Outliers: Pediatrician finds new calling as chocolatier

What started as a hobby for Dr. Heather Johnston has quickly morphed into a sweet business.

While she still works part time as a pediatrician, Johnston's passion these days is operating Veruca Chocolates, a small-batch candy company in Chicago. She and her employees—two to eight, depending on the season—hand-make candies by the hundreds: bonbons, truffles, turtles, salted caramels. And for Hanukkah this year, she made 7,000 boxes of her Gelt for Grownups, foil-wrapped chocolate coins in three varieties.

Johnston, 42, also has transformed turtles, taming their “blobbiness” into a neat square dusted with green powder and stamped with a reptilian pattern. “My approach is, I make what I want to eat,” she said.

She left full-time medicine in 2010 seeking greater creativity and more time with her children.

Drawing on a five-day chocolate class at the French Pastry School in Chicago, her only formal training, Johnston at first treated chocolate as a hobby, making gifts and catering small parties. But by February 2011, Johnston's husband, Matt Brown, offered an observation. “He's lugging 100 pounds of chocolate up the steps,” she recalled, “and he said, 'You have to know that this is beyond a hobby.' ”

That June, she incorporated Veruca Chocolates, funding her startup with a tax refund check. The business is on track to turn a profit by January, she said.

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