Cocoa Blue Chocolates has a new owner — someone who is a familiar face to regulars at the Rochester chocolate shop.
Joshua Becker, who opened Cocoa Blue in 2013, has sold the shop to longtime employee Mary Boesdorfer. Boesdorfer has worked at Cocoa Blue for nine years, starting at the store’s former Springfield location in 2017. When that shop closed in 2018, she relocated to the Rochester store, and “that’s really when the intensive training came in,” Becker said.
Boesdorfer and Becker have worked side-by-side at the Rochester store for the past eight years while Boesdorfer honed her chocolatier skills.
“Mary has been making 90 to 95 percent of everything we sell for years now,” Becker said.
The Cocoa Blue sale included both the business and the building at 117 E. Main St. in Rochester.
Becker and Boesdorfer have been talking about the possibility of Boesdorfer taking over the store for three or four years now. Becker said he felt he had taken Cocoa Blue as far as he could, with the store settled into “the most profitable, most efficient form of what works for Cocoa Blue.”
“In the last year or so, I’ve just had the itch to do something else,” Becker said. “I do love making chocolate and being around chocolate, but I need something new, something to challenge myself in some way.”
He said he doesn’t know yet what that something may be. A lawyer by training, he renewed his law license two years ago, and he’s also open to considering new entrepreneurial endeavors.
“I’m really excited for this opportunity,” he said. “I’m super excited for Mary. I think she will bring a new energy to the shop. And I’m excited for Rochester that the shop will still be here.”