MY LIGHT BULB MOMENT
Chocolatier Lavinia Davolio
LAVINIA DAVOLIO, 34, set up her own confectionery business, Lavolio, in 2013. She lives in London with her husband, Angelo, who works in the City. I SPENT my childhood on a farm in Italy. We grew more than 100 fruits and vegetables and rarely went to a shop. I loved to cook and was taught by my grandmothers.
After university, I moved to London and started working for an investment bank. I was a director at 27, and sometimes the only woman in a team of 34 men. It wasn’t unusual for me to be mistaken for the secretary!
One day in 2012, I touched in at the bank’s gate as usual, but my pass did not work. All of a sudden, a security guard appeared and escorted me away. Like 4,499 other employees, I had been made redundant. As I stood there, stunned, I promised to myself I’d try to see it as an opportunity.
I decided I would retrain as a chef and open a restaurant — something that had always been an ambition.
Six months later, I was in a cookery class playing with ingredients to make chocolate bon-bons while experimenting with sugar coating — the technique used to make sugared almonds.
As I was pouring sugar into a revolving barrel filled with nuts, I wondered if I could use the same technique to keep more ingredients fresh without using artificial preservatives.
I realised I could encapsulate foods, including coffee beans, nuts, fruit pieces and chocolate, in a sugar shell. So Lavolio was born.
No one thanked me in the past when I did financial deals worth millions. Now, customers say my chocolates are ‘little nuggets of joy’. I have the best job in the world — and it’s all thanks to being made redundant!