Cedar Crest graduate lands sweet deals on ABC’s reality TV show ‘Shark Tank’

Mother, navy veteran, and aspiring entrepreneur are just a few words to aptly describe Thereasa Black. 

These life experiences have led the 2005 Cedar Crest graduate to launch a dessert-based business named Bon Appe´Sweet. Her Maryland-based company recently landed not one but two business deals on ABC’s “Shark Tank” television program. 

“Shark Tank” is a reality TV show where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas or products to a panel of wealthy, self-made investors (the “sharks”) in hopes of securing capital and mentorship in exchange for equity in their companies, according to the television network’s website. 

The show “features the sharks critically evaluating the pitches and sometimes engaging in bidding wars to invest their own money in promising ventures, making it a showcase for American entrepreneurship and innovation.”

Black said she was not surprised that her company received two offers. The first was what she requested: $75,000 for 10% of her company. The second shark offer was for another $100,000 investment for an additional 10% of her company. 

“I mean, our chocolate is very unique. We were the first of its kind out there on the market. And so there have been a bunch of copycats at this point, but I’ve tasted all of them, and we still taste better, significantly better, than everything else that’s out there,” Black said during a telephone interview. “And so it doesn’t really matter that they’ve tried to copy because they haven’t been able to copy the recipe.”

There’s a big difference between regular candy and her dessert products, she notes, which are made with no soy, dairy, zero-added sugar, and sugar alcohol. When it comes to the competition copycats, there’s a big difference there, too. 

“That’s primarily because they have chocolatiers making their chocolate and chocolatiers were trained to make chocolate in a very specific way. I made mine after watching a YouTube video,” added Black, who still makes the candy her company produces. “So my chocolate is made based on taste. And not just the taste of anyone, but the taste of a child.”

Black’s primary product taster is 9-year-old daughter Isabella, who says her favorite candies made by her mom are milk chocolate and milk chocolate with crisped rice.  

“It’s really sweet. It’s like the perfect amount of sweetness and I really like the milk chocolate. It’s really weird that it tastes like milk chocolate, tastes like it has milk in it. It’s like, ‘How does this not have milk in it?’” Isabella told LebTown. “And it tastes really good.” 

Black, who was in her second year in law school when she delivered Isabella as a single parent, said she started her company because of her daughter.

“As soon as I graduated from law school, I was informed that I was getting mobilized. So it was actually a week after I took the bar exam, I was notified that I was getting deployed to Djibouti,” said Black about her deployment to Africa as a U.S. Navy reservist. “So I left in March of 2018. And that was one week before my daughter’s birthday, and she was about to turn 2. She actually went to live with my cousin” in Lebanon.

Black said the deployment that lasted just over 14 months broke her heart every day she was gone. (A touching moment in the “Shark Tank” episode is a video of Black’s reunion with her daughter following that deployment.)

“I left while she was still 1 and I didn’t get back until she was 3. I cried every single day. Like no joke, every single day I cried because I was just, I couldn’t, it was very difficult on me that I was doing that to her because she was so young. She didn’t understand why I was gone,” Black said. “So I remember my first week gone, she called me and she said, ‘Mommy, can I come visit you at your new house?’ And that was heartbreaking because she thought that I just left her, you know? And so it was just very difficult for me, but it was also very difficult for her because I’m her only parent and I left her, you know?”

Black knew the pain she was causing her daughter was something she wouldn’t allow to ever happen again. 

“Just the fact that I was causing that pain for her is what really did it for me. So while I was gone, I was just like, ‘Hey, I can’t do this again. I can never deploy like this again.’ And so I decided to start a business when I got back home,” added Black. “I decided to start my own business so I could be with her.”

Black contemplated what kind of company to launch, noting that she never thought of herself as an entrepreneur.

“I took a while to figure out what I wanted to do actually because I was doing little mini-pitches every day at dinner to my friends that I had about different business ideas. And so by the end of the deployment, this one is the one that won. So making a better-for-you dessert,” said Black, noting that dates give her products a sweet but healthy flavor. 

Part of the final product decision concerned her daughter being fed candy by a family member while Black was overseas.

“I had never let her eat candy before, and my aunt, who is always wanting to spoil her, was just always trying to sneak her candy and stuff. So I was just like, ‘All right, well, for a little kid who’s never had candy, you don’t miss it. But once someone gives it to you, you know what it tastes like and you want more.’ And so that’s why I decided to create this so I could give her the candy that she fell in love with but with the ingredients that I loved. And so I learned how to make these desserts and I started making them for her and then selling them.”

While Black was not surprised to receive multiple deals, she admitted she was by the sharks’ reaction to her product. Filmed last June, the episode aired on Jan. 14. 

“I actually do food shows all the time and so I sample the chocolate a lot and I usually get that type of reaction. But their reaction, yes, because they obviously taste a lot more things, more different desserts and foods because people are always bringing them things,” Black said. “My friend actually watched the show and he called me afterwards and he said, ‘Thereasa, your face looks shocked.’ I was like, ‘Have you ever seen ‘Shark Tank’ before?’ I mean, they usually tear people apart. I was not expecting that reaction from them. And so yeah, I was taken aback. I was surprised.” 

If not also presented with what she said was a surreal experience.

“They’ve met so many different entrepreneurs because people pitch to them all the time. And as I said, just being in a situation where you’re just one of a million, right? But you were special to them. Like, you were special in their eyes,” Black said. “That was surreal.”

A Temple University graduate with a degree in advertising, Black used what she learned to help create a memorable company name that is a play on words. 

“Bon Appe´Sweet means ‘dessert well’ because bon appe´tit means ‘eat well,’” said Black, who has a number of dessert products for sale and plans to add more. “We can have any dessert and it’s not specific to one type of dessert. And so yeah … I launched, officially launched, the chocolate (line) in September of ’21.”

The past two weeks have seen sales spike following the new deals with the sharks. Her products are available for purchase on the company’s website, from Walmart and Mom’s Organic Market stores. Other deals are in the works given the free nationwide publicity following her recent television appearance.

“Some stores have reached out and said they wanted the chocolate in their stores. Individual sales have been pretty crazy. We’ve been slammed,” Black said. “I don’t think that we’ve been able to get our orders under 2,000 on a daily basis. It’s just above 2,000 and we’re just trying to keep up. … It is impossible to keep up because you just can’t print labels that fast. So it has been pretty overwhelming.”