Brownie Points
Courier Mail (news.com.au/couriermail)

Brisbane

Tuesday January 30, 2007

Its easy to sidestep your dreams because of the fear of failing. As a child, Deb Peralta had fantasised about owning her own food business as she took over her parents’ garage with her “shop”.

“I would have my mum collect all the non-perishables and I would set up my “shop” in there pretty much permanently. I always wanted to own my own food business but I worried about failure. I mean what do you do if you try to live your dream and fail? What’s left?

Today at 44, she’s changed both her life philosophy and her career, launching her own brand of luxury brownies, Dello Mano.

Peralta originally trained as a food scientist in product development but moved into marketing. “I was the product development manager at a pretty young age and the marketing people were always coming in and telling us what o do, how to change things and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. It intrigued me and I wanted to learn what made consumers tick, so I decided to go and study marketing.

Her first subject, consumer behaviour, clinched the deal, “ I loved it- finding out why consumers behaved as they did and there was no turning back.”

Peralta rose to success working for many big-name companies but never forgot her dream of owning her own business.

She had her “is this it” moment, she says while working for Kellogg’s , based in the Asia Pacific region. “ I was pregnant with my youngest daughter, Coco, at the time. It was in some respects, the ideal job, but I had a few problems with my pregnancy and had another baby at home and just thought, “What the hell am I doing?”

“I came home and resigned and took a long break”

Husband Bien, 44 who she had met while working for Cadbury’s was a Brissie boy and wanted to reconnect with family, so the couple moved back up her from Melbourne when Coco, now seven was a baby.

Like many people it took a significant birthday to cause Deb and Bien to re-evaluate their lives.

“ We thought that maybe we have to start thinking about what we really wanted to do” she says.

“ I love Italy and had always dreamt of taking the kids there, so we took six weeks off and decided that we were going to go there and think about what we wanted to do with our dreams. There was to be no second guessing or turning back.

“When we were there, I remember walking into this patisserie and just being so blown away by the look of it all and just thought, “yes this is what I want to do.”
 
“Later on back at the place we were staying, Bien said tell me more about your dream and I found myself talking and it all started to solidify. At the end of my brainstorming session, Phoebe, who was seven then said “Do yo want me to read back over the notes?” She’d been sitting there taking down everything I said. We still have them as a keepsake.
It was both a love of and experience with chocolate and an appreciation of “more real , provincial” foods that made Peralta decide on brownies.

“I wanted to keep the concept of something looking exactly like what they were supposed to be, but lifting a rustic product above its usual. Chocolate is really important to me, great chocolate, I mean. Without chocolate, there is no joy – it makes people happy. I have tasted a lot of Brownies and what I wanted was to make something really special”.
Peralta spent 18 months in the kitchen, baking batch after batch before coming up with a recipe containing real Belgian chocolate that satisfied her. Unfortunately the business was placed on hold when she was struck down with Ross River Fever.

“It really slowed me down, but then at some point, I came up and thought I need to act, so I went to get some advice from someone in the business. I thought it would be a good way to get grounded, but instead of telling me how hard it was she said “well what are you waiting for go get baking”.

“So off I went. Now we are baking four days per week.”

Not only are the Peraltas, making their Belgian chocolate brownies by hand (dello mano is a corruption of the Italian for “made by hand”) but they are also hand delivering them.

“We looked at different options in terms of how to deliver the product to the customer, but we really wanted to retain integrity, and quality, so for te time being, we are hand-delivering it personally. I know it’s impractical, and my bank manager will probably have a coronary but I wanted it to be lovely and beautiful rather than practical.”

Part of the appeal of brownies for Peralta was the idea of presenting a home-style food, elegantly.

“ I had a complete vision about packaging. It’s massively important and I found a designer who would work with me. We have found some amazing people to help us. I wanted to create a brand that was complete in its integrity. I loved the idea of food as a gift and looked to Tiffany’s as a model – it has a timeless elegance. I wanted the statement of food as a gift to be about beautiful artisan work.”

When you open the Dello Mano box, the brownies are nestled inside, a solitary one wrapped in gold foil tied with a bow – Peralta’s idea.

“They need to be packed very tightly, so they don’t move around in transit, so they need something for people to be able to pull to get them out. That’s where my old confectionary background came in. I was thinking about the fact the women used to wrap the foil around the chocolate and that added another statement, a gift inside a gift.”

There are some other brownie variants on the drawing board, says Peralta, including organic brownies and gluten free varieties. A special one off for Valentine’s Day gourments is chocolate brownies infused with rose water and sprinkled with petals. “I’ll do brownies for the next six months then expand my portfolio.”

So is she still ever afraid of failure? “Because I have always wanted to do it, I underestimated how it would feel seeing it coming to life. I came to the realization that just getting here and doing it means I have succeeded, and that is a very liberating belief.”

Dello Mano, ph: 1300 661 682

www.dellomano.com.au