“It’s more fun to work with chocolate than with computers.”
That’s Julie Frazier talking about her second career as the owner and chocolatier of Alpharetta-based Maybird Confections, named after her maternal grandmother, Allie Jackson.
Frazier had been making toffee since the 1980s, when she traded her family’s homemade ice cream recipe for a colleague’s toffee recipe at a company picnic. She started making the toffee for the holidays, giving it to friends and family. “You should sell this,” she was told.
After considering the possibilities, Frazier started Maybird Confections in early 2019, first working out of shared kitchen space in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward neighborhood. She had worked in information technology her whole career, and making toffee was just a sideline business.
However, she was laid off from her day job in 2021, and decided to lease a former pizza restaurant on McGinnis Ferry Road, where she now works seven days a week, producing nearly a dozen varieties of toffee, as well as chocolate-covered nuts and espresso beans.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
“The basic recipe hasn’t changed much from the original, but I knew if I was going to sell my toffee, I wanted to upgrade things,” Frazier said. “When I was just making it for friends, I was using chocolate chips and grocery store nuts. For Maybird Confections, I upgraded to fine couverture chocolate, organic butter, organic sugar, Georgia pecans and Himalayan pink salt. Now, I am working with cocoa beans and making my own chocolate. I’m very proud of that.”
Serendipity and relationships have played a large role in the success of Frazier’s business. Her first wholesale customer was Suzy Wright of Mountain Valley Farm in Ellijay. “I shopped there often, buying her raw milk and grass-fed beef,” Frazier said. “I saw she was carrying toffee from another chocolatier, and told her I liked my toffee better, and was thinking about selling it. Without even trying any, she asked me to make toffee for her, using really dark chocolate, her favorite.”
It has been a big seller for Wright. In fact, Frazier said, “I just took her 300 8-ounce bags of dark chocolate toffee and another 50 bags of chocolate-covered almonds. She often jokes that she doesn’t know if she’s a beef store selling toffee, or a toffee store selling beef.”
Frazier met Bindley Sangster, a coffee farmer and roaster from Jamaica, and made coffee toffee and chocolate-covered Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee beans for his event at the James Beard House in New York City.
R.M. Rose Distillers in Dillard started carrying Frazier’s toffee in its gift shop, and she began using the distillery’s bourbon to make dark chocolate and white gold bourbon toffee in spring 2022.
She met Matt Weyandt and Elaine Read of Atlanta-based Xocolatl at a Georgia Organics event and started using their chocolate for toffee sold through the Xocolatl shop. Now, Frazier buys Nicaraguan cocoa beans from them to make her own chocolate.
Soon, she plans to add single-origin chocolate bars, chocolate bars with inclusions, drinking chocolate and more.
“I’d like to make marshmallows, caramels and truffles,” Frazier said. “I have so many ideas — more ideas than I have time to execute, since I am my only employee.”
She’s renovating the former pizza restaurant to include a retail space, where she can broaden her offerings. “I made lavender white chocolate fudge for the Roswell Lavender Festival,” Frazier said, “and it sold out so quickly. Fudge is something you want to sell fresh, so, with my new retail space, I can make fudge and sell it directly to my customers.”
Candymaking might seem old-fashioned, but Frazier said she sees Maybird Confections as a way to take traditional candies and turn them into “elevated classics.”
Go to maybirdconfections.com for more information on their products and where to buy.
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