Inside the store of Santa Clara’s Lula’s Chocolates on Thursday, Sept. 29 were platters of divine-tasting chocolates- crunchy toffee, mouth-watering rocky road made with macadamia nuts, minty butter crèmes, vanilla butter crèmes topped with fresh pecans and a dream buffet of rich truffles- blood orange truffles, petit truffles and wine truffles. At the grand opening of Lula’s Chocolates, Santa Clara Mayor Lisa Gillmor, city officials and members of the Santa Clara Chamber of Commerce came to celebrate the ribbon cutting and of course, nibble on chocolates.
“We have a lot of great support from the South Bay and have had customers from Santa Clara at our stores,” says Scott Lund, owner of Lula’s Chocolates. “This store is a brand new project by the Irvine Company. The Santa Clara planning department and people from the city were a joy to work with. It probably helped that I brought chocolates wherever I went. I’m glad we chose Santa Clara.”
Currently, there are two Lula’s Chocolates locations in Carmel, one frequented by locals and the other one, by tourists. The third store is a factory based in Monterey. The new Santa Clara store, located at 2712 Augustine Drive, Ste. 140, is Lula’s Chocolates’ fourth store.
Scott Lund’s grandmother Lula Lund learned how to make candy from her home economics teacher when she lived in Wyoming.
“My grandmother was making candy for her friends, who told her to start selling the candy,” Scott Lund says. “Then she moved to Salt Lake City to get married and she kept making candy and started selling it. She sold them under the name Mrs. Lund’s Personality Chocolates. I asked her one time why she called them personality chocolates, and she said that no matter how hard you try to make the chocolates have the same exact look, our hand-dipped chocolates all look different, even if they’re made from the same batch. So she liked to say that the chocolates all had their own individual personalities and that’s why her chocolates were called personality chocolates.”
In 1945, Lula Lund started selling Mrs. Lund’s Personality Chocolates. She passed away in 2000 after celebrating her 99th birthday. Eventually, Scott Lund and his family moved from Utah to Monterey, California. Using his grandmother’s recipes and confectionery making techniques, Scott Lund opened his first Lula’s Chocolates store in 2006. The store’s sea salt caramels, sprinkled with sea salt from all over the world, are popular with customers. Scott Lund’s personal favorite is the milk almond toffee, made from only butter, sugar, chocolate and almonds.
“We don’t skimp on our cream or butter or any of our ingredients and we use the finest and freshest ingredients,” Scott Lund says. “We don’t use any kinds of preservatives and there are no artificial colors or flavors in our candies. We sell our candy fresh.”
