DeBrand: the chocolate house on Auburn Park Drive

1987 — present

A Fort Wayne food, made by hand: Cathy Brand grew up in her parents' Fort Wayne confectionery-supply business, Country Kitchen, working with chocolate from the age of eight. In October 1987 she opened DeBrand Fine Chocolates — "De," the French prefix for "from," before her maiden name — in a room her parents gave her in their business, by other accounts in her childhood home on Wells Street; the Wells Street location was destroyed by fire three years later, and she rebuilt. The candy firms as companies belong to the Business section, and DeBrand's corporate line is only sketched there; its place in the city's food record is the chocolate itself and the institution built around it. The recipes are Brand-Beere's own. The company she built with her husband Tim Beere — lead designer and photographer since their marriage a year after the founding — was named to Oprah Winfrey's Favorite Things in successive years, supplied chocolates to the television program The Apprentice and to Trump properties, and sells by mail order across the United States and abroad. In 2002 the firm opened its headquarters on Auburn Park Drive — production kitchen, shop, offices and a tour operation in more than 30,000 square feet — and the Auburn Road tour, ending in the chocolate kitchens, became one of the city's standard food pilgrimages. Three Fort Wayne shops and one in Indianapolis were trading at the counts the trade press gives for the mid-2020s, with three daughters of the founder in the business full-time: a confectionery started in a borrowed room is now the city's signature sweet.

Sources:

1. Manufacturing Today, DeBrand Fine Chocolates profile (25th-anniversary year) — the 1987 founding, the parents' confectionery business, the name, the Oprah and Trump record, the 30,000-square-foot headquarters.
2. Farm World / Marketplace (December 2005), via the Fort Wayne press — the Wells Street first location of 1987 and its destruction by fire three years later, the mail-order reach.
3. Indianapolis Business Journal, "Made in Indiana: Chocolate by DeBrand Fine Chocolates" (August 2023) — the October 1987 start, the childhood-home first store, the Auburn Park Drive headquarters.
4. Meijer newsroom release (19 October 2023) and Business People magazine — the family business today, the founder's daughters in the firm, the Fort Wayne retail presence.