All told, Mimi Wheeler was plenty happy in her native Denmark.

She lived in an apartment above her parents’ grocery store with some other employees, and she fondly remembers the deep, genuine sense of community inherent in her surroundings. But as happens to so many people, life had other plans for this grocer’s daughter.

“Well, I met this American guy with a big afro in a hippie community in Copenhagen in the late sixties. He kept reciting poetry to me, and I guess he won my heart,” she tells The Ticker. “But I was definitely never going to move to the United States.”

After American hippie Norm Wheeler got homesick, however, (“I think he missed baseball,” Mimi says) Norm and Mimi did in fact move to his native Michigan with their two young children, eventually settling in Leelanau County near Empire.

Despite day jobs at Benzie Community Mental Health and later the Leelanau School (Mimi has a social work degree), she dabbled in a bakery business where she made chocolate-based treats. She loved the feeling of “making people smile” with food, but she also liked introducing them to good chocolate. Real chocolate.

“I grew up with pretty decent chocolate in Europe. We traveled some around Germany, Switzerland, Austria,” she says. “So when someone gave me a Hershey’s bar during my first visit in ’77, I was like: ‘How can you eat that?’”

It was 2004 when she took the leap and started Grocer’s Daughter full time, eventually opening up her small shop on M-22 on the bend just west of Empire.

“I thought I’d be open a few hours a day. It would be real quiet and I wouldn’t need to hire anyone. It would just be fun,” Wheeler recalls. “Well, people kept stopping by and calling. Word spread and it became busy very quickly.”

The business is now a true Leelanau County must-visit, with two buildings in the heart of Empire that bustle with activity, particularly in the peak summer season. Wheeler passed the torch in 2013 to Jody and DC Hayden, who have been responsible for considerable growth while maintaining that small-shop charm.

“I feel so lucky and privileged to get to do what we do,” Jody Hayden tells The Ticker. “Mimi was a pioneer, and now there’s still so much cool stuff to be a part of in the industry…Our staff here is incredible, and it’s such a special thing to be able to work with incredible people from all over the world.”

Hayden and former husband Chris Treter in 2001 founded Higher Grounds coffee, which led the way locally with responsibly sourced, fair-trade coffee based on real relationships with farmers in developing countries. She’s now able to continue that ethos at Grocer’s Daughter, where she has direct, long-term relationships with cocoa and chocolate producers.

“I came from a social justice background. I really wanted to help build the economy for these farming communities,” she tells The Ticker. “I feel like chocolate is probably 15 years behind coffee as far as direct trade, but we’re starting to catch up.”

Hayden also had known Mimi for about a decade prior to purchasing the shop via an informal group of like-minded local businesses that also included Light of Day and Food For Thought, and they jointly traveled to Ecuador in 2008 (the former for coffee, the latter for chocolate) and it was then they met Jenny Samaniego, a Quito native who now makes much of Grocer’s Daughter’s raw chocolate.

Grocer's Daughter now produces scores of confections (truffles, bars, coated fruits and much more) from large batches of ethical chocolate sourced from farmers they know personally. Hayden and Wheeler will speak at length about how much it means to them to have these types of relationships.

“These farmers in Ecuador are just like all of us. They care about their kids, they care about their lives. But many American consumers don’t really realize that when you buy cheap chocolate and cheap coffee, it’s at the expense of so many in the supply chain,” Hayden says.

“You honor the farmer by flying there, by showing up and appreciating what they’ve produced. You make a connection. You smile and share words together,” Wheeler adds. “It’s rich for the customer and it’s rich for the vendor.”

And while everyone likes a feel-good story, the business is only going to go as far as paying customers are going to take it. That’s why everything in the shop is a “labor of love,” Hayden says, carefully crafted to taste amazing and consistently sell at the higher price tags tied to premium chocolate.

“People have always loved the shop because Mimi started with really, really high standards for quality, and I think we’ve expanded on that,” she says.

Business is fun, Hayden says, but it’s not easy. All of her input costs are “up, up up,” she says (as just one example, the case of cocoa butter that cost $200 in January 2024 is more than $500 now), and she’s seeing definite patterns of cautious buying from customers.

She’s also feeling for her employees, who are having trouble finding affordable housing, and is bracing for the impact of tariffs on her already high costs.

“I think pre-pandemic, it felt like everything was approachable, and the challenges were things we could handle and even predict,” she says. “Now I feel like things that come our way are tougher and a bit more unpredictable, and some of it is a little nerve wracking.”

So yeah, the cost of her products have gone up in recent years.

“Some people come in here and they're like, oh, it's expensive chocolate. I'm like, honestly, this is what all chocolate should (cost) If everybody's being treated fairly,” she says. “And it’s still an expensive tropical item. We should treat it as such and  celebrate it a little bit more. You should never just munch on chocolate - take time to savor it.”

Photo: Wheeler and Hayden in Grocer's Daughter in Empire.