Grandma and Granddaughter

Our Story

Grandma Stroh is the quintessential grandma. I guess maybe I think that because she’s my grandma; and, though I recognize my bias and she will strongly disagree, I think she’s just perfect. She grew up in a very small farming town in central Illinois in a large family with ten children. During the Great Depression, ten kids meant somebody was always hungry. Times were tough then, but they all worked hard and managed to keep their priorities on their family. Her dad was a day laborer and her mom – well, she was raising ten kids, so she didn’t have time to blink. The family endured a number of hardships including the loss of their mother when Grandma was just fourteen. Through it all, they kept their family together and formed unbreakable bonds of love. Grandma has some great stories from when she was growing up. Like the one where her school-teacher taught her to embroider when she was just five years-old because she needed something to do and didn’t want to go outside and have a snowball fight with the boys at recess. She also learned to bake at a very young age; and, wow, can she bake. There are a few people who are just magical in the kitchen and my grandma is one of them.

At nineteen, Grandma married our Grandpa Stroh. They ran off together (though Grandma doesn’t like me to say that) and went all the way to Iowa (which was a long way back then) and got married in the “Little Brown Church in the Vale.” Although there was a church just up the street, Grandpa Stroh was a romantic guy and knew my grandma always liked the popular song about that particular church. Together, grandma and grandpa owned and managed five successful businesses and worked hard to escape the poverty they had endured during the Great Depression. Before grandpa passed, they were married nearly sixty-two years and were in love every minute of them.

As a kid, I remember watching my grandma bake and thinking she must love me tremendously. When you taste her food, you know there’s just no other conclusion a kid could draw. This was particularly true when she would make me a cup of her hot chocolate. It warmed my soul from the inside out and made me feel special. The hot chocolate usually came out when Grandma was taking a break between batches of cookies. So, we’d sit at the table and talk over a warm cup together. I could ask my Grandma anything. It made me feel like there was no place she’d rather be. No kid she loved more. No time like right then.

I’m all grown-up now, and I have two amazing children of my own. I want them to feel that same special feeling I had as a kid, so I try to recreate this atmosphere in my kitchen with each of them. Grandma Stroh’s Hot Chocolate just has a way of making people feel exceptional. It’s not just a drink. It’s the whole experience. It’s the magic of my childhood that comes flooding back and gets passed on to my kids. Over the holidays I always made a bunch of Grandma Stroh’s Hot Chocolate to give as gifts to our friends and family. I guess I was trying to sprinkle some of Grandma’s magic on the people we love. It never failed that shortly after the holidays, the requests for more of Grandma Stroh’s Hot Chocolate came flooding in and our gift list became longer and longer each year. Finally, one of my friends said, “won’t you please just start selling this stuff so we can have it all the time?” I decided there was no better way to honor not just the hot chocolate that my Grandma made, but how it was a conduit of her love and affection for her family. I want to share that legacy so that children and families everywhere can enjoy Grandma Stroh’s Hot Chocolate and feel the magic it brings to their homes.