On Telegraph Avenue in Temescal sits a pink, Cape Cod-style building that looks as though it were transplanted from a storybook. It is the former home of Hooper’s Chocolates, where a vintage neon sign out front still reads “I LOVE TO MAKE GOOD CANDY.” For over a decade, the building has remained without a tenant; its Loopnet listing shows a price tag of a cool $2.7 million.
The realtor has given hopeful buyers hundreds of tours. Much of the original machinery is still there, and the space was very much purpose-built for the work of producing candy. In other words, it’s hard to justify the expense if you’re just hoping to host yoga classes there (which it did for a short time in the ‘90s).
Empress Kehinde Koyejo grew up nearby, on 61st and Poirier. When she was a kid, her parents would take her to Hooper's Chocolates for Easter treats, mint truffles, and maple creams. The family that ran the place was generous, she says, and doled out samples without hesitation. People flocked to Hooper’s from all over the Bay to join in on the factory tours and browse the glass displays of truffles neatly arranged in boxes. “We could smell the chocolate in the air,” she adds.
Empress Kehinde Koyejo wears a Choc’late Mama Cookies apron at her live-work space in Emeryville. (Estefany Gonzalez/COYOTE Media Collective)
Gordon and Barbara Hooper started the business in their garage in 1939, mixing and dipping chocolates by hand before selling door-to-door. Cindy Rhoda, one of their grandchildren, told Hoodline that the Hoopers kept the business going during World War II’s strict rationing by swapping cards with neighbors to stock up on sugar. As reported by SFGate and the Oakland Tribune, they were moving half a million dollars a year and supplying over 800 Bay Area stores, from newsstands to Woolworth’s, by the late 1950s.
At their peak, they made more than 200 varieties of candies like marshmallow hearts, toffees, and Victoria cream patties, with some of their confections even making their way to Osaka. The pink building on Telegraph, their headquarters, was very much a neighborhood fixture — “the Willy Wonka of the Bay,” Koyejo calls it.
Fresh cookies are wrapped in glossy wrapping paper, candy factory-style. (Estefany Gonzalez/COYOTE Media Collective)
After Gordon passed away, Barbara eventually sold the business, and the company churned through a series of owners who couldn't maintain it. By 2011, Hooper’s was done. The building’s tenants cycled through all kinds of non-candy concepts, including a thrift shop, skate shop, yoga studio, police dog training center, and a sound healer’s space.
Now, Koyejo’s got her eye on it. Over the last 10 years, she’s built Choc’late Mama into a cookie company that she’s hoping to flip into a whole lifestyle brand, with a decade of pop-ups and research under her belt (and a customer base that has waited patiently for a brick and mortar location). When she started thinking seriously about Hooper's, she ran it by members of her community and was told to at least call the realtor.
Several specialty items available for purchase at Choc’late Mama in Emeryville. (Estefany Gonzalez/COYOTE Media Collective)
Her cookies aren’t like your typical bakery standby. The base dough is vegan, gluten-free, grain-free, and there’s no white sugar — which sounds like a list of deprivations until you understand that the goal is almost everyone being able to eat one. The result is a cookie that opens the room to all, she says. “Everybody except for the 1% with nut allergies can have my cookies.”
The space she's imagining is closer to what Hooper’s actually was: manufacturing, retail, and customer experience running in unison. The building, all 13,500 square feet of it, is still set up for food production. There’s floor drainage, a roll-up door, and skylights over what used to be the factory floor. Koyejo wants to make dough there and sell it, run sip-and-bake nights and cookie-and-wine pairings, host families making ice cream sandwiches together, and yes, open a cafe.
Empress Koyejo makes a batch of fresh cookies. (Estefany Gonzalez/COYOTE Media Collective)
She has no interest in gutting Hooper’s. “A lot of people wanted to completely change it,” she says. “That's where the bulk of the costs are coming from for them. I want to operate it as-is. It's already built for what it is that I'm doing. I can fit into it.”
Still, the building’s $2.7 million price tag translates to a whole lot of cookies, so she's looking for investors. The pitch isn't complicated: The space has been empty long enough that the bar for “better than nothing” is low, and her proposal is considerably better than nothing. She grew up two blocks away and wants to bring the aroma of melted chocolate back to her old neighborhood.
Empress Koyejo stands outside Choc’late Mama in Emeryville. (Estefany Gonzalez/COYOTE Media Collective)
“Having the opportunity to be a legacy business operating out of a space that has such great history, to me, is aligned with my vision for myself and what I want.”
In the meantime, Choc’late Mama is open at the Emery in Emeryville, Tuesday through Thursday, 1–6pm.
Soleil Ho is a cultural critic, cookbook writer, and food journalist who has a nasty habit of founding media projects instead of going to therapy: from the feminist literary magazine Quaint to food podcast Racist Sandwich to our dear COYOTE.
