Corporate to Chocolate

Today she is head chocolate maker at She Chocolat, the Governors Bay café and chocolaterie, near  Christchurch.

Tempering chocolate so it hardens to a glossy finish is a messy business and Oonagh’s usual work attire consists of jeans and a chef’s jacket, quite a contrast to the smart wardrobe required of a corporate high flyer.

“I was like Miss Corporate. I had the suits, the BMW, the whole bag.”

She still clearly remembers the moment she decided to chuck in her job after seven years with multinational Proctor and Gamble in London.

“My boss came in for a performance review and he said ‘The only thing that’s stopping you becoming the managing director is time.’ I thought ‘what’s the point I could do it now!’ The drive to do it just burst completely.”

She and then partner Declan Scott set off to travel the world. They eventually settled in Australia where Oonagh taught yoga and started a family, but then someone gave her a chocolate recipe book.

“It lit my fire and I discovered something I didn’t know was inside. When I was a kid I’d always save my money for a good bar of chocolate rather than the cheap stuff. I wasn’t a chocoholic but chocolate was always something I enjoyed.”

Initially playing with chocolate was just a hobby and she was thrilled when an organics shop in Byron Bay agreed to buy her Decadent Dates stuffed with chocolate hazelnut paste and coated in chocolate. When the family moved to New Zealand to help friends run the She (Spiritual Human Evolution) Café, Oonagh’s Decadent Dates were a hit at the local farmers market.

Her little sideline turned serious when a friend told her about a closing down sale at a hospitality shop. “They had about five of the key pieces of equipment that I needed at rock bottom prices. All up it cost me $5000 and I thought, ‘It can go on the credit card, I’m just going to go for this.’”

Oonagh set up a ‘chocolate room’ at home in a gutted bathroom, and apart from completing a six-month on-line Canadian chocolate making course, she is completely self-taught.

Two years ago the chocolaterie moved into the café and a major investment in European equipment means she no longer has to hand dip up to 1600 Decadent Dates a week.

The business now employs three staff and the range has expanded to include single origin bars made from chocolate from Papua New Guinea, Madagascar, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic.

A relationship with a tiny Fiji cacao farm north of Suva led to the development of another new product: cacao beans rolled in organic chocolate.

In September She Chocolat imported a 1947 London Bus, which will operate around Christchurch as a mobile chocolate café with inspirational movies screened in the Shevolutionary Lounge on the top deck. 

Eager to share her obsession with chocolate Oonagh runs one-day chocolate indulgence tours where participants are encouraged to try chocolate with everything from blue cheese to rice crackers.

She also offers intensive three-day chocolate making classes, which attract students from as far away as Auckland.

Despite abandoning the corporate life, Oonagh readily admits that her business background has proved extremely useful.

“I understand about accounts, I understand costings, the practical things that allow a business to hum. There are at least three chocolates we only sell direct from the café because they are so time consuming to make, they’re not viable to wholesale.”

Oonagh has never regretted her radical career change and seems to thrive on the challenge of juggling the demands of her job with the needs of her three children (aged three to eight).

“When I walked away from the corporate world, I walked away from those kinds of fears. When we moved to New Zealand we didn’t know how we were going to support ourselves. We just trusted that by following our passion, everything else would flow from that.

“I don’t have the word ‘work’ in my vocabulary any more; it’s just life. I feel like I live a seven-day weekend.”