Utah's White Mesa Willy Wonkas

“This is Hubert, our VP of sales and marketing,” says Lickity Split Chocolates CEO Andrew Dayish, of a ten-year-old boy wearing a Grim Reaper Halloween mask.  “I am not. I’m a dead guy!” retorts Hubert, before running off for another piece of cake, a cape flapping in his wake. 

All of Lickity Split’s owner-operators straddle corporate titles and Halloween costumes, paperwork and cake equally comfortably.  The fifteen children managing the tiny chocolate factory at the edges of Blanding, Utah are a boisterous mix of the rural community’s Navajo, Mormon, Mexican and Anglo populations.  Although set deeply within one of the nation’s largest and poorest counties, the only one in Utah with a Native American majority, where thirty percent of people live below the poverty line and less than 1% of the businesses are Native-owned, Lickity Split’s children, nicknamed in one article the “White Mesa Wonkas,” have sold nearly $30,000 during their three years in business. 

Tired, cheerful and near-saintly Elaine Borgen is the patient blonde sustaining the project.  Having moved to Blanding as a VISTA volunteer after twenty years in the corporate world, she remembers Andrew, Creedence Sampson, Tya Manygoats, Tiffany Billie and a few other Navajo neighbor kids knocking at her door to ask for money for the movies.  “I can’t lend you all money,” she said, “but come back tomorrow and we’ll try to figure out a way for you to make your own money.”  The next day’s brainstorming session led to the germination of the company’s flagship product, a chocolate lollipop decorated like a traditional Navajo basket.  Over the next four months, the children and Elaine made prototypes, evolved their technologies, and assigned everyone roles: CEO, CFO, COO, President, Vice-President, and managers of the company’s Production, Shipping & Handling, Computer, Art, and Sales & Marketing departments.  The children meet four times a week: for after-school tutoring on Mondays and Wednesdays, and chocolate-making on Fridays and Saturdays, with a team meeting at the end of every chocolate-making day where they assess progress and discuss new schemes that have appeared on the “Chocolate Idea Board.”  Older children are paid by the hour and younger ones through a point system whose monetary value changes according to the company’s profits (much like stock options); some employees earn upwards of $700 a year.  Many use the money to help their parents with bills.  Fifteen percent of the profits are re-invested for maintenance and operations, and with the kids registered in the state of Utah as the Limited Liability Company’s official owners, it is listed as a majority-owned Native American business.  A Lickety Split spin-off has now formed on the Mountain Ute reservation south of Blanding, coordinated by its director of education, Kelda Rogers, and stakeholders dream of similar franchises on reservations across the country, when increased volume could allow them to sell chocolate to such venues as the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.   

Getting out of poverty, Elaine argues, is a matter of acquiring skills and then assets.  By making chocolate, the children learn from start to finish what running a business means: how to do the books, put a quality control system into place, cost a product and market it. In order to get hired, children must exceed a 2.5 grade point average, which they must also maintain if they wish to stay, but Elaine reckons the average GPA for a Lickity Split employee is 3.0, and she’s seen grades go up as leadership skills increase.  While the Navajo basket chocolate lollipop—which uses pure butter and cocoa butter—is still the most popular Lickity Split product, the children have also developed truffles, caramel apples presented in pretty origami boxes, hogan, teepee and Kokopelli-shaped chocolates, chocolate-dipped strawberries and pretzels, painted pottery and jewelry.  They hope to open a retail space on Main Street and have been fundraising by hosting a ‘café’ with live music, desserts for sale, and pint-sized waiters and waitresses. Each year sees a business retreat during which both the Blanding and White Mesa branches of Lickity Split spend a few days together—last year, before they traveled to the Oregon Coast, a local medicine man performed a ceremony to ensure the children’s safe return. 

While she’s quick to laud the kids as the movers and shakers of Lickity Split, Elaine deserves any credit she can get.  She offers breakfast at her house before school every morning to any neighboring children who might appreciate a high-protein, chock-full-of-fruit start to their day, and works tirelessly teaching business courses as the local college, as the chairperson of the San Juan County VISTA volunteers, and on her own VISTA project, the Legacy Community Development Corporation, which pairs people in rural areas with business opportunities that allow them to work from home, such as call centers or a remote-site medical coding business.  Any money made on top of her VISTA stipend (10% above the poverty line) is poured into Lickity Split.  Once the children start turning sixteen, Elaine hopes to help them set up Individual Development Accounts (IDAs), bank accounts similar to a 401(K) that are matched three to one by the state. Although she recognizes that as a business the company is less than sustainable, leaning heavily upon her labor (since the number of orders often exceeds the time the children have available to fill them, Elaine ends up making a lot of chocolate herself), she does believe the skills that the children are learning will allow them to start sustainable businesses of their own some day. 

Neither Elaine nor the kids have gone unnoticed.  Generous grants have awarded each of the kids a bicycle and a computer, although most of them lack Internet and some even electricity at home.  Elaine was named this year’s Small Business Associations Minority Champion of the Year. The children have traveled to national conferences, been recognized by Utah senators, and Creedence and Andrew even met President Bush.

When asked about the ways their organization differs from more traditional companies, one employee pipes up: “Our waste is about 30%, which is higher than the waste at other chocolate factories.  But it’s hard for us to keep our hands off the chocolate!”  Indeed, a pint-sized Wonka sporting a pastry chef’s floppy hat sidles up to me repeatedly with shards of white chocolate melting in her palm.  Elaine maintains that Lickity Split has more to do with education than chocolate, but the children disagree: “The best thing is definitely the chocolate.” “And the people!” another pipes up. 

In a no-alcohol Mormon town where the intoxicants of choice are meth and Listerine (“This is real old-fashioned America,” says Elaine, in a voice utterly lacking irony), set in a county so big and remote it covers the same space as RI, CT and MA with only one inhabitant for every two of its desolate, rocky square miles, a group of children get together every week to alchemize raw materials into what may look like chocolate but is actually far more. 

The phone rings, and Tya Manygoats picks up.  “Hello, Lickity Split Chocolate,” she says perkily, then, annoyed, to someone in another room insolent enough to greet the same caller: “I already answered, okay?” Then, back to the caller: “What can I help you with today?”

In October and November 2006, I meandered circuitously between San Francisco to Miami under the auspices of Minnesota-based nonprofit Renewing the Countryside, interviewing farmers, ecologists, musicians and activists for a book on youth revitalizing rural landscapes all across America.  Hero-bosses Jan Joannides and Brett Olsen have allowed me to post my interviews here, but look for them in the Youth Renewing the Countryside book, due out in the spring of 2008.