As a little girl growing up in Seattle, Fran Bigelow loved candy bars so much she’d save up her allowance to buy them. It was a hint of the career to come: Bigelow would grow up to become one of America’s pioneering chocolatiers.
After first earning a business degree at the University of Washington, she opened Fran’s Patisserie and Chocolate Specialties in 1982. In the decades to follow, she built a small cake shop in Seattle’s Madison Valley into Fran’s Chocolates, an international name in artisan sweets. Fran’s chocolate covered caramels—finished with a dash of gray or smoked sea salt—was one of America’s first introductions to the now-essential combination of salt and caramel. But she still loved candy bars. Especially peanut butter cups.
In 2017, Fran’s debuted its own peanut butter cup, an indulgence sold only in its own retail shops. Until now.
Town & Country Markets is the only other place where you can find Fran’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups, with their distinctive foil packaging. It’s an exciting new milestone in the companies’ many years of working together.
(Shop our entire selection of Fran's Chocolates)
Chocolate, Peanut Butter, and Family Businesses
“She was a real pioneer,” says Susan Allen, Town & Country’s Executive Director of Brand Development, and part of the markets’ third generation of family ownership. “I love that Fran took her passion and married it with her business background.”
Today, Fran’s daughter, Andrina Bigelow serves as company CEO. Her brother, Dylan Bigelow, is Director of Chocolate. Fran herself has retired, though her influence still steeps every corner of the company’s pristine white production facility in the old Rainier Brewery in Georgetown.
While their families—and companies—have worked together for decades, Susan Allen and Andrina Bigelow finally met in person when Andrina gave her a tour in advance of the peanut butter cups’ debut at T&C.
A Time-Tested Partnership
Nobody at Fran’s Chocolates or at Town & Country can remember exactly how long they’ve been doing business together. The relationship predates existing billing software, even the recollection of some of the company’s longest-tenured employees. Fran’s own memory puts it at around 1988.
T&C was one of Fran’s first wholesale accounts, says Andrina Bigelow. Back then production was much smaller. Her mother only had a small amount of chocolate to sell. “It was about specific relationships,” says Andrina. At T&C, “She knew her product would be represented properly and taken care of.”
Susan Allen still remembers the first time she encountered Fran’s signature Gold Bars on Town & Country store shelves: “They stood out so distinctly,” she says, that shiny gold foil conjuring images of Willy Wonka’s fabled golden tickets. Packaging that commands your attention is a longtime hallmark of Fran’s products, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s it was unusual to see a specialty chocolate in the aisles of a grocery store.
A 1988 Seattle Times article described the Gold Bar as “a Snickers bar with a Ph.D. in aesthetics.” No wonder Susan also remembers the first time she actually tried one—the anticipation of unwrapping the buttery caramel and toasted almonds encased in dark chocolate. “When I see a Gold Bar, I still have that feeling.”
A Glimpse Behind the Chocolate Waterfall
Inside Fran’s custom-built factory, employees in white lab coats temper, enrobe, fill, and mold, drawing on years of training and instinct. Over the years, the cascade of melted chocolate that flawlessly coats bars and caramels on the enrober machine acquired the nickname “the chocolate waterfall.”
Susan Allen’s tour included, of course, production of the peanut butter cups. Skilled employees mold perfect outer shells of tempered dark chocolate, then pipe in a ganache made with emulsified organic peanut butter and white chocolate. Once the molds get closed up (and after a few gentle shakes to remove air bubbles) each cup gets topped with bits of caramelized peanut, for an extra dash of crunch.
“This one is a special product to us, really inspired by my mom,” says Andrina Bigelow.
It All Started with Cakes
As a girl, Fran Bigelow would visit the chocolate counter at the original Frederick & Nelson department store with her grandmother, who always let her pick out a few bonbons. “That was the spark for her,” says Andrina. A visit to a Parisian chocolate shop in 1969 inspired Fran to go to pastry school.
At first, her Seattle shop focused on elegant chocolate cakes; the truffles began as free samples for customers waiting in long lines for their orders. Andrina Bigelow remembers handing them out as a child.
“Then people wanted to give them as gifts,” she says. The truffles were more shelf-stable than those cakes, and her mother was a businesswoman, after all. “It evolved from there.”
Fran’s signature chocolate-covered caramels—hand-sprinkled with a precise band of sea salt—make good gifts too. Just ask President Obama, who ordered custom boxes of them to hand out to White House visitors.
As a fellow steward of a family business forged through sheer entrepreneurial spirit, Susan Allen appreciates Fran’s story as much as she does its chocolate. “It’s somebody’s product, not something we just buy from a warehouse,” she says. “It’s a win-win for everybody, especially our guests when they get to have that experience. Plus, it’s a lot more fun.”