Welcome to The Marshmallow Factory story

A lot of people ask us " how did you ever come up with this idea".  Simply put, it's all about the chocolate marshmallow & the one's that didn't exist on store shelves. 

It kind of all started when we were out at our seasonal camp site in September of 2022.  

One Sunday evening in September, sitting around the camp fire 🔥 with our kids & a few good friends as we usually did. 

The conversation about S'mores came up and we started talking about how popular the whole s'mores thing used to be when we were kids.  S'mores always went hand & hand with campfires when my wife & I were both growing up. Now, not so much with this generation. It's almost a forgotten Canadian tradition. 

We all started to get the munchies with all this talk about S'mores, marshmallows, chocolate and graham crackers so I went to grab the supplies from the cabin so we could all make some.  I came back to the campfire with some bad news.... We didn't have any chocolate & the marshmallows we had sitting in the cupboard were hard & stale letting everyone in on the unfortunate bad news.  

 I sat back down & we all continued the conversation when one of our boys asked "why are there only 2 flavours of marshmallows?" We all kind of pondered the question but nobody had the answer.  Our oldest spoke up and said "dad, why don't you just make a chocolate marshmallow? We wouldn't have to worry about not having chocolate if we had chocolate marshmallows".  I nodded & said ' I could probably make a chocolate marshmallow."  

The night went on as well as the conversation until one by one we left the camp fire to retreat to our beds for the evening. 

The next few days passed & I couldn't get the chocolate marshmallow thing out of my head. I kept thinking, how hard can it be to make a marshmallow. 

I grew up taking baking classes in school, had a stay at home mom who cooked & baked religiously &  I had dabbled quite a bit with many of my own baking recipes. I loved coming up with new things & felt good when people liked what I made.  I felt I was quite versed in the baking world & loved the creative process and science behind it.

The day had passed & while on my phone that evening "you know,  those devices that are attached to our hands all day long that pretty much listen to every word it hears" well my phone had started popping up videos of this company called The Marshmallow co who are based out of Australia. I watched a few video reels & was instantly engaged with inspiration & excitement! I watched more & more & i just couldn't stop watching! I thought to myself "wow, this is really a thing and we need to bring this here. Canada needs this, we're like the s'mores capital of the world.  We all need this in our lives & I can do this.  

This may be a great way to also revive the quality family time around the campfire's we all used to share & enjoy as kids ourselves. If theirs one thing i know now as i get older that i didn't as a child, it's the value of a memory.

If only we can show this to everyone & someone could open a little marshmallow shop in Canada or something. Not realizing that this was something we would embark on in our near future. 

If you know me, you know once I get an idea in my head it's hard to stop me from chasing after it.

I eventually fell asleep with phone "in hand", likely dreaming of these fluffy, puffy gourmet marshmallow clouds of excitement. 

The next morning I awoke from my dreamy state &immediately  started to look up videos on how to make homemade  marshmallows. I found a few basic recipes & It seemed doable but also very appeared expensive, time consuming & messy. My wife was not going to like what I was going to do next. Especially if it had to do with her kitchen.  

later on that day I remember going to the store & buying all the bottles of corn syrup, boxes of those little packages of gelatin & a large 15 kg bag of  sugar from the local grocery store. I defiantly got some strange looks with over 15 bottles of corn syrup in my cart. Thankfully we already had some pure Mexican vanilla in our pantry at home. 

When I arrived home with groceries in hand, my wife Dena said "what the hell are you making now?" Those were really her exact words. I kind of felt like i was in a lot of trouble before i even started.

I laughed and said "I'm making marshmallows." She replied "you don't even have a mixer, you need a big mixer for that, your not making marshmallows in my kitchen!", she exclaimed.  I said " oh, ya I guess I need one of those things. 

 So I called Grandma & asked if I could borrow he's for a day which really ended up being a whole month until we bought our own.  Very glad we bought our own since I ended up blowing up 2 of them, breaking the whip attachments on a few and burning one motor out on the other. Thank God for the good return policies where I bought these from. 

Yes I destroyed a lot of mixers while I experimented with our own recipes the following month.  

With many failed batches, flavouring and texture issues I finally perfected the perfect base recipe that gave the result we were looking for. I was so done with the process at the time trying to make a decent marshmallow. I wanted to give up a few times & it was getting expensive to keep failing. But finally we had a winner. So the moral of that story..... Don't give up because I wouldn't be writing this right now if we did!

Once we had the basic formula for the recipe, the hard part was done.  

Now we needed to figure out what we wanted to make for flavours. 

At this time making a business out of this was not even on our minds. We just wanted a better marshmallow and more flavour options. This was just still all for fun at this point. I had lots of time on my hands not being able to work a full time job & the pain throughout my body was getting pretty bad. I felt maybe it was getting worse because I was getting older. 

At family dinner we tasked  the kids to figure out which marshmallow flavours we wanted to make & try out. You know, ones we would actually like to eat.  It was almost a given, we needed to do a chocolate marshmallow first and foremost because that's what started this all. 

At firs,t creating the marshmallows wasn't about presentation or how they looked in general. They had to taste good. We do like marshmallows and could never live without them but we're not big marshmallow fans so our # 1 goal was taste. We needed to turn our like for marshmallows into love! The marshmallows needed to taste amazingly good or this was going to be a huge waste of time & money. We figured over time the aesthetics would take shape & it would somehow sort itself out if it  even needed to. 

At this time we already knew Mexican Vanilla bean was going to have to be a staple as the base flavour profile to add to all the batches.  It also helps bring out and add a creaminess factor to any other flavor we decided to add to it.  

We looked up some professional candy flavours that were available online, made our selections and waited for them to arrive.  This was going to take a week or two. 

While we were waiting for the candy flavours to arrive & me being me, we kept experimenting.  The first trial flavour was born " Chocolate  marshmallow". 

This was about the time I found out that  this chemistry experiment was not going to be smooth sailing. Even though we had a perfect base recipe, adding a powdered Dutch chocolate flavouring into our mix ended up as a failed batch over and over again. I had no idea if I was doing something wrong, missing a crucial step or if it was the form of chocolate I was using. I had no idea why this was happening.  It was definitely frustrating.

The chocolate cocoa powder deflated our marshmallows & it was back to the drawing board. 

Nope, we were not going to be using fake chocolate flavouring, that's not an option. It needs to be real chocolate cocoa marshmallows.

I searched for answers asking Google;s help all day long, i finally gave in & asked a baker friend who just happens to be a professional baker by trade.  We tried a few new things making the necessary recipe process & volume changes.  After some creative suggestions & testing from the professional baker we knew, we had solved the chemistry issue. 

We were so excited we pushed through & persevered to create our first real chocolate cocoa Marshmallow. It was perfect. It didn't deflate, the marshmallow was soft, fluffy & tasted like a good quality chocolate marshmallow. We were taken back & impressed with the outcome. . 

 It's likely the candy industry doesn't have chocolate marshmallows on the shelves because you wouldn't need to buy chocolate bars for your s'mores anymore if the did. Haha. Just a thought to one of our original questions that started us on this journey. Why is there only two marshmallow flavours on store shelves? 

Now that we had a chocolate marshmallow, what could we add to it to make it even better?  

Honestly at this point I'm thinking of substance & more textures to add, not only as a flavour experience but now a full on texture explosion for your mouth. This is the game changer!

 Let's change the texture experience on this next one. 

keep reading our journey below as our story continues.......