After dinner at a friend’s house the other night, she laid out a small plate with pieces of candy. There were dark chocolate peppermint creams made by Summerdown, a company based in Hampshire. Their tagline sounds like it was copied straight out of a Midwich Cuckoos’ chapter: “We are the peppermint people.” The Summerdown cult also makes versions of their mints in the shape or form of dominoes, crisps, fondants and truffles. Like Mr. Creosote, I only required one thin mint to satisfy my sweet tooth.
On another occasion, my friend handed me a bag of Petite LaFleur’s signature salted dark chocolate honeycomb candy. She’d found both of these confections at Rockridge Market Hall. The “market” section of the hall has continued to evolve over time into an haute bourgeois version of Cost Plus, which has been rebranded as World Market since my last visit there. Most of the “world” represented at the College Avenue gourmet grocery store hails from Europe. The shelves are stacked high with Italian panettone and biscotti, French teas, British jams and curds, Greek olives and Scandinavian tinned fish.
Petite LaFleur is an exception to the European rule at Market Hall Foods. Suzanne LaFleur’s chocolate business is based in Berkeley. A former pastry chef, LaFleur launched her own company after taking a job as a production manager at Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco. “The whole point of getting that job was because I wanted to learn [about chocolate] manufacturing from a raw agricultural product into a product for the customer,” she said.
As the sole proprietor and chocolatier at Petite LaFleur, she’s currently making two products, a golden popcorn bark and the aforementioned honeycomb candy, which, it turns out, is actually made out of honey and not honeycomb. “It’s called honeycomb because of the texture,” LaFleur explained. “Basically, the ‘honeycomb’ I make is an aerated honey toffee.” It has a caramel-like quality on the tongue, but the floral and earthy flavor is informed by the activity of bees as they travel through the air and land on soft beds of pollen.
LaFleur sources her honey from Khaled Almaghafi’s Bee Healthy Honey Shop in Oakland. He’s been making honey and distributing it in the Bay Area since 1992. As proof of his bona fides, his social media account swarms with images of himself draped in blankets of busy bees jauntily strolling around his face and torso. Almaghafi clearly does not suffer from apiphobia. When she picks up her five-gallon order of honey, LaFleur noted that he’s rarely at the shop. “He’s often out in the field removing wasp’s nests and moving bee colonies, things like that,” she explained.
While working as a pastry chef, LaFleur made plated desserts with honeycomb as a component “to add a little crunch.” But when a friend of hers handed her a Crunchie bar from the UK, she had an inspirational aha moment. “It’s a honeycomb bar, but it’s very sweet,” LaFleur said. And, instead of actual honey, the Crunchie bar is made with golden syrup. To make her own version, she experimented with the flavor, adding in other notes such as Maldon sea salt. “I try to caramelize the honey so, hopefully if I’ve done my job right, you might have very slight bitter notes,” she said. “I wanted you to be able to eat it without your palate getting bored.”
When it comes to the process of tempering chocolate so it “breaks well with a snap,” LaFleur reminded me that milk, dark and white chocolates all require different temperatures to achieve a shiny finish. Otherwise, it won’t solidify. “If you’re doing it by hand, you melt chocolate to a higher temperature than you want to actually use in the final product,” she explained. Then she adds unmelted chocolate to cool it down. “Without getting super technical, you’re trying to align the crystals so they stay emulsified,” she said. Tempering preserves the layers of honeycomb while also preventing the candy from easily melting in the hand.
The Petite LaFleur production center is set up in the Berkeley Kitchens building, the same one that houses Third Culture Bakery, Batter Bakery and La Noisette Sweets. And, until it closed at the end of 2025 (sob), Kelsie Kerr’s Standard Fare operated out of it for more than a decade. “I love this building,” LaFleur said. “It’s really cool to be amongst a community of other kitchens, because if you forget something you can go down the hall for support.”
LaFleur doesn’t have retail hours because she’s in production mode there. Pickups can be arranged online, but she’s usually cranking things out for her wholesale accounts. “I do also sell on my website and on Etsy, especially right now because of the holidays,” she said. If Market Hall Foods isn’t a regular haunt, Petite LaFleur products are widely distributed around the East Bay at Oaktown Spice Shop, Berkeley Bowl, Piedmont Grocery and Blue Willow Tea.
Petite LaFleur, 2701 Eighth St. #104, Berkeley. petitelafleur.com. IG: @petitelafleursf.
