Brownie Shotz was born from a need. Not a need for brownies or even chocolate so much as a need to work. Having spent most of my career as a designer on everything from theme park attractions for the likes of Disney and Universal (see my website) to movie premiere parties and food products, the one thing they all had in common was that they were projects that eventually came to an end and so I was constantly finding myself out of work. Having returned to Portland after a 23 year stint in Los Angeles, I found myself still looking for work. Then, one fateful evening in March of 2007, I had dinner with a friend and a person I had never met before. He told me how he decided to start a potato chip company beginning with a concept and working toward the product. “Well now,” I thought to myself, “that’s one thing I have plenty of - concepts.” So I quickly searched the files of my brain and dusted off an idea I had had back in the late 80’s when I was designing a lot of movie premiere events with all those great Hollywood caterers, it would be a sort of brownie sampler.

I hurried home, looked up the name Brownie Shotz (the name I had given my new company on the way home) on GoDaddy and to my surprise, it was available. Following my new friend’s lead, I immediately bought the domain name and then looked it up on the department of patents and trademarks’ website and it was available there too. Now, in 15 minutes or so and a few dollars, I had my identity established.


In the next couple of days, being the designer that I am, I designed my logo, put up a temporary website and started experimenting with brownies. And I baked a bushel of brownies. All sorts. Any flavor I could think of. Since they were called “Shotz” anyway, getting inspiration from cocktails seemed like a fit. (Who doesn’t like a little booze in their chocolate?) After I had settled on a few flavors, I took them to my friend at the Food Innovation Center here in Portland and she helped me with finalizing my formulas. (That, I found out was what you called a recipe when it’s made commercially.) She also suggested I cover them in chocolate to extend shelf life, a very important concept in food.


Then came the job of deciding just how to get them into commercial production. There were a couple of ways to go, setting up a commercial kitchen and hiring staff or finding a contract baker to do it. Since I am perpetually broke (starving artist syndrome) and have no credit to speak of, the second option was my only choice.

 But it’s not at all easy to find a baker who also has enrobing capabilities (another bit of production jargon meaning to coat in chocolate). Finally, a friend suggested I split the two funtions and find one person to bake and another to enrobe. So after several months of searching and trying out a few different vendors and possiblities, I found a great bakery that wanted to expand its production line to include people like myself who needed commercial production and a candy company that had an enrobing line it needed to keep constantly enrobing.

Then a big revelation hit me; I’m not creating just brownies here, I’m creating jobs. The fact that delicious, decadent chocolate coated brownies are coming out of the effort is actually just a side benefit. From suppliers to packagers and distributors, I'm creating jobs. And in a country starved for jobs right now, I’d say that was the real product of Brownie Shotz.  But the brownies ain’t bad either.