that I would like to grow and scale into and then have them be better off for the rest of their life and just sort of unwind and just relax you know. It’s time for me to take over and take care of my family and my parents especially.
(upbeat music)