The Hot Chocolate Sparrow is one of those places where you always run into someone you know. Overrun in summer with visitors who don’t mind standing in line for the Orleans café’s signature frozen coffee drinks, grilled sandwiches or ice cream, it’s a hub all year long for people who stop daily to pick up coffee on their way to work, meet friends for lunch or come for dessert in the evening.

Right around now, the shop’s candy counter is especially busy as people rush in for boxes of chocolates for their sweeties for Valentine’s Day. And all those tempting truffles behind the glass represent the Sparrow’s true roots.

It was 20 years ago this week that Marjorie Sparrow opened her first location of The Chocolate Sparrow on Brackett Road in North Eastham, featuring delectable homemade chocolates.

Sparrow, who trained as a nurse, worked as an RN for five years before earning a master’s degree in nutrition and becoming a dietician. She worked for Outer Cape Health and the WIC program for more than a decade before deciding she wanted to do something different. People who know her background, she concedes, think it’s funny that a nutritionist wound up selling chocolate, but her philosophy is “Everything in moderation.”

Asked why she decided to open her own shop, she reflects, “It was about having my own business. My father had his own business, and he told me you had to have a business you love because you’ll be with it all the time. I like chocolate, so I picked chocolate.”

She thinks that choice – picking something she loved – had a great deal to do with the business’s success. And after all these years, she still enjoys it. “It’s an upbeat business,” she says. “People are mostly happy when they come to it – it’s not like medicine.”

Soon after opening in Eastham, The Chocolate Sparrow moved across Route 6 to the Seatoller Shops, enjoying ever-increasing popularity as word of the quality of Sparrow’s chocolates spread. Sparrow opened a satellite location in Wellfleet a year later, and, in 1993, opened The Hot Chocolate Sparrow on Route 6A in Orleans, marking the business’s expansion to espressos, cappuccinos and lattes.

But the chocolate-making operation remained in Eastham, so Sparrow and her employees were often on the road. That ended in 2002, when The Hot Chocolate Sparrow moved to its own building on Old Colony Way, behind CVS. Her husband Bob, a builder, renovated an existing building on the site, formerly a barber shop, and built around it to create a shop with more seating, an expansive kitchen and a candy-making area. They also opened an ice cream window. With a larger facility, the shop expanded its café menu of grilled sandwiches, adding soups, bagels and breakfast sandwiches.

Sparrow kept the Eastham location open for a while longer, but closed it about five years ago. The Wellfleet shop remains a summer operation.

Today, “The Sparrow,” as locals know it, employs close to 40 people. Of those, Sparrow says, 16 are trained to work the espresso machine and 11 are strictly candy people. Some of the employees have been there for a number of years, a few since the business’s early days.

Candy-maker Kathy Dufresne has been with Sparrow from the very beginning, first working at the original shop on Brackett Road. “I would work downstairs, packing the chocolate … I did one day a week, because I was babysitting for her kids,” she says with a laugh. Then she started learning about making candy, from Sparrow and from the Sparrow’s first candy maker. When that candy-maker left to attend college, Dufresne took over.

Dufresne, who lives in Eastham, is always expanding the shop’s repertoire of creative offerings – the latest additions are chocolate pizza and homemade marshmallows. In addition to the creative freedom, she really enjoys the people she works with.

“We all get along, it’s great,” Dufresne says. “It’s kind of like a family here. If someone gets sick, we all take up a collection and get a card. Everybody cares about everybody.”

That attitude is top-down, she says, noting that Sparrow is a very caring boss.

Sparrow says she is happy to have employees who really want to be there. “Most of them could be doing other things,” she notes.

Both the Sparrows’ children have worked in the business. Now daughter Maya is a senior in college, and son Perry, 25, who works for Harwich-based Back Office Associates in New Mexico, is getting married this spring.

Sparrow, who is in the shop just about every day, enjoys both the employees and the customers. “It is kind of a community center,” she says. “It’s always open and you can sit down and spend even a dollar on a cup of coffee.”

To celebrate the business’s 20th anniversary, the shop gave away 400 commemorative coffee mugs, plus countless bags of candy and free coffees. Throughout the fall and winter, the Sparrow has run unadvertised promotions involving coupons for coffees and cappuccinos, all, Sparrow says, to reward year-round customers. “We do appreciate our customers, and we wanted them to know how important they are to us,” she says. “We tried to exceed expectations. … It’s a constant effort to keep people happy.”

So far, the main effects of the recession have been increased costs, she says. Like other Cape businesspeople, Sparrow is keeping a weather eye on the approaching summer season. Last summer, she points out, European visitors were a big part of the picture, a factor that may well be reduced this year.

“Maintaining a business is a lot harder than starting one,” says Sparrow.

That’s all the more reason to celebrate a successful two decades.

Article: Wicked Local