Warm & Toasty
- Benjamin Lerner
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
How Vermont Marshmallow Company founder Alexx Shuman turned her favorite childhood snack into a highly-successful, independent Vermont business
STORY BY BENJAMIN LERNER PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY VERMONT MARSHMALLOW COMPANY
A great marshmallow should feel cushiony and light, with a custardy center that turns crème-brûlée-shattery at the edges when you toast it. That’s the timeless experience that chef-founder Alexx Shuman is after at Vermont Marshmallow Company: a confection that elevates a campfire staple into something you can savor and enjoy in countless ways.
True to that philosophy, Vermont Marshmallow Company’s delectable marshmallows are built like desserts from a Michelin-starred kitchen. If a recipe for a specialty marshmallow calls for blueberry, she starts with real, Vermont-sourced blueberries; if it needs chocolate or coffee, she partners with Vermont-based, artisan foodmakers and roasters whose products carry authentic depth and flavor. The enduring bestsellers from Vermont Marshmallow Company’s catalog—Toasty Vanilla, Dulce de Leche, and Cinnamon Sugar—share a signature texture that Shuman delightfully describes as “pillowy as heck.” It’s the kind of luxurious texture that wins over skeptics and self-described “not-marshmallow people,” many of whom are now her recurrent customers.
Seasonal flavors broaden the palette without losing broad appeal, changing with the temperatures and moods of Vermont’s equinoxes and solstices to pave the way for year-round enjoyment. This Holiday and Winter season, marshmallow mavens and new customers alike can enjoy Peppermint, Gingerbread, and Buttered Rum marshmallows made with local butter. It’s a gourmet lineup that reads more like an upscale restaurant dessert menu than a supermarket candy aisle.
Over the past several years, the defining ethos of Vermont Marshmallow Company—handmade, quality ingredient-centric, and joy-forward—has grown into a brand with national reach. But even as the company thrives, Shuman still finds the sweetest fulfillment on the front lines. At the Big E, a massive, annual product exposition fair in Massachusetts, Shuman spent seventeen days toasting, chatting, and serving, with a thousand micro-moments of delight that keep her tethered to the reason behind her hard work.
“When someone takes a bite and throws their head back for a second—that’s what it’s all about,” she says. It’s the same spark that lit her path towards marshmallow mastery in the first place, a path that began with childhood memories of being a “marshmallow kid” in South Burlington. The same metaphoric flame that toasted her marshmallows eventually lit a fuse of passion. It fueled her motivation to persevere through classical culinary training across the globe, then brought her back to where it all began, where she found her true calling. Ultimately, Shuman was able to channel both her raw talent and entrepreneurial grit into Vermont Marshmallow Company, which has become a bona fide Vermont success story.
In the weeks following Shuman’s herculean stint at The Big E, we sat down with her before the start of the busy Holiday season. She shared about how her menu is made, why her marshmallows taste different, and how her business was born and successfully scaled. She also offered a glimpse into how Vermont’s culture of craft and community helped a young, female entrepreneur build a business as remarkable as the first bite of her delectable marshmallows.
Made-From-Scratch Flavors: A Curated Tour
Shuman’s marshmallows are constructed the way a pastry chef builds a plated dessert: Flavor by flavor, with a principled refusal to rely on bottled extracts when real ingredients can do the work. The Blueberry Lemon Thyme marshmallows featured in her summer catalog are a prime example. She sourced fruit from Adam’s Berry Farm in Charlotte, roasted the berries for hours to concentrate flavor and reduce moisture, then recalibrated the sugar-syrup temperature to keep them cloud-soft and not soggy. It’s culinary research and development, and the payoff was evident in the heavenly texture.
The chocolate and coffee used in her inspired seasonal creations during the colder months come from neighboring Vermont independent businesses – not a corporate market or catalog. Burlington-based chocolatiers, NU Chocolat, supply bars with the rare flavor balance Shuman wanted for her s’mores kit: a dark-milk profile that holds nostalgic value while adding nuance and depth. Celebrated Burlington-based roaster Brio’s coffee lends sublime character whenever used in her products. Shuman elaborates: “With anything we add to our product line, we make it as though we were a scratch bakery or a pastry kitchen in a fine-dining restaurant. You can really taste the difference.”
Perennial customer favorites maintain a noted presence in the Vermont Marsh mallow Company catalog. The Dulce de Leche marshmallows have been a day-one bestseller, and the recipe remains unchanged from her original formula. Toasty Vanilla marshmallows are another staple. Refined through several iterative improvements, they serve as a wonderful, broadly-appealing base flavor. Cinnamon Sugar leans into the comfort of a bakery classic, and the seasonal winter flavor selection this year will explore several distinct flavor profiles: Peppermint, Gingerbread, and Buttered Rum, the last made with local butter so the flavor feels plush, rather than sharp. Holiday pre-orders open November 1, ship in December, and the team doubles up during this time to meet demand without sacrificing quality.
Separate from the catalog mainstays and seasonal features, Shuman recently channeled her playful side into a special menu at The Big E exposition. Crowd favorites included her delectable “S’macarons,” recently featured on a well-received EatVermont Instagram reel. They feature graham-cracker macarons by Burlington-based Matryoshka Bakery, sandwiched with toasted marshmallow. Her “Choco Tacos” began as house-pressed waffle shells filled with marshmallow fluff, which were then dipped and sprinkled. The “Yippee Pie” stacked a salted brownie cookie with marshmallow on top, a mash-up that locals also hunt down whenever Vermont Marshmallow Company sets up shop at the Burlington Farmers Market. These aren’t novelties; they’re proof that when you combine joy and culinary artistry with hard work, artisan confectionery is both accessible and scrumptious.
A “Marshmallow Kid” Finds Her Medium
Shuman grew up in South Burlington and graduated from the Lake Champlain Waldorf School. Good food was everywhere throughout her early years in Vermont. Her constant proximity to high-quality, locally-sourced ingredients felt normal until she lived elsewhere and realized how special Vermont’s food culture truly was. “I always call myself a ‘marshmallow kid,’” she says. “We always had a bag in the pantry. We toasted them year-round, outside or over the stovetop. It was so present I assumed that everyone did that.”
Her subsequent schooling combined rigorous culinary training with a broad range of artistic disciplines. She studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, earned an Art History degree from Smith College, returned to Vermont for a stint at New England Culinary Institute, and built restaurant experience from South Carolina to Boston. Eventually, she stepped away from professional kitchens and wondered whether the food industry was the right fit. The answer arrived in December 2018 during a holiday visit home, when she made marshmallows with her mom. It was a craft she had first experimented with a decade earlier, but this time, everything lined up.
Over the course of three days, Shuman developed three recipes, built a simple website, and told everyone she knew that she was selling handcrafted marshmallows for Christmas. Two weeks later, she had sold a thousand dollars’ worth of marshmallows from a single home kitchen, handwriting labels the first night, and teaching herself Photoshop the second. “It was the hardest thing I’d ever done,” recalls Shuman. “It was also one of the most rewarding.” She launched soon after in 2019, with an official run that quickly gained momentum in the local food scene through sheer tenacity and organic, frontline promotion.
At the Burlington Farmers Market, Shuman learned how quickly an initially-skeptical “no” can turn into a converted, loyal customer. Plenty of shoppers told her they hated marshmallows. She would respond with the following cordial invitation: “That’s cool…have you tried mine?” Ensuing conversations and marshmallow converts stacked up, and the business was in full swing.
Expansion: Spaces, People, Channels, and the Art of Refinement
True growth and expansion began with a simple step forward: more room to make marshmallows. About eighteen months in, at the height of the COVID pandemic, Shuman moved production after hours into the kitchen at Willow’s Bagels in Burlington. A single batch jumped from roughly five retail bags to about seventeen. Shuman points out that when it comes to scaling marshmallows, it isn’t just about pure arithmetic; a batch that is four times the size needs an entirely different approach. She fine-tuned temperatures and timings until the texture returned to her original standards.
The pandemic reshaped how and where orders happened. Farmers Markets never disappeared in Burlington’s outdoor setting, but due to the constraints of the pandemic, e-commerce continually surged. That mix of curbside community and doorstep shipping created entrepreneurial resilience. Late in 2020, she hired her first packaging helper, then a production teammate so she could step back into strategy. Early wholesale and direct, local business partnerships with markets and businesses such as Slate, Golden Hour Gift Company, and Healthy Living gave her sustainable and consistent cash flow without overextending inventory.
The true pivot arrived in summer 2023, when the company moved into its own kitchen. Capacity, autonomy, and work rhythm changed overnight. With real room to expand, Shuman started handing off the roles she’d outgrown, not out of detachment, but out of necessity. She elevated her employee, Katelyn Whitman, into a full leadership lane: Director of Business Development.
Shuman explains that the position was designed to drive wholesale expansion through active outreach. She entrusted production operations to Thea Dicey, who she touts as a team member that has a gift for turning fine-tuned kitchen processes into repeatably excellent products. With capable people in the right positions, wholesale grew quickly and sustainably.
Still, Shuman admits that the first year in the new space was somewhat difficult. New promises revealed new problems. Shuman fondly refers to this period in the growth of her company as their “Year of Refinement.” She reined in her impulse to chase constant novelty, returned to making every batch for a full cycle, and rewrote recipes into crystal-clear formats so anyone stepping in could execute without ambiguity. The payoff was cultural as much as operational. “Now everything is suspiciously easy,” she says with a laugh. “Last year, certain processes felt difficult. This year, the transitional considerations have paid off. Everything takes less time and less effort, and we have a great time doing it.”
Today the team includes three full-time employees, with part-timers added during a holiday surge that doubles headcount. Vermont Marshmallow Company ships nationwide, is carried in close to a hundred stores year-round, and adds seasonal accounts in the fourth quarter of every year. Their footprint spans more than a dozen states, which are largely concentrated on the East Coast with a scattering farther afield. The Burlington Farmers Market remains a Saturday anchor when the season allows, an enduring thread connecting the brand to the Vermont community that shaped it from the beginning.
When reflecting on how the food culture of Vermont shaped her business from its earliest days, Shuman explains that between the farmers markets, shared values of independent business, and a community that prizes bold and enterprising foodmakers, a support network is created where opportunistic and brave entrepreneurs can truly thrive. Shuman found herself surrounded by women starting businesses at the same time, a peer group of female powerhouses that shared industry lessons step by step. Shuman mentions Allyson Sprinkel of Pepper Lee CBD as a founder whose trajectory seemed to move in tandem with hers, inspiring her to double down on her commitment to excellence as a female Vermont business owner.
Reflections, Reach, and What Comes Next
As Vermont Marshmallow Company continues to press forward while building on its existing momentum, Shuman’s business is entering a new season. It’s one where the making process supports creativity instead of smothering it, and where leadership means crafting lanes for other team members to thrive. Shuman is currently gearing up for a busy season of Holiday production again, and is grateful to be handing off several aspects of production to qualified team members. She adds: “I’m excited to see them take the opportunity and run.”
Shuman is generous when asked for advice, especially for women food-makers and entrepreneurs who are standing on the edge of a great idea. “First, make it exist. Then, make it good. Get clear on the elements of your idea that are crucial to its soul, and give yourself permission to be agile with the rest.” The company’s evolution proves the point. A holiday experiment in 2018 became a 2019 launch. A shared kitchen became a home base. A one-woman show became a team. A simple marshmallow became an elevated, renowned Vermont culinary experience.
And somehow, after all the growth, the story still comes back to a South Burlington pantry, a humble stovetop flame, a bag of marshmallows, and a smiling, joyful kid who toasted them all year long. That kid grew up into a courageous chef who learned to build flavors – and a strong and resilient business – from the ground up. Ultimately, Shuman’s marshmallow journey catalyzed her growth, leading to her current status as a respected entrepreneur who is still deeply rooted in Vermont values. By prioritizing creativity, neighborly collaboration, and persistent independent spirit, she found the key to success is taking things one day, one order, and one batch at a time, and growing from there. The result is both tiny in size and massive in impact: a versatile dessert that can melt your heart as it melts in coffee, crown your Holiday traditions as it crowns a s’more, or stops you mid-sentence at a farmers market as you enjoy the flavor of the Green Mountain State at its finest: Pillowy joy, toasted to wonderful perfection, made by hand … in Vermont.