Not Your Sugar Mamas

At the end of a long dirt road in West Tisbury, if you listen carefully, you can hear music flowing out of a little shack in the woods. Voices that sound like angels chattering lead to the masterminds of a raw, all natural chocolate company called Not Your Sugar Mamas (NYSM).

NYSM is the brainchild of Bennett Coffey and her business partner and friend, Ky Keenan. Bennett, a graduate of the world’s largest nutrition school, the Institute of Integrative Nutrition in New York, and Ky, a graduate from Bentley University’s School of Business, met on Martha’s Vineyard, exchanged ideas about raw food ingredients, and made a plan to make their vision a reality, all in the name of chocolate.

For Bennett, the desire to start her own chocolate company kicked in after a messy breakup, an eye-opening hip-hop theme-song cross-country road trip, and the realization that she was nobody’s sugar mama. She had tried raw chocolate before and wanted to have it all the time. Why not start her own raw chocolate company? The cocoa bean had been planted. “I instantly felt better every time I ate it,” Bennett says. “The only problem was, I couldn’t find it where I lived, so I decided to start making it on my own.”

“Something tasty that makes you feel good,” is what catapulted Bennett to create the perfect super treat that makes you feel, well, super. She started with a simple recipe and adjusted it to be void of liter- ally everything ‘bad,’ like refined sugar, gluten, dairy, wheat, and preservatives. Instead, she worked with only natural ingredients. After finding the perfect mix of flavor and texture, Bennett’s final product resulted in her own sublime line of chocolate bars. She had perfected the recipe to create thin, square chocolate bars infused with lavender and peppermint oil (Be Cool Bar), Skye Botanicals’ Aphrodite’s Love Potion (Be Sexy Bar), or just the way it is (Be Original Bar).

Three Variations: Be Original, Be Cool, Be Sexy, $8.50 a bar. Look for them in the refrigerated section at these fine locations: The Black Sheep, Fiddlehead Farm, Scottish Bakehouse, Morning Glory Farm, Alley’s, 7a Foods, the Tisbury Farm Market, and the Down Island Farmers’ Market. Also available online at www.notyoursugarmamas.com.