South Burlington native’s marshmallow business catches fire with sweet smell of success

SOUTH BURLINGTON ― The marshmallows Alexx Shuman has made for a little over four years under the name Nomadic Kitchen have always in her eyes represented her home state of Vermont.

As the name suggests, her life has been nomadic since she graduated from South Burlington High School in 2007. From college in New York and Massachusetts to cooking school in Paris and Vermont, from her restaurant stint in Boston to master’s-degree studies through a South Carolina college and a crucial three-month stay in Provence, Shuman has been a vagabond most of her adult life.

Her marshmallow production, though – that roots her in Vermont.

“I always thought of the business as a homecoming,” Shuman said of the enterprise that has its origins at the end of 2018 in her parents’ kitchen in South Burlington.

Now, Shuman will pay direct tribute to her home state. On Sept. 7 she changed the name of her ever-growing business from Nomadic Kitchen to The Vermont Marshmallow Co. She plans to ramp up production of and income from the confection she refers to with one of her business slogans as “pillowy as heck.”

Fresh off a move to a new production facility just up Dorset Street from her high school, Shuman said the “Nomadic” in the original name no longer applies. She is now based, firmly, in Vermont.

“The reality is in the past four years,” Shuman said, “we have become ‘The Vermont Marshmallow Company.’”

From Le Cordon Bleu to NECI

Shuman was raised, as she put it, with baking in her blood.

“I have a classic Jewish grandmother,” she said. “I grew up with big, good flavor.” Shuman said her mother was also a great cook, and she gravitated toward baking as a hobby. Shuman remembers as a young girl sneaking into the pantry, where she found marshmallows that she’d then toast on the stove.

After graduating from South Burlington High School, Shuman’s life zigzagged from her interest in food to other pursuits. She spent her freshman and sophomore years at Bard College in New York state, then left to study cooking at the famed Le Cordon Bleu school in Paris, where she focused on savory rather than sweet foods.

Then it was back to New England to complete a degree in art history at Smith College in Massachusetts before attending the New England Culinary Institute, the now-defunct cooking school that began in Montpelier in 1980. She attended NECI with hopes of becoming a pastry chef.

Why switch from savory to sweet? “Um… I… I love sugar,” Shuman said in a conversation at her new kitchen in South Burlington, where sandbag-sized satchels of sugar are stationed near her front door. “I felt I could access my own creativity in sweet.”

Shuman made croissants and cakes at NECI but now realizes how often she incorporated marshmallows into her work there.

“There’s just a level of joy and magic a sweet thing brings out of a person,” Shuman said. “It’s play.”

Inspired in the south of France

Following NECI, Shuman pursued a career in baking, first at the James Beard-nominated WildFlour Pastry in Charleston, South Carolina, then at chef and TV personality Ming Tsai’s first restaurant, Blue Ginger, where she worked in the Boston-area eatery’s bakery.

Shuman’s professional experience, she said, was a wake-up call to the “disheartening” reality of the restaurant business. She said the work is grueling, and she always felt in survival mode dealing with bad hours and bad pay.

“It’s a really brutal environment that made me fall out of love with my craft,” Shuman said.

She left Blue Ginger to work for a food startup in Boston, not on the production side but as a writer promoting the business. She found herself getting further into marketing – she even got a master’s degree in business administration from the College at Charleston in South Carolina – and moved out of the food business to work for a tutoring company. Her corporate life felt more balanced than her restaurant life, but she didn’t love it.

At the end of her work day, though, she had time and energy to cook, and gravitated gradually back to the food world. She had dreams of writing a cookbook in the south of France, and when she read on a Smith College alumni Facebook page of someone looking for a person to house-sit in Provence she quickly signed up.

During her three months in France, Shuman traveled by train through Europe and began a food blog she called “Nomadic Kitchen,” named for her temporary expat lifestyle. “Slowly but surely I was like, ‘This matters to me,’” she said.

Shuman returned to the States for the holidays at the end of 2018. She and her mother spent a week making marshmallows in her parents’ South Burlington kitchen.

“It was just so fun,” Shuman said, as she connected her childhood fondness for marshmallows with everything she learned in culinary school. They made three flavors – vanilla, dulce de leche and coffee cardamom, all of which exist in original or modified form in her current company – and Shuman added an e-commerce component to her Nomadic Kitchen blog.

She hoped she’d make $100 in sales from that week of work. Instead, she earned $1,000. She spent 17-hour days baking and hand-crafting labels for mailing packages of marshmallows. Shuman said she never felt more tired, or more satisfied.

Magical marshmallows

Business kept growing, to the tune of 100%-increases in sales year by year. She hit six figures in sales soon after the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in early 2020. She sells primarily online – businesses such as hers did well when people were housebound in the early days of COVID - but her marshmallows are also carried in about 70 stores in the U.S. and Canada. She has built that fan base in part through an engaging social-media presence, earning The Vermont Marshmallow Co. nearly 8,000 followers on Instagram.

The Vermont Marshmallow Co. is the only business in the state dedicated solely to producing marshmallows, according to Shuman. She said her marshmallows attract fans of sweets who are looking for something a little more sophisticated.

“They’re definitely textural and flavorful enough that people just eat them out of the bag,” she said, while her marshmallows take on a crème-brulee-like, “elevated smores” quality when toasted. Some customers, she said, like to drop them in cocoa or their morning coffee to add frothiness.

“This isn’t the marshmallow you know,” Shuman said, referring to those sometimes-rubbery products commonly found on supermarket shelves. She kept tabs for a while on the number of people who told her “I hate marshmallows” before becoming regular customers of her business; she stopped counting at 280.

“A fresh marshmallow,” Shuman said, “is really a magical thing.”

Entering the ‘abundant season’

She worked out of her home kitchen for a while, then leased space in the off-hours at Willow’s Bagels in Burlington. She had access to only 15 square feet of storage space there, so she kept the bulk of her workplace needs in her car, her parents’ basement, wherever she could.

Commercial-kitchen space is notoriously hard to come by in Vermont, so Shuman jumped at the chance for what she considers a homecoming to her old high-school stomping grounds of Dorset Street, where since June her business has occupied the former Uncle Tony’s Pizza location. She and her staff of four part-and full-time employees now have a 1,200-square-foot home base in which to produce up to 1,600 bags of marshmallows (10 marshmallows per bag) each week.

The move seemed the perfect time to go ahead with the name change Shuman had long contemplated. The Vermont Marshmallow Co. tells the story of her product better than the more-evocative, less-specific Nomadic Kitchen did. That will be especially important as Shuman, for the first time, will seek stores to carry her product.

“There’s definitely huge opportunity there,” Shuman said, as last year 44% of her sales were through e-commerce while only 25% ware from store sales, primarily independent shops. Another 25% of her sales were at farmers markets and other events, with the remainder coming from weddings and corporate events. (She does not have her own retail shop.)

“I think it’s going to make it a lot easier to grow” with The Vermont Marshmallow Co. name, Shuman said. “It’s a name that I feel a lot more confident pitching.”

The name evokes the freshness and quality of food Vermont is known for. “You look at that name and it immediately tells you something about who we are,” according to Shuman.

Her goals with the expansion include allowing her and her employees to live the lives they want financially while avoiding the stressful pitfalls she endured in the restaurant industry. “I want to be a million-dollar company that’s operated very leanly,” Shuman said.

The rebranding - which includes a couple of new flavors, maple chai and spiced pumpkin - comes as The Vermont Marshmallow Co. approaches what Shuman calls its “abundant season.” Production and sales typically increase from now through the holidays.

Shuman has spent the past several weeks poring over a sprawling spreadsheet of tasks, from updating the website’s URL to changing the name throughout The Vermont Marshmallow Co. website, from creating new product labels and merchandise to communicating with stores so they can change the name if they mention her product on their own websites.

“I’m definitely going into this abundant season not quite as rested as I would have chosen,” Shuman said.

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com.

This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: Vermont Marshmallow Co. plans growth with new kitchen, business name