A Conversation with Ellie Weinstein of Cocoa Press
In this episode of Make:Cast, I talk with Ellie Weinstein, founder and CEO of Cocoa Press, a company that manufactures 3D printers that print with chocolate. Ellie discusses her 10-year journey from starting a high school project to launching the second model of her Cocoa Press printer. The discussion highlights her background in mechanical engineering, her experience with 3D printing, and the challenges of creating a unique product that combines technology and confectionery.
Ellie also shares her experiences at Maker Faire – she brought her first prototype to Maker Faire New York many years ago and Cocoa Press was at Maker Faire Bay Area last October. There’s so much to learn from Ellie’s story — the starts and stops of developing her chocolate 3D printers and having to sell chocolate bars to keep working. But Ellie was clear that she wanted to do what interested her most, and that was making machines that make chocolate.
I love hearing Ellie’s story and whether you like chocolate or not, you might appreciate learning what it took for her to keep going through stops and starts and proving that nothing is as easy as it seems at first, but the challenges can make the reward all the more sweet.
Video of Podcast
Ellie Weinstein and Cocoa Press were at Maker Faire Bay Area in October.
Transcript
I’m 3D Printing Chocolate
Dale Dougherty: Welcome to Make:Cast. I’m Dale Dougherty. I bet few of you, when you want something sweet to eat, would think a 3D printer might satisfy your craving by producing a chocolate bar. Well, a Cocoa Press 3D printer would make that possible. Instead of plastic filament, it prints chocolate in any shape you desire. One couple bought a Cocoa Press printer for their wedding so they could make personalized favors for their guests.
In this episode, I talk with Ellie Weinstein about an idea that became a project and then became a company called Cocoa Press.
Ellie had the idea about 10 years ago, but slowly and steadily, she developed the process and the machine. And now she’s launching model two of the Cocoa Press printer. I love hearing Ellie’s story and whether you like chocolate or not, you might appreciate learning what it took for her to keep going through stops and starts and proving that nothing is as easy as it seems at first, but the challenges can make the reward all the more sweet.
And before we begin, I wish may the holidays be happy for you and yours, and make yourself something that lights up the long winter nights. From me and all of us at Make:, Happy New Year.
Marker
Dale Dougherty: I’m here with Ellie Weinstein and glad to see you. Where are you right now?
Ellie Weinstein: I am at our new Cocoa Press office in Philadelphia.
Dale Dougherty: Philadelphia.
Ellie Weinstein: We moved, I don’t know, three months ago? Within Philly, but I’m pretty excited to be here now.
Dale Dougherty: Great. I didn’t know you were in Philadelphia. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your background. How did you even know that you would be doing what you’re doing?
Ellie Weinstein: I didn’t know I’d be doing what I’m doing. Yeah, I’m Ellie. I am the founder and CEO of Cocoa Press. We make 3D printers that print chocolate. And I guess my background is in mechanical engineering. I went to the University of Pennsylvania and studied that. I’ve just been obsessed with 3D printing and stumbled in chocolate printing about 10 years ago now.
Dale Dougherty: You were at Maker Fair Bay area. I didn’t get a chance to do this, but you said, come by, do a taste test, and and I would suspect that half your challenge is to convince people that a 3D printed chocolate is not an inferior piece of chocolate.
Ellie Weinstein: It is interesting how many people expect 3D printing to change the flavor of the chocolate and it doesn’t. It is still the same chocolate. And if anything, because we’re able to do unique textures and make shapes that are just not possible to make with traditional chocolate making techniques, it actually can sometimes enhance the mouthfeel and, while it’s not changing the flavor, it still makes the overall experience and taste better of the chocolate.
Dale Dougherty: Can you just give us an overview of how it works? I imagine you’re melting it in at some level, right?
Ellie Weinstein: I’m sure most people who are listening know this — I know you know this — 3D printing overall is a process of building up an object layer by layer. So we’re putting the bottom part of the chocolate down, and then just building that up slowly over time. With general 3D printing, you have a spool of filament that you’re heating up as it’s being printed, but with ours, all of the chocolate is being heated at the same time — preheated even — and so it’s all melted. All the chocolate that you need for your print is melted ahead of time in a little cylinder shape, like a syringe type of thing.
And so that’s probably the biggest difference right off the bat is just we preheat all the chocolate, it’s there, we have two heaters, crazy precise within plus-or-minus a tenth of a degree Celsius. Yeah it prints it out just above, or just below body temperature actually, with about 10 pounds of force, and then it solidifies at room temperature, with no need for any active cooling.
Dale Dougherty: So something that we might know, like a chocolate Easter Bunny that’s hollow on the inside, is something you could print.
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah, you can make it hollow, you could make it just about solid, you could make it with gyroid infills, or whatever infill is on your favorite slicer these days.
Dale Dougherty: Did you have this idea and start playing around with it and then later on it became a business?
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah, exactly.
Dale Dougherty: Talk about that road, if you will, exploring something.
Ellie Weinstein: I can get carried away with talking about this, so I’ll try to keep it somewhat brief.
I started this actually as a senior in high school in 2014, and I was fortunate enough to be at a school in 2014 that had 3D printing. It was a little less popular in high schools than it is now, and basically [I] was in an intro to engineering class, thought I could build anything, and said, oh, “I want to build a 3D printer.” And my teacher looked at me and said, “We have one over there, go do something that doesn’t already exist.”
And at that point, there may have been a couple of DIY chocolate printers out there, but there really wasn’t anything commercial. And arguably there’s still not very much commercial in chocolate printing. So it became a one semester project that turned into a full year project, which turned into my hobby.
Dale Dougherty: At high school, before you went to college, you were doing this?
Ellie Weinstein: Yep, and I’m doing this, and I say, okay, yep, mechanical engineering is definitely what I want to do. I didn’t know anything about CAD, I didn’t know anything. I remember how mind blowing it was when I found out you could actually make threads in a piece of metal by tapping a hole.
That was all stuff that I learned in the course of this project, and definitely took a lot of inspiration from the original MakerBot Replicator that we had there and downloaded the CAD to look at all of that type of thing. So that’s how it started.
Then I went to college. Like I said, I was at Penn studying mechanical engineering and just picked it up every once in a while, whenever I had downtime, winter break, summer break whatever it might be. And it ended up being the summer going into my junior year of college; I was taking some classes that summer, taking physics E&M in the morning, working in the school’s 3D printing lab in the afternoon, and then, in the evenings, I would literally go home, make dinner, come back to the lab, and I’d taken 20 square feet of this room, and like a five foot table by like maybe four feet back, and decided, okay, I’m gonna redo this machine to make it actually work and be able to print more than, I don’t know, 13 layers tall.
My brother convinced me to apply to actually go to Maker Faire. And I swear I’m not saying this just because I’m talking to you but he said, you really should try to show this off at New York Maker Faire, which I had actually been to the year before in 2017, I think? 2016 I’d been, so I showed it off in 2017. When I got in, I was so excited. And that is where it started, being like, hey, maybe this could be a business.
Dale Dougherty: So how was it when you showed it at Maker Faire that year, did it work?
Ellie Weinstein: Okay, so it was a 90 degree day in September that year, and I was outside.
Dale Dougherty: you’re worried about…
Ellie Weinstein: The answer was, it didn’t work very well, but I was able to do a couple of two layer things. And, it worked well enough. I had finished that prototype three days before. I was interviewed by, I’m blanking on the person’s name, but who ran a website at the time called 3DigitalCooks. People were asking, how much does this cost? How many have you made? Like, where can I buy them?
I finished this three days ago! At that point, I had been kicked out of the lab because the school year had started. And so I was doing this from the corner of my bedroom with…
Dale Dougherty: This is just at the start of the school year.
Ellie Weinstein: Yes, exactly. It’s Maker Faire New York with what September? Yeah, exactly. So beginning of the school year, I just started dating someone who seven years later is now my fiancee. And so she thought I was like a little crazy, which she’s right. But that’s how it started. People were just coming up to me because I was in this, the future of food section.
And looking at this, it put a little bit in me of, “Hey, maybe there is a market for this, maybe this is something people want.” But also I was behind in school.
Dale Dougherty: I’m just really happy to hear that story. I’ve always hoped that Maker Faire was almost like this pre-commercial opportunity. Like before you even know if it’s interesting, suddenly you get this feedback from people and you ask those questions and you go what is it they want? And could I deliver it?
Ellie Weinstein: Absolutely. I had a group of my friends come up. We stayed in one of my brother’s friend’s houses for the weekend. It was really fun. That was a cool Maker Faire.
Dale Dougherty: You still had two more years of school to finish, right?
Ellie Weinstein: Yes. So I put it away after that. I was so behind on my schoolwork. You can get away in school with not doing work the first week or so because they’re just telling you what textbooks to buy, but I was behind. I was convinced to go to this other event in January where accidentally everyone else there was a startup and they accidentally asked me to be on the panel and me being me, I just said yes before realizing. So now I’m on a panel with a whole bunch of other people in a startup and this is like a hobby. So that was the next thing.
Put it away again, I had another semester to complete. And what really changed things was my senior year of college, we had our senior design capstone project, and had to decide what to do. My team really wanted to work on Cocoa Press. It was someone who was really interested in thermodynamics (who later went on to do a PhD), someone who was really interested in the design and the graphic design (and so a consumer product was really appealing to her), and the programming, etc.
It was a perfect match for the team. I was actually one of the people saying, I don’t think we should do this because giving up control is scary.
Dale Dougherty: Yeah.
Ellie Weinstein: But senior design went well. I had school resources now. I could talk to professors. Our advisor was the fluids professor.
Dale Dougherty: So you incubated it by yourself for years without really getting other people involved. And then this senior design project makes it a team.
Ellie Weinstein: Yep. Yep. And then that year I took — it was like five out of six classes I would have needed for the engineering entrepreneurship minor. So I didn’t get the minor, but I took most of them. The last class I took was this class called “Engineering and Entrepreneurship Lab” with Professor Jeffrey Babin.
And you would use your own startup idea as your class project to learn about all of it. So it was three hours, once a week, and we would just sit around. He literally bought pizza for the class every week. This was his like, hobby class. It was his passion.
Dale Dougherty: Oh, that’s great.
Ellie Weinstein: So my last semester in college, two out of my four classes was just me working on Cocoa Press and getting credit for it. So that’s how it started.
Dale Dougherty: Can I ask a question? Because it’s come up in the past for makers at colleges. Do you give up any IP rights?
Ellie Weinstein: I know every school does it differently. At Penn, and I don’t know what their rules are now, but at the time at Penn, they had pretty good rules for undergrads. They basically said you own all IP, but you do need to run it by our legal department. And they interviewed me, they interviewed a couple of professors.
I don’t remember if they talked to my teammates, but like I got, something informal but in writing from my teammates saying they didn’t own the IP. And so then I left with a letter saying Penn has no right to any of the intellectual property of this. So grad students, I know they’re like a little more…
Dale Dougherty: Yeah, it’s a little different because they’re paid often to work on…
Ellie Weinstein: Exactly.
Dale Dougherty: It’s good to bring it up because people should ask.
Ellie Weinstein: Totally. I won a few different awards and stuff, so I got somewhere in the realm of $20,000 as I was leaving college to keep working on this. And free space for six months in their innovation accelerator and stuff like that, and they still didn’t take any IP, even though I got all this money and all these awards.
Dale Dougherty: Good them.
Ellie Weinstein: I appreciate that.
Dale Dougherty: So you graduate. Do you make a decision to like, “I’m done with school. My project is now my business?” Or do you think about, do you think about getting a job?
Ellie Weinstein: Applying for a job seemed difficult, and doing my own thing, while more difficult, is easier to not apply for a job. I had applied to do a robotics master’s program, which I did get into, decided not to do.
Dale Dougherty: At Penn?
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah, at Penn. And also started the LLC at the same time, that second semester of college. But once I got into the Penn Innovation Accelerator, which is like a mile off campus, but still on campus, it was pretty clear I was going to try that out for a little bit. And yeah, I went full time right from school.
Dale Dougherty: Now you lost your design team, right?
Ellie Weinstein: Yes.
Dale Dougherty: So it’s all back in your court again, right?
Ellie Weinstein: One of the people was still my roommate for a couple more years. And so he would help me with, I don’t know, like various math and programming things. Just like a very smart person. Obviously much more informal. That was rough to lose everyone I was working with, to lose all of the access to the school’s resources, all of that.
Dale Dougherty: But did you have a pretty good prototype at that point?
Ellie Weinstein: I thought so. I look back and I realize I had no idea what it takes to launch a hardware product, but at the time I thought so, yeah.
Dale Dougherty: Because your challenge then was to move from a prototype to something you could manufacture, right?
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah. And I think it’s unique for a hardware company to start up having already built three full prototypes, having a proof of concept from my engineering entrepreneurship class, having run customer surveys, really having a good idea. I don’t think that’s common in a hardware startup specifically.
Dale Dougherty: What was your vision for the market for it at that point? Like industrial or consumer? I guess is what I’m asking.
Ellie Weinstein: Industrial more than consumer at that point. We were talking to everyone from more than chocolate shops, actually bakeries. Because they’re used to doing customized cakes and other stuff, but don’t want to buy the equipment to work with chocolate. And this is an all in one chocolate thing. More on the industrial space at that point.
Dale Dougherty: That involves going out and finding those potential first customers and getting them to try a new method of doing something that they’ve been doing probably for a long time.
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah, exactly. Our competition is always the status quo. There was no one else really doing it.
Dale Dougherty: So you had to do that too, right? Like you didn’t have a salesperson yet.
Ellie Weinstein: Nope, not at the time. Not at the time. I hired someone who started, I want to say March 2nd, 2020. Great time to hire someone.
Dale Dougherty: Yeah, I’ll always remember that when they were hired.
Ellie Weinstein: Oh yeah. So it was just me until then. And then yeah, obviously COVID was a mess.
Dale Dougherty: Say the next year or two, what changed? Or what did you have to accomplish?
Ellie Weinstein: At the time, in my building was another 3D printing company Allevi. They switched their name from BioBots. Since then, they’ve been acquired by 3D Systems, and they have left the building. But I got to talk to Ricky, who ran that company, all the time, and I was on the first floor of the building. I would leave my door open often because of HVAC issues. And he would just come by and he’d say, “Ellie what are you going to sell? You have to make money. What are you going to sell?” I was, “The printer, the chocolate until I can sell the printer.”
That’s what I was doing at that point. We ended up launching our first printer the fall of 2020. And it was just an absolute failure from every perspective. And that was a wake up call at that point.
Dale Dougherty: Yeah.
Ellie Weinstein: That was the first of, I would say, two or three times that Cocoa Press almost shut down.
Dale Dougherty: So you probably weren’t paying yourself.
Ellie Weinstein: No.
Dale Dougherty: And everything went into the product, right?
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah.
Dale Dougherty: Can you talk a little bit about how you thought you would manufacture? How many did you think you would have to make? And how did you go about it?
Ellie Weinstein: We were hoping to sell 25 of them to start. We had talked to a sheet metal manufacturer that was in western New York. I had toured another one, a little more locally, but the place in western New York was very kind to us, was so excited about what we were doing. And so just helped a little bit on like, how do you launch a hardware product? And they were great.
Dale Dougherty: So this, can you tell me a bit about it? Because, at least some people in your position get on a plane and go to China, right? Over the years, talking to people, I go — they wish too, that there was more opportunity for American manufacturers to get involved, especially small to midsize ones that — But sometimes they don’t know how to interface with a new product.
Ellie Weinstein: Sometimes it’s about not knowing how to interface. Sometimes it’s about cost. I find that people often think, okay, manufacturing in China is going to take this $100 product and make it, $105 or something, if you make it in the US. And from what I found, prices in China are — there was one part that I got quoted in, one set of parts I got quoted in a whole bunch of places, and manufacturing in China was 40 percent of the cost of the US. So sometimes it is really hard to say, no actually, this 100 product is now going to be $220, or $210. Which is a huge difference.
There were some parts I could not source from the US. Our double paned, argon filled glass door. I tried and I tried and I could not get anyone to make them in the US.
I found a place in China on Alibaba and they did it for, I forget, 60 bucks each. Custom size, just incredible. And then other places in the US, a heater company that I found was great to work with. They just sent it out to China anyway to get it made, and so I was paying that premium for what I thought was US made, but it was actually just a US company getting them sent out.
Since then, we do get most of our stuff made in China with LDO, who also goes to Maker Faires and events, and is just like a wonderful steward of the community. But those are some of my thoughts about U.S. vs. Chinese manufacturing.
Working LDO is amazing.
Dale Dougherty: You’ve produced seven and you sell those?
Ellie Weinstein: Some of them. Some were demos. One went to Linus Tech Tips, got destroyed by UPS. They put a pallet jack through it. Spent eight months fighting insurance to get that money, which I did eventually get, because they put a pallet jack through it and then lost the package. I did get it back eventually.
Dale Dougherty: Doing a business is a bunch of those war stories. Like you did, you never think that’s where you’re going to spend your time. But it is all those things like insurance and stuff that comes up and hits you in the face.
Ellie Weinstein: Oh, insurance constantly comes up and hits me in the face. The number of insurance companies I’ve talked to that says, “Are you 3D printing guns?” And “I’m like I’m 3D printing chocolate.” What are you asking me right now?
Dale Dougherty: What don’t you understand about chocolate?
Ellie Weinstein: If somebody wants to make a chocolate Nerf gun or something, Zach Friedman tried, but like, all power to you, but don’t deny my insurance because of this, please.
Dale Dougherty: How did you transition into the company you are today? Like, how many people you have now?
Ellie Weinstein: Right now, we have four people full time, and then, I don’t know, depending on how you count it, three to four contractors we work with pretty regularly. And then a few other community members who are just amazing humans and help us out in return for as much chocolate as they want.
I mentioned earlier, there were three times where Cocoa Press almost disappeared, that first time was where we are in the story now, like after the printer failed to sell, and that was due to various reasons. Everything from the product not working as well, shipping being difficult, not making enough so we had to raise the price, etc. Just bad product market fit overall.
I said, okay, let’s become our own customer. And we spent the next, I don’t know timelines here, year and a half, selling chocolate and sold tens of thousands of dollars of chocolate. Got into company systems, university systems. And sometimes once you’re in their system as a preferred vendor, every department will slowly find you and say, “Oh, wait, we can do this custom thing, and you can be paid very easily by our company? Great!”
Dale Dougherty: So they were ordering custom chocolate? Not pre packaged bars or things like that, necessarily.
Ellie Weinstein: Not prepackaged bars. Except one of the things, I realized is like, where does 3D printing really make sense in here? And so I would actually make, at this point I had some chocolate equipment, I would actually make blank bars and then 3D print text on top of them. And it was great. Ninety second print.
I think I had four of those seven printers. Or maybe three of the seven printers. I sold thousands and thousands of chocolate bars and the chocolate made it everywhere. I sold some to the U. S. ambassador to Germany and she brought it to Germany and to the White House. She was meeting with the president at the time in, I think this, I don’t remember exactly what it was, but they weren’t allowed to eat it, obviously, due to security concerns. I know some White House staffers and folks got to eat my chocolate. That was pretty cool. That was pretty cool. So we became our own customer.
Dale Dougherty: You weren’t shipping machines, you were shipping chocolate that you’d make.
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah, exactly. We would for the businesses that were higher quantities. For people, we worked with a local chocolate shop and they made like colorful, flavorful bonbons, and then we did the customized bar. And so we were trying to use what’s the benefit of traditional chocolate making? What’s the benefit of 3D printing in this?
Hot chocolate bombs were big at the time. One complaint from chocolate shops was, “You have these two half spheres. Then you have to put them together well and make the seam.” I can just print this in a way cooler shape than just a sphere and make a pause in the middle, put in the marshmallows, and I put some edible glitter inside and keep going.
We sold hundreds of 3D printed hot chocolate bombs as well. It was fun.
Dale Dougherty: On the technology side, was there anything that had to happen? We talked about manufacturing a little bit, but was there anything that either, you found some part or something that made a difference? Or you had to do programming that made a difference? How did the technology side develop during this period?
Ellie Weinstein: Not very much during that period. It was really focusing on use cases. But I didn’t want to be a chocolate shop, right? I didn’t want to compete with — there’s 3,000 chocolate shops in the country. I wanted to do the hardware because that’s what I’m interested in. And I was not, I wasn’t interested in running a company that didn’t interest me.
And so what happened was, it was me and someone who was in college, Will, at the time, and we we looked at all of the 3D printers out there and said, What should we do? Let’s work with an existing manufacturer and just put our extruder on there. Because what worked badly on the printer was the gantry system and what worked well was the chocolate aspects. And that’s just silly like I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. So we started working with this company. Didn’t go well, they ended up folding. They stole some of our equipment.
Dale Dougherty: An American company?
Ellie Weinstein: Yep, they folded. They took some of our equipment. I’ve since met them in person and they were just like, oh, yeah. So that was a little bit of a kick. Then we said, okay let’s check out this Voron printer. Luckily we hadn’t wasted too much time with them.
So we looked at the Voron printers. That’s just like an open source, 3D printing group, basically. And I loved the V0, the small printer. So anyway, long story short, we made a prototype using a V0, brought it to the Midwest RepRap Festival, met the team. At that point, that was the closest Cocoa Press ever got to closing. I was actively interviewing for other jobs at this point.
I was like, I can’t do this anymore. This printer might work, but it’s gonna be a side thing and maybe I can build it back up to a full time thing. And at that event, everything changed. Unrelated to this, I met someone and got to fulfill my dream of being on BattleBots, and so I’m on Team Mammoth in BattleBots, which is really fun.
And I met the Voron folks, and I got an email from Maks, who is RCF, the founder of the Voron project, and he said, paraphrasing, “Hey, let’s make your printer, but good.” And he unfortunately came down with COVID from that event and had the most productive COVID you’ve ever seen anyone have.
And he just redesigned the whole machine, basically. And we worked for the next year to to make what then became the printer we started selling last year. I’m forever grateful for Maks on that
Dale Dougherty: That’s great. So someone from the community steps up and says, “I can help you.” And that’s pretty remarkable. And you were just about ready to give up.
Ellie Weinstein: Oh yeah. No, I was actively searching for things. At one point I was going, this may have been a little bit earlier, but at one point I was interviewing for a company in Canada. I was going to move to Canada. And the border was closed, so it couldn’t happen. And I was frustrated at the time, but so thankful now that the border was closed because of COVID, of course, that there was no way for me to move to Canada.
Dale Dougherty: Oh, that’s cool. So Maks helps you produce this new version of the printer and then where do you go get that made? A different process, right?
Ellie Weinstein: Yes, so very different, there’s no sheet metal in this. There’s one injection molded part, but it was an off the shelf part. We didn’t have to buy tooling for it. And that was something that was really important to me, is not putting a bunch of upfront money into this.
I always have this question, like, when do you launch a product? At what stage? I think that’s something the 3D printing world is reckoning with at the moment. From so many failed Kickstarters to printers that they say, “Okay, this printer is available today. It’s shipping.” And everywhere in between.
Dale Dougherty: Yeah.
Ellie Weinstein: But when I felt ready, I put it up for sale. The company was just me at the time. Amy, who had been working with me, had left to go to Formlabs. I was like, okay let’s try this out. So put it up for sale.
Dale Dougherty: What was the price tag?
Ellie Weinstein: $1,500. Same price it is now. Although, a quick plug for me: we just announced Cocoa Press 2 and there’s a $300 discount for pre-ordering it. But importantly, people only had to put $100 down to reserve it, and that was refundable.
Dale Dougherty: That’s cool.
Ellie Weinstein: I just wanted to see, what? How do you figure out what the demand is for a new product?
Dale Dougherty: Yeah, exactly.
Ellie Weinstein: It’s impossible.
Dale Dougherty: That is where Kickstarter was interesting, but it was also a challenge.
Ellie Weinstein: It is. I decided not to go that route, just because, I don’t remember any specific products at the time, but I feel like there were a couple of high profile 3D printing missteps.
Ultimately, there’s just not that much different about a Kickstarter versus your own pre-order campaign, but the visibility is different.
So we worked with LDO who had made some parts for the original printer, but had really saved us with making a custom extruder motor. That was one of the defining things. We moved from air pressure back to a stepper motor driven system.
Dale Dougherty: Is that kind of the heart of the machine?
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah, so I have an interesting prototype because it’s strange colors, but of the newer extruder here, and there’s this lead screw in the middle.
I guess people will be listening to this through audio, but there’s a stepper motor with a non-captive lead screw, and the lead screw can go through the center of the stepper motor. And LDO custom made one, we were like, we want this much force and they said, “okay, sure.” And it was something that we had tried to source and couldn’t. So that was, a huge game changer.
And so then they did about 75 percent of the kits. They would send the boxes to us. And then we would put in the rest of it. So all the electronics were being made in the U.S. by UltiMachine. Some other various things either we were making or printing or sourcing or sourcing and then finishing off at our place. We did all the final stuff at our office.
Dale Dougherty: Fantastic.
Ellie Weinstein: Just going back a little bit, launched it for pre-sale, was hoping for 50 pre-orders in the first two weeks. I got 50 in the first 24 hours. And I hit a hundred, and when I hit a hundred I said, okay, I feel confident enough in this that I can hire someone. So I hired someone full time.
Dale Dougherty: To do what?
Ellie Weinstein: Small companies, you work on everything. She did documentation, some of the work on helping to interface between the person doing my programming, who is a contractor, and I, because I don’t know very much about programming. I know enough to like, work with people, but not to do it myself. I don’t know, prototyping, putting things together. There’s a lot that goes into just like, how do you build something? How do you tell people how to assemble it?
Dale Dougherty: And you have to answer the phone.
Ellie Weinstein: And so she was doing all of that.
Dale Dougherty: Or the email that people have, right?
Ellie Weinstein: Oh yeah, we had some one on one Zoom calls with people. It was more in the earlier days when we were selling a more expensive machine. But yeah. We did that and eventually we launched the printer. Less people than I would have hoped…
Dale Dougherty: What’s the timeframe on that? When was that?
Ellie Weinstein: Fall of 2023, so just over a year ago. We, I believe, started shipping in October and suddenly had to figure out how do we ship? And even more than that, how do we make enough chocolate in here?
Because that was a whole other side of this is, of course, your chocolate recipe. What chocolate do you use? And then who do you work with to get it made, or do you do it yourself? And I wanted to outsource it, but chocolate shops are not used to making cylindrical, air bubble-free, steam free chocolates with very high tolerances because they’re used in your system almost as a mechanical seal.
Now we just develop our own equipment to do our own chocolate.
Dale Dougherty: And so the people, to be clear, the people who buy the machine, buy your chocolate.
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah, it comes with, 20 of our CocoaCores. And some people use their own chocolate, but we always say it’s easier to use ours. But we’re not going to lock you out of doing your own thing.
Dale Dougherty: Yeah.
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah, and so it went well. We had to figure out how do we ship it. The first week we tried to ship 10 machines, and I forgot that I don’t know how difficult that packing process was going to be and learning about how to ship things, learning about UPS pickups, stuff that we’re much better at now.
Dale Dougherty: So what did you start seeing people doing with the Cocoa Press Printer?
Ellie Weinstein: Everything. That was the coolest part. It was like, I made the machine. I didn’t know what it could do. People have figured out how to do manual color swaps to do multicolor things, which we’re now making easier with our new machine. But people, someone bought it for their wedding to make their own wedding favors because it was going to be cheaper than doing wedding favors and then they had a chocolate printer at the end of it.
Dale Dougherty: Let me ask you, does it require a lot of expertise to figure it out other than just practice and doing it over and over? When you say the wedding couple, I wouldn’t expect that they’re chocolatiers or anything. They just wanted to figure out and they’ve got a deadline to, produce all this stuff.
Ellie Weinstein: With our machine I would say learning the chocolate side is way easier than learning the 3D printing side. So I will be the first to tell someone if you’re thinking about buying the printer, just know you’re going to have to put a little bit of time into learning how to use it. It’s not going to work exactly like your Prusa or Bambu. It’s a little bit different. And if you haven’t 3D printed before, you can definitely learn it. You can learn anything, but you’re gonna have to put some time into it. It’s not plug and play.
Dale Dougherty: And yeah, if you have the patience, that’s the main thing.
Ellie Weinstein: Exactly. You have to have the patience. And people respond to that in various ways, but I don’t want the angry support emails. I want people to be happy with what they buy. That’s what we’re doing, right? We’re doing it totally for fun.
Dale Dougherty: So really you could think about, you did nine years up to when you finally shipped a real product.
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah.
Dale Dougherty: Then for basically a year you’ve been shipping.
Ellie Weinstein: It’s the I think from the outside it, it has looked almost like an overnight success, that I’ve worked on for a decade now. And also its always looked like it was going well from the outside. That was something I always struggled with. It’s just like, how do I be optimistic, but also be genuine, and it wasn’t going well a lot of the time.
Dale Dougherty: I admire that persistence. It takes a lot of stubbornness to go through that. And I feel like the model that’s out there a lot of times for entrepreneurship is, oh, it should take about three months to do something, and about six months to be successful, and a year before you cash out.
Ellie Weinstein: Yep. Now we’re going with the slow growth.
Dale Dougherty: Slow and steady.
Ellie Weinstein: I don’t even call us a startup all the time anymore because I almost feel like we operate somewhere between the startup and the small business model. I’m not trying to grow to be 100 people. I’m not looking for VC money anymore. I just want this to be able to sustain itself, grow a little bit, for sure.
Dale Dougherty: Yeah, but I think the remarkable thing that makers should realize, if they don’t, is that this kind of model, and I hope you’re able to sustain it, but you’re employing people. You’re doing a lot of good to have a business that people enjoy working at, the customers you serve enjoy your product, and it’s meaningful.
It’s helping them make a living doing other things. It’s that whole ecosystem that you’ve connected and, it’s not about cashing out, it’s really I think building something that lasts and just trying to build a product that’s good.
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah. I don’t know how to say this without sounding cliche or whatever, but we do what we want at Cocoa Press. We are fully, it’s always hard to hire people for Cocoa Press because they say, what are the exact job responsibilities? And I say, here’s the core of the job. And then here’s everything else we could do. And you pick. If you’re interested in marketing, if you want to learn SEO, and Google AdSense and stuff, we can do marketing there. If you love events, and Maker Faires, and RepRap festivals, we’ll put our money towards those. Which is obviously what we’ve picked, we don’t do any paid marketing at the moment.
But it really is just what is a company if it’s not the people? And so we just try to have fun with each other and do what we want. And that’s how…
Dale Dougherty: But that’s a creation too, right? That’s something you’ve created. You’ve made it possible for people to work like that. And it’s really meaningful.
Ellie Weinstein: I appreciate that. And going back to, when Ricky, who is the, CEO of Allevi, would come by my office, the other thing that he would always say to me is, innovation is not just the product. Innovation is the business model. Innovation is how you connect with your customers.
I don’t know if he said this, but I would add, what your company’s culture is. And I think we’ve been able to be innovative in multiple of those fronts. Which is cool, it’s fun.
Dale Dougherty: So let me just ask you a last question. What’s the future hold then? I get it from your answer, really, to keep doing what you love doing.
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah, we are really excited about Cocoa Press 2. We’re excited to launch it internationally. I get emails every single day from people in Europe and other countries asking when they can get it. I know some people have secretly shipped it to a forwarder or someone to export out of the country. But I will not ship it internationally, right now. Cocoa Press 2, we will.
Dale Dougherty: Is that mainly about support?
Ellie Weinstein: It’s about support. It’s about just my amount of time to figure out taxes. Difficult things. I’m struggling enough just figuring out how to do taxes in 50 different states or figuring out which of those states I need to.
Also, about how do you ship chocolate internationally? In the U. S., we ship chocolate in the warmer months only on Monday or Tuesday. Because we do not want it in a warehouse over the weekend. It’s just like weird little tricks like that we’ve picked up over the years. So the future of Cocoa Press is get more people to be able to do it. At some point, I want to be able to reduce the cost of the machine.
We took huge steps in having pre-orders be $1,200, which is the least expensive Cocoa Press has ever been. That will go back up, of course. We’re also starting a whole other side of the company. We’re not talking about it a ton right now, but we did recently acquire Alien 3D. And they do monthly 3D printing project boxes.
And so we’re going to be able to just do, we’ll run this as a completely separate brand and we’ll be able to do more fun things in 3D printing. I think one of the coolest parts about running Cocoa Press is we get to decide where we spend our money and who we do business with. Because I want to work with cool people, ethical people, and we just want to make joy, right? Like we do chocolate, we’re going to be doing 3D printing projects so that people who don’t know what to do with their 3D printers can do some really cool stuff. And so I think there’ll be a little bit of diversification of what we’re doing.
Dale Dougherty: I have to say one thing. I remember going to Maker Faire Tokyo and seeing a 3D printer. There’s kind of these Japanese sweets, they’re kind of soft and they had a printer there probably with a syringe type injection into it, but they were having, it was probably like college students, a bit like you. But they were there.
It was just such fun to, you know, it’s nice not to see plastic. And it’s nice to see things coming out of a printer that, that that are as fun as chocolate.
Ellie Weinstein: Yeah, I love seeing all the crazy things people do. And, I also like that the chocolate industry is very friendly, and the 3D printing industry is certainly very friendly. And I know the other people who are doing 3D printed food, 3D food printers, and 3D chocolate printers. Like I, I just emailed them and I’m like, “Hey? How’s your product going?”
Dale Dougherty: So if someone you hadn’t seen for 10 years came up to you and asked you in one sentence to describe what you do, how would you answer that?
Ellie Weinstein: If they asked like what I do now?
Dale Dougherty: Yeah, right.
Ellie Weinstein: I just say that I make 3D printers that print chocolate. And if my mom is around me, she goes, “No. You designed the printer, you invented the printer.” And it’s trying to give me a little bit more credit, where I just, you know. I take credit, I take more credit than I deserve from everyone who worked on the design team, to people who have been at Cocoa Press, to my current team. But, that is the way.
Dale Dougherty: Let’s wrap it there. Thank you, Ellie, for your time. It was wonderful learning about, really this 10 year journey that you’ve been on. And I hope for many years into the future.
Ellie Weinstein: Thank you. And obviously, thanks for everything you’ve done with Make, that really was my start. And I didn’t mention that I got to meet Miguel, who made the pancake printer, which was another one of my inspirations. And we actually went to Maker Faire Rome together at one point.
And yeah, thank you for everything you’ve done as well.
Dale Dougherty: Alright, take care.
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