On a sunny Saturday afternoon, Kate Weiser and her 4-month-old daughter Juliette, dressed in matching pink outfits, pose for a photo shoot in her Carrollton home. It’s a little different than her look the day before: A blue hairnet, a wearable breast pump, pushing crates across a warehouse. “Instagram versus reality,” she jokes. “Working mom life is wild.”
Weiser is the renowned chocolatier behind some of Dallas’s most decadent desserts. At just 26 she opened Kate Weiser Chocolates at Trinity Groves, a move she considers kismet. A decade later, she’s grown the business to include locations at NorthPark Center and The Shops at Clearfork, partnerships with Neiman Marcus, and earned a nod from Oprah.
In motherhood, Weiser’s journey is bittersweet. In 2022, she lost her first child, a son, Theodore, at just three months old. Now, months after welcoming her daughter Juliette, she talks about finding new joy.
Interview with Kate Weiser
DFWChild: What drew you to culinary arts?
Kate Weiser: I always loved cooking and particularly baking when I was young. I was 10 or 11 when I started collecting pastry cookbooks and I would read them instead of other books to fall asleep. I loved the recipes. To me it was like magic—really, it’s chemistry—but back then it was magic how bread would rise. I loved experimenting; my parents would buy ingredients and I would go to town on the weekends.
DFWChild: How did that lead to chocolate?
KW: I started as a pastry chef in Kansas City. Then when moved down to Dallas in 2009 I had a lot of jobs—a morning baker, a cheese monger—just really trying to get in somewhere. One of those odd jobs was at Chocolate Secrets in Oak Lawn. I was like, ‘I’ve never done chocolate, but I’d love to give it a shot.’ And the owner hired me and I basically failed every day at making chocolate for the next year-and-a-half (laughs).
Every night I would go home after just totally screwing everything up and say, ‘I need to figure this out.’ I would try to find videos but there really wasn’t anything out there. So I kind of learned on my own, and I fell in love with it. Working with something that challenging just lit a fire in me.
RELATED: Old-Fashioned Candy Stores in DFW
DFWChild: What made you venture off on your own?
KW: A friend of mine showed me the Trinity Groves incubator concept. They were looking for unknown chefs with a vision or concept. I reached out on a whim, not thinking anything would come of it. They took a meeting with me which I thought was like the meeting where you get weeded out. But it was the meeting. I didn’t have a business plan written out, I just had what I wanted to do in my heart—and some chocolates. And they said, ‘yeah, let’s do it.’
Walking out of that meeting was just one of those moments—I had goosebumps. I sat in my car for like five minutes with my hands on the steering wheel, just looking out and thinking, did my life just change forever?
RELATED: Meet the BakerMama Maegan Brown
DFWChild: Let’s talk about being a mom. Did you always want kids?
KW: Oh yes. I have FOMO—fear of missing out! I always knew I didn’t want to miss out on that life experience.
DFWChild: We’re so sorry for your loss of Theodore. Can you tell us a little about him?
KW: My son passed away at 3 months old. He was born with genetic abnormalities which we did not know about at all during pregnancy. We were completely blindsided when he was born—he passed every test, every sonogram, and then all of a sudden it was just chaos. He was in the NICU for almost his entire life. I have pictures of him sleeping in the NICU and me pumping while working on my laptop. This company saved me in so many ways, just helping me cope in those moments. My team was so wonderful. You really don’t forget how people treat you during that time.
“Once we knew this type of love, we had to have it back in our lives.”
DFWChild: That experience must make welcoming Juliette so complex.
KW: To be a bereaved mom is an experience that isn’t talked about enough. We have our beautiful baby girl but there is always that void. You can’t fill that void. We got pregnant with Juliette about eight months after Theo passed and that decision was based on the fact that once we knew this type of love, we had to have it back in our lives. There was no question that we were going to try again and have hope that it was going to be better this time.
This time my postpartum anxiety has been through the roof. Constantly worried about losing her and the nightmare situations. I know I’d be a different mom had I not gone through what we went through with Theo, but also, I’m just so grateful to have met him, to have known him.
DFWChild: What’s surprised you most about mom life?
KW: I was one of those naive moms who thought that I’d have time to do anything. I thought on my maternity leave that I could spend time reading. I was like, ‘what a great opportunity for me to read about business and educate myself.’ Was I insane? (laughing) I was surprised by how much time these little ones take. I had no idea it took her 30 minutes to feed. With Theo, there were nurses caring for him around the clock and I was just trying to hold him at any moment. It’s different when you’re a mom with a baby at home. Wow, it’s a lot!
DFWChild: How are you finding balance as a working mom?
KW: Work is great, my job is great. I love my company, but my family comes first. I’m so lucky that I can put a hard stop on things, like ‘I’m not going to do this because I’m going to go to my kid’s play.’ I’m lucky to be able to say no to something because it would make me miss out on something else with Juliette. But I also want her to feel like she’s part of this business. I would love it if she was very familiar with my company and just feels like she’s grown up inside a chocolate shop.
DFWChild: What traits do you hope Juliette gets from you?
KW: I hope she’s bold. I hope she goes after it, whatever it is. And I hope that she can do things scared—that she still says yes to doing something even when she’s scared, because that has really helped me in my life. And if she likes making chocolate, I won’t be mad at that.
Kate Weiser’s Sweet Stuff
On her favorite comfort food, self-care and the thumbs-up from Oprah:
Carl the Snowman
In 2018 Weiser’s cutest confection, Carl the Snowman, a hollow chocolate snowman filled with cocoa mix and mini marshmallows, earned a spot on Oprah Winfrey’s annual list of Favorite Things. “That was surreal,” Weiser remembers about career-changing moment. Not surprisingly, Weiser says creating the now-iconic hot cocoa bomb is one of the peaks of her job, but not for why you might think.
“When customers tell me they melt a Carl every year with their kid and it has become a holiday tradition, that’s so rewarding. Now I can see kids who have grown up with this, and it’s become almost like a core memory of theirs,” she says. “That is the coolest thing that I could be part of, especially now that I have my own daughter. When we melt our first Carl together, I’m going to bawl my eyes out. A full circle moment.” $35; kateweiserchocolate.com
Comfort Food
What does a chocolatier indulge in? Weiser says she eats this on an almost nightly basis (and especially when pumping): “I take some toast, spread a little Jiffy peanut butter on top and then chocolate chips—like the ones you’d put in chocolate chip cookies—and a little salt. I’ll chow down on those. I’ll eat two of them.”
Game Night
Weiser says she and her husband, Daniel, are “big puzzlers” and put together many while waiting on baby. When they do head out for a date night, they usually hit a local restaurant, but for a change of pace they like Activate, an active gaming facility in Plano.
Early Morning Self-Care
“I wake up at 5am to pump and right after I go to the gym and I lift heavy weights. That is self-care for me,” says Weiser. “It’s the way I clear my mind; I can work through problems while I’m doing it. The endorphins get my energy up. It’s really helped me through postpartum depression. It’s not even so much about the results, it’s more, I was able to accomplish this task by 7am. It’s a great way to make you feel in your own power.”
Mommy Must-Have
Weiser top mom tool is a nasal aspirator—or in other terms, a snotsucker. In fact, she has four of different types. “I wanted to try them all. I love getting those boogers out,” she laughs. “It makes me feel like I’m super mom.” Which one works best? Forget the electric version—the classic manual NoseFrida, as gross as it may be, is the winner, she says.
RELATED: Meet The Defined Dish’s Alex Snodgrass
