'The story of small business has always been one of survival,' writes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Rilvin
Rivlin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author ofhe three brothers gathered in their Bronx living room to talk through their options. It was approaching midnight at the end of another long day. They had devoted all of themselves tothe chocolate bar business they had founded five years earlier. Now, on a May night in 2020, two months into the pandemic, they were at a loss. They went around the room, and none of them had anything positive to report.
The three brothers talked about giving up. They shared an apartment in a part of New York City that had been hard-hit by COVID-19. The wail of ambulances in the background was a constant. Their cash reserves were gone, and their store of beans—the cacao beans they needed to make their chocolate bars—had been depleted. And even if the next day they received a shipment that was already several weeks overdue, they had almost no orders to refill. June’s rent was due in a few weeks.
Yet that May, late at night in the apartment the three shared, their prospects felt dire. One in three small businesses in the U.S. shutters its doors before celebrating a second anniversary. Half close within five years of opening. Seventy percent are dead within a decade. The three bothers couldn’t even count on help from PPP, the program the government established to help small businesses survive the pandemic. It was the“We had to face reality,” Daniel said.
Bloggers and others who wrote about chocolate were among those contacting the Maloneys. People of color generally were the workers who planted and harvested the planet’s cacao beans, which grow in tropical climates. But the owners were overwhelmingly white. The Maloneys were featured in an article in, an online magazine, spotlighted their bespoke approach to producing chocolate. A local news site profiled the bean-to-bar makers behind the Bronx’s first chocolate factory.
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