Editor’s note: This article spotlights Chef Tammy Maki, founder and CEO of Raven Rising, a winner of the 2023 Upgrade with Wix contest. Winners were announced in January 2024 and won a business update, courtesy of Wix.
They say food is the window to the soul. In the case of Raven Rising, food is also a window to the wider world.
“Food is the one language that every single human being on this planet understands,” says Founder and CEO Tammy Maki, who, for the last four years, has been making chocolates specially crafted from ‘global indigenous’ ingredients.
Those ingredients run the gamut: lingonberry from northern regions of the globe, seaweeds plucked from the bottom of the ocean, nutmeg from Grenada—even mustard from Western Canada.
“I’ve found ingredients that I’ve never heard of before. Never would have even thought of,” says the Canadian chef. “I've tasted things and it's just like my eyes roll back in my head, I'm just like, ‘oh’—like Homer Simpson with doughnuts. It's just phenomenal.”
But unlike Homer Simpson’s doughnuts, Raven Rising’s chocolates and history are complex and, in many ways, unexpected. The first of the surprises starts with Tammy herself: the pastry chef who opened a chocolate shop in her 50s with hardly any experience in chocolate-making.
“At Raven Rising, we blend the world of fine chocolates with the rich traditions of Indigenous cultures.”
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It started with a midlife crisis
“I flopped around for 35 to 40 years.”
Tammy’s referring to the period of her life when she spent 30 years in the electrical trade, following in the footsteps of her electrician father. Her only exposure to pastries at the time: baking all types of cakes—wedding cakes, birthday cakes, anniversary cakes—and pastries out of her kitchen under the guidance of a Betty Crocker cookbook.
“And then, in my mid-forties, [I had] my midlife crisis,” she states. “Instead of, you know, starting to date somebody new and buying a Corvette, I went back to school and took baking and pastry arts. And from the second I walked into that classroom, I knew that was where I was meant to be.”
Of course, dreams don’t always find us at the best times. Several years after graduating and opening a pastry consulting business, Tammy faced another big obstacle called COVID-19. The pandemic raged. Business stalled. And Tammy moved back home. Eventually, she shuttered her business altogether.
Tammy had a decision to make. What would be her next move? What could she realistically do with the pandemic still wreaking havoc on in-person retail and services?
“Honesty, I looked at Amazon and I went, ‘If they can have an eCommerce [site] that can service the world—for God's sake, why can't I?’”
And so it went: Tammy researched types of businesses that could satiate her longing to start a business in indigenous foods and also exist online. She settled on chocolate (“Iike duh, it’s one of the most well-known indigenous ingredients in the world”). Chocolate, she figured, could be easily shipped and infused with diverse ingredients—the latter being an important ingredient to her recipe for success.
The Sixties Scoop roots
Every founder’s aha moment looks a bit different. Tammy’s dates back to finding out about her Sixties Scoop background.
Coined by researcher and author Patrick Johnston in 1983, the Sixties Scoop is a period when a series of policies were enacted in Canada that allowed indigenous children to be “scooped up” from their birth families, usually without consent. Between 1951 and 1984, it’s estimated that more than 20,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were forcibly removed from their homes and adopted into predominantly white, middle-class households.
As Tammy would come to find, she was one of them. “I’m finding out a lot about my Indigenous roots now,” Tammy told Rise in 2020, when she won the organization’s 2020 Bell Let’s Talk Start-up Award. “But I was adopted into a wonderful Finnish family, and many of my earliest memories are of me and my mother in the kitchen.”
Tammy is a member of the White Bear First Nation in Saskatchewan. Today, her confections are designed to reflect her heritage while celebrating the rich traditions of other indigenous communities. A portion of proceeds are also donated to various societies, plus used to support an indigenous student in the Baking and Pastry Arts program at George Brown College.
“The food that I make, the chocolate that I make, the art that I do—it's my story.”
An online-first chocolatier
Every bit of Raven Rising’s brand—be it the design of its bonbons or the physical space where Tammy works—is created with intention.
The name, for that matter, honors Tammy’s journey as a founder. “I talked to my friend, and she owns a couple of restaurants,” recalls Tammy. “She said, ‘Oh, you should call it Phoenix Rising [because] you keep rising out of the ashes.’ And I said, well, Phoenix in my culture doesn't hold any significance…but my spirit animal is a Raven. Raven Rising is perfect.”
Now nearing 60 years old, Tammy has weathered her fair share of challenges. Among them: getting fired (which she fondly refers to as a pivotal moment in her career), running two other businesses before Raven Rising, her midlife crisis and figuring out this thing called eCommerce.
“I’ve been a long-time Wix customer,” she mentions. “It’s given me the tools, the resources and the knowledge that there is no way that I would have been able to figure out on my own.”
Her Wix site now services customers all across Canada. Through her online store, customers can place orders, purchase digital gift cards or inquire about custom orders. Meanwhile, Tammy often finds herself in the back office of her site, keeping an eye on her email and social media campaigns.
As visitors hail from various channels, she points to Wix Analytics as being particularly useful:
“It's not like Stephen Hawking speaking science to me. It’s Wix telling me, ‘Oh, this is where all your business is coming from’...It's like a really easy-to-read book and I am not a numbers person, but I can actually understand and break down those numbers, apply them and [know where to focus].”
A long way from retirement
So, what’s next for Raven Rising?
Already the winner of several awards, including the 2024 Extraordinary Female Entrepreneur Award by the Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada (ITAC), Tammy still has a long to-do list.
“I've experienced so much since starting the business that it blows my mind and I'm almost 60 years old,” says Tammy. “Most people [my age say,] ‘Oh, yeah, I'm retiring next week and I gave my notice after 45 years.’ And I'm like, ‘Wow. Here I am four years into this new business and I wanna go everywhere.’”
“Everywhere,” according to Tammy, could mean exporting. New chocolate concoctions. Opening up shop in her first nation in Saskatchewan. The sky’s the limit.
“Aside from wanting to do more, I couldn’t imagine not doing this,” she says. “This is my zen.”
Lessons from Tammy
Every story of entrepreneurship has its own flavor. For Tammy, becoming an entrepreneur wasn’t so much a choice as it was a natural progression of her interests and talents. That’s not to say it wasn’t tough—as she shares below, there are several key tips she’d impart to others in her shoes:
Take the chances: “Life is full of pivots and challenges and decisions. Every single day there's gonna be some big decisions that you have to make and then there's gonna be small decisions. But sometimes the small decisions are some of the biggest ones that have the most lasting effect, right?”
Put your heart and soul into it: “If you're gonna [start a business], don't do it half-a**. Just do it right the first time so you're not revisiting things over and over because if you're a business person, you don't have the time to [correct those mistakes].”
Ask for help: “Don't be afraid to look for help because you're gonna need it.” Whether you need help creating a website or keeping your finances in order, talk to people who are masters in these fields and can help you get it right the first time.
Expect the unexpected, but keep going: “I think as a small business person, you always hope that things are gonna be super smooth…and maybe for some people it is. But for the other 99.99% of us, it's not. There's major peaks and major valleys and you're not [always] sure if you're gonna crawl out of that valley and ever see another peak.”
Do your due diligence: “Know your stuff; don't guess. Like [if] you're in the food industry and whether or not it's regulated…understand that if you're selling food, you have to ensure that your consumer is safe…So you need to care about what you're doing, not just be doing it to do it.”
Read about our other Upgrade with Wix winners: