New Rockridge Shop!

We are so excited to announce that we will be opening a new shop in Spring 2023 at 6309 College Avenue in Oakland, CA! It is in the beautiful Rockridge District, an easy walk from BART. This page will keep you updated on when we will be there and what is happening, so come back regularly to see the latest news!
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We are so excited to welcome all of you from the Rockridge area to our website and to tell you a little more about what you can expect! Please be sure to go check out this page of our website to learn all about us and our existing wonderful little shop in Walnut Creek!
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Pick Up Chocolate before we open!
Before we are officially open in 2023, we will be having pop-up shops in front of the shop periodically. We were there every Saturday in November and December with items for Thanksgiving and the Winter holidays (see below).  It was so nice meeting so many of you!
Love + Chocolate Rockridge
We plan to be back in front of the store with our pop-up shop for the several days leading up to Valentine's Day! Look for us for sure on February 11th & 14th. And check this space to see if we will also be there the 12th & 13th!
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And of course, you can always just head over here on our home page browse our items and have anything you like shipped to you or to your loved ones in advance of us opening our new Rockridge location.
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Can I just have my order shipped to my home or shipped to the person I'm gifting it to?
Of course you can! Easy peasy! Just place your order as usual, when you get to the Checkout section, select SHIP (not Pick up!), put in the shipping address of where you want it shipped to, fill out the rest of the payment information, and we will get it off in the mail for you!
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Interested in how the build-out process is going? Follow along below to see what we are up to inside the space to turn it into the sweetest little chocolate shop that you ever did see! :)
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BEFORE PHOTOS of 6309 College Ave:
        
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GETTING THINGS CLEANED OUT (Sept - Nov)
       
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November 4, 2022
We submitted our plans to Alameda County (for our the health regulations we need to meet!) and also to the City of Oakland (to get our building permits!) today! Woohoo! We are using an expedited process so hopefully we will get faster responses and be able to start building out our shop soon!!
 
January 2023 Update
Well, as you saw above, we submitted our plans to the County on November 4th, and we are still working our way through the approval process. We are very hopeful that we get sign off from the county by the 3rd week in January. Once that happens, we have to then re-submit these approved plans to the City of Oakland in order to get our building permit so that we can finally get started actually creating our new beautiful space. We know all of this will be so worth it, but it is sometimes hard to be patient with the process!
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If all goes well, we hope to begin building out the space in February and be open no later than the end of March! Please think good thoughts for us! We are really SO excited for opening day in Rockridge so just keeping our eyes on the prize!!
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March 2023 Update
Well, ugh! You can see how excited we were above to open this month. Unfortunately, it took until the end of February before we got our Health Department approval on our plans. The next step after that was that we had to get the City of Oakland to issue us a building permit. (Unfortunately, these things have to be done sequentially, so yeah.) So we submitted our stuff to the City of Oakland for approval at the end of February.
Well, I'm guessing many of you have heard that the City of Oakland was a victim of a ransomware attack in February. A few offices were targeted -- guess which ones? Of course, the building department was one of them. They basically shut down for almost all of February, and now they are way backed up and just trying to sort things out. Because they didn't pay the ransom, all their data is unavailable to them (being held hostage!), so they have no record of any of the previous interactions we have had with them and we are having to start all over.
We are now hoping to pay some expediting fees that mean our review process should be shortened and we hope to have our permit so we can finally start turning the space into a chocolate shop somewhere in early April. 
While this has been a very frustrating journey so far, we are still so glad we will eventually be in our new Rockridge space. We have been doing quite a few pop-ups and it's been so great to meet so many people in the neighborhood. We will be there Easter Weekend and Mother's Day weekend for sure, so come see us!
Don't forget that you can always order online from our Walnut Creek shop and have your goodies delivered to your doorstep. And we can't wait until the day we get to open the doors to our Rockridge shop to all of you!
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July 2023 Update
Wow. My last update was in March 2023 and we are just now seeing light at the end of the tunnel that isn't a train! So much craziness has happened since our last update. We were able to finally start construction in April. But of course we uncovered a lot of issues once we started. There was a lot of tearing apart that had to be done before we could even start trying to make it beautiful. See below:
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YIKES! At one point I asked our General Contractor to stop sending me pictures of what they were doing because it was making me sick to my stomach to see our pretty little shop getting so torn up! But it had to be done -- and we did it right. And for the last couple of months we have been putting it back together and things are finally starting to look up! All the holes dug up for new plumbing are filled, we built our new wall to create our backroom space, we have put up all our trim, we put new floors in, and our cabinetry has been installed! Woohoo! The vision is finally coming to life! See below:
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As I type this, we are sanding walls, finishing up trim and doing a lot of work in the backroom to get it health department ready. We are feeling good that we will FINALLY be open in a few weeks. Fingers crossed. Please think positive thoughts for us and be sure to check out our "Remode" Highlight on our Instagram page and our Instagram Stories & Reels to follow along on this adventure. You can follow us @loveandchocolateshop
Hope to see you in the new shop soon!!
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If you'd like to send us a message, use the contact form below.
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