By Whitney Pipkin and Tonya Stewart
50+ locally made gifts for everyone on your list and the stories behind the artisans who make them.
Blanc Creatives
Charlottesville
Established: 2011
Where to buy: Website
Products: Forged metal cookware and wooden accessories
The carbon steel cookware that Corry Blanc and his team of 10 forge in a Charlottesville shop has for years been “the secret of the restaurant industry”—durable, nonstick and ideal for searing. “Now, we’re bringing it to the homeowner world,” Blanc said. Today, Blanc’s team makes up to 100 pieces a week over the shop’s hot flames as one of three businesses in the world forging skillets and pans by hand. –WP
Milton’s Local
Richmond
Established: 2013
Where to buy: Mom’s Organic Market, select Wegmans stores, Yes! Organic Market and other small grocers
Products: All-natural bacon and bacon sausages
With the desire to continue a legacy of support for sustainable agriculture and family farms but understanding his own limitations as a farmer, James Faison created Milton’s Local. Named in honor of Faison’s late grandfather, Milton’s Local connects meat-raising farmers in Virginia and North Carolina with wholesale buyers and produces a line of all-natural bacon and bacon sausages (a product created when bits of bacon are incorporated into sausage). Products contain no antibiotics, no added hormones or steroids, no artificial nitrates or nitrites and no MSG; they are also gluten-free. –TS
Moroccan Saffron
Washington, D.C.
Established: 2013
Where to buy: The Cookery, Eastern Market, Sapore (SE D.C. location), Amazon
Products: Moroccan saffron, organic honey, artisan loose-leaf teas
Rachid Saad grew up in Rabat, the capital of Morocco, and wanted to start a business in the U.S. by bringing a bit of his homeland to America. His 100 percent pure raw saffron honey mixes the best of two worlds: honey from the Virginia Shenandoah Valley and organic saffron Saad imports directly from farmers in the Moroccan mountain village of Taliouine. –TS
Goodpasture Knives
Ashland
Established: 2005
Where to buy: Contact for special orders
Products: Kitchen, file, hunting knives
Tom Goodpasture has made a machete for a patron in Singapore and hunting knives for customers in Alaska since he started his business in a small shop in 2005. The Virginia State Police officer got into knife-making through a mentor on the force and hasn’t put it down since. He specializes in kitchen knives starting at $45 and scours yard sales for metal filings that can find new life with a new edge. –WP
True Made Foods
Alexandria
Established: 2015
Where to buy: Select Balducci’s grocery stores, Bon Vivant Café & Farm Market, The Cookery, Glen’s Garden Market, Sapore, select Yes! Organic Markets, From the Farmer, website
Products: Vegetable-infused condiments
“As a parent and someone concerned about health and natural foods, I tried to get my kids to stop eating ketchup,” says True Made Foods co-founder Abe Kamarck. He was unsuccessful, but True Made Foods has instead created health-forward versions of three American sauces: Original BBQ Sauce, Vegetable Ketchup and Original Veracha Hot Sauce. True Made Foods infuses fresh vegetables (specifically carrots, butternut squash and spinach) into their products and drastically cuts added sugars. –TS
Ketchung! LLC
Alexandria
Established: 2014
Where to buy: Fern Street Gourmet (Fairlington), Let’s Meat on the Avenue (Del Ray), LoKL Gourmet (McLean), Maple Avenue Market (Vienna), Westover Market and Beer Garden (Arlington), website
Products: Korean-inspired spicy ketchup and barbecue sauces
Ketchung! creator Helen Chung, a “congressional staffer by day and a specialty sauce hawker by night,” began making her signature sauce, a Korean-inspired ketchup, when she was in high school. She gave the sauce as holiday gifts to family and friends. Now, thanks to the efforts of Chung’s small business (read: she and her husband), you can do the same. –TS
Potomac Chocolate
Woodbridge
Established: 2010
Where to buy: Crystal City Wine Shop (Crystal City), Lolli and Pops (Tysons Corner), The Sugar Cube (Alexandria), UnWined (Alexandria), website
Products: Single-origin dark chocolate bars, inclusion and milk chocolate bars, collections (variety packs) of bars, drinking chocolates
Ben Rasmussen, a bean-to-bar craft chocolate-maker, starts with raw fermented cacao beans and finishes with a smooth bars of chocolate. “Just like a wine grape or a coffee bean, different cacao beans from different origins have really different flavors, and my goal is to make chocolate that highlights those flavors,” he says. Special winter and holiday products include drinking chocolates (a Dominican Republic chocolate with fruity notes offered three ways: plain, with peppermint and with winter warming spices) and a dark chocolate bar with crushed Doscher’s old-fashioned candy canes. –TS
Cervantes Coffee Roasters
Springfield
Established: 2013
Where to buy: In-store
Products: House-roasted, single-origin coffee and coffee shop
Though the location in a warehouse district is unassuming, the coffee is anything but. The owner of Cervantes Coffee Roasters, Marialy Justiniano, and her husband, Alex Escobar, have spent time with many of the South American coffee growers from whom they source single-origin beans for roasting in the concrete-floored space, made into a homey coffee shop with pallet-wood tables and burlap-bag art. MentalFloss.com recently named the roaster, which offers cuppings, tours and events, the best in Virginia. –WP
