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Stephanie Rieke alias-Nutty Steph is a mathematician entrepreneur cognitive scientist poet that grew up daily watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. She started manufacturing and selling the epitome of granola perfection in 2003 at age 23 sans any knowledge of commercial food production. For four years, she and various staffers bustled their way to granola distinction, being chosen by the buyers and chefs of America’s finest food establishments including The New York Marriott Marquis, Stowe and Sugarbush Resorts, San Francisco’s Bi Rite Market, Zabar’s, The Basin Harbor Club of Vermont, Chicagoland’s Ambrosia Patisserie and the eatery at L. Burdick Chocolate.

Patrick Giantonio, our head baker, is also the head of Vermont Refugee Assistance, where he facilitates the placement and community envelopment of African refugees, drawing knowledge from his five year walk across Africa in the nineteen nineties. Also in the nineties, Patrick built a commercial baking facility on his hundred-acre Keene Farm property nestled in the mountains of Woodbury, VT. He operated a pretzel company there known as Patrick’s Green Mountain Twisters, which fizzled out, and the baking facility remained. In 2005, when Nutty Steph’s outgrew its baking situation as a late-night rental of a local restaurant kitchen, beautiful Keene Farm became the new vehicle, driven by Patrick himself, for Nutty Steph’s Vermont Granola production.

Around that time, Montpelier’s insanely brilliant chef Patricia Powell accidentally invented dark Belgian chocolate dipped Vermont Granola, also known as Nutty Steph’s Magic Chunks. (Well, the first batch was made with grocery store chocolate chips, but it knocked off everybody’s socks nonetheless.) This nourishing-while-decadent confection was destined to put Nutty Steph’s in the mouths of every gourmet bourgeoisie on earth, and local chocolate maker Allan Sirotkin began its production immediately. A year later, Allan got cancer and fought it with the unguarded abandon exemplified by his “cancer slayer BLOG.” When he finished chemotherapy, he was ready for the production of... just about nothing except for a Caribbean vacation, and Magic Chunks, along with all of Green River Chocolates, were in danger of extinction.

Steph told Allan to get someone else to take over, AND FAST, and no, it would not be her because she was very, very busy. Four and half days later, inspired by a late night’s autumn roller blade revelation, she decided that yes, it would be her. The next week, the biggest rent-able truck in existence was rented and filled with whole damn chocolate operation known as Green River Chocolates. It was then plopped smack in the heart of Vermont, at the great gold-domed capital city of Montpelier, at the Nutty Steph’s 1400 square foot warehouse, (within which, in a small square cement back room, Steph personally dwells), and renamed The Montpelier Chocolate Factory. Steph has now practically BECOME her childhood hero, which was, of course, the strong willed and famously eccentric Mr. Build-your-dreams himself, Willy Wonka.

While Steph was not particularly inspired by the packages and aesthetic feel that Allan had developed in his 12 year chocolate career, she was indeed quite roused by the wide selection of superior chocolate varieties that he had sourced from around the world. The Montpelier Chocolate Factory would thus be unique, (by highlighting this decadent and wide variety), in its focus on training the laymen’s chocolate palette.

Nicholas Buckalew is a 20 year old, ex-con, ex-racist, born again hippie, that was SAVED by Nutty Steph’s Vermont Granola and has, in turn, been saving IT ever since. He is the warehouse Ace in the Hole, packaging every ounce of granola and managing shipping, Internet customer relations and national sales. He is wont to be found wearing clothing he made out of discarded rubber, pronouncing cynical bits of his impeccable lexis to enhance any company conversation.

Trisha Denton recently slid a quarter into a fortune-telling machine and it said that her destiny was to be a Taxi Dancer Grease Monkey. After she and Steph researched the phrase “Taxi Dancer,” Trish became serendipity-awed by what she felt was a deadpan accurate explanation of her existence. Besides currently completing an independently designed bachelors degree at Goddard College, raising her son Augustus, and creating sideshows for Burlington’s premier burlesque gala, Trish operates the vegetable-oil powered Granolamobile and manages all in-state granola sales and deliveries. She turned Nutty Steph’s grease filtration setup into a community grease fuel cooperative, which is also located in the 1400 square foot granola warehouse/ chocolate factory/ presidential suite/ outlet store at 190 River Street in Montpelier. Trish created the erotic “Steph delivering granola on a bicycle” photo series as well as The Nuttycracker Suite annual ballet production at the Langdon Street Café, among other unexpected marketing conspiracies In her free time, Trish designs Tarot decks and reads tea leaves for passersby at the Montpelier summer farmer’s market.

Gwen Marsha lived just down the mountain from Patrick the baker for over a decade and was swiftly chosen as the first assistant baker to Patrick. Gwen has a 16-year-old daughter Phoebe and recently completed her self designed Sustainability Degree from Vermont College. Besides baking the granola, Gwen maintains the perfect standard of quality with a discriminating taste of every 34-pound batch that is made. But her real occupation is what Vermonters affably refer to as a “Woodchuck.” A woodchuck is a Vermonter who makes it their business to be equipped with every skill that they may otherwise be required to pay someone else to carry out. On occasion, stopping by her plot of land, Steph has found Gwen changing brake pads, building a trout smoker, growing vegetables, framing stained glass, and designing the cabin that she intends to live in, tucked slightly further into the woods than her present dwelling, which is heated with wood that is annually chopped and stacked by her.

The other assistant in the bakery is Ruth Blackwell. Ruth exhibits her visual artwork in various local galleries and performs throughout Vermont with her five-woman steel drum band, Pan-Ashé. She also operates a recently developed vegetable farm and Kim Chi company, Blackwell Roots Farm, with her brother, father and stepmother, (who, incidentally is also named Ruth). When she’s not drawing, drumming, baking for Nutty Steph’s, farming or making love, Ruth works for a local land surveyor.

Anton Marek is an 8th grader from Montpelier’s Main Street Middle School who supports his guitar and snowboarding hobbies by affixing stickers to bags that are destined to contain Nutty Steph’s Vermont Granola. Steph testifies regularly to the state legislature and Vermont Department of Agriculture, through her post with Vermont Specialty Food Association, regarding the need for state and federal support of small-scale food production for the happiness of Vermonters and the health of the American consumer.