Two summer residents team up to bring some sugar-coated nostalgia back to Nantucket.

FOOD & DRINK

story by Antonia DePace

photography by Alexandria Eigo and Kendal Lovejoy of Lovejoy Studios

Cacao, cocoa butter, sugar and milk are the standard ingredients to make a chocolate bar—but add in Caroline Witmer and Sarah Michler’s love for Nantucket, and you’ll understand Tuck Shop’s sweet result. Launched in late May, the bespoke chocolate bar brand was spotted throughout the island this summer at Sconset Market, Pâtisserie by PPX Events, The Green Market, Epernay, Bookworks, Nantucket Looms, Faraway Hotels and Greydon House.

“When Sweet Inspirations closed, we were inspired to bring more chocolate back to the island,” explains Witmer. Both she and Michler have been summering on the island with their families since childhood. In turn, Tuck Shop—whose name is an ode to the island and a play on the name of British boarding school confectionary shops—still brought a bit of Sweet Inspirations with the brand through the cranberry chocolate bar, inspired by the previous shop’s chocolate-covered cranberries.

Starting with the packaging, Witmer and Michler teamed up with illustrator Tess Ramirez of My Father’s Daughter Designs to create a Nantucket-centric toile pocket casing. On the outside, there are iconic Nantucket symbols (Brant Point Lighthouse, baskets, sailboats, bicycles and flowers), and there’s space to customize the label with names, messages, logos and art accordingly. “You want to capture the sense and the essence of this place,” Michler says. “We want people who really love the island to appreciate what we picked to put into the toile.”

When it comes to the actual chocolate inside, the women partnered with a Brooklyn-based chocolatier who sources her cacao from a family-owned farm in Colombia. “We maintain simple ingredients. It’s celebrating the simplicity of the product, but actually ensuring that each element of the product and packaging is of a high quality. We’re not cutting corners,” Witmer says.

While the brand is currently more focused on a strong presence in the event space—the bars were seen at this year’s Nantucket by Design week and the Nantucket Film Festival, as well as some of the island’s weddings— there’s also a hope of launching them in more locations with packaging inspired by those destinations. A first step was made toward this in September, when a New York City adaptation was created.

“There are so many different ways we can go with this product. And we’ve started small intentionally so that we have the flexibility to adapt and to see where this brings us and lean in when it makes sense,” Witmer explains. But, it all circles back to Nantucket, the original inspiration, and according to Michler, an on-island storefront in the future isn’t out of the question. She says, “That’s the dream.”