Bonnie Lynn Tempesta

Who was Bonnie Lynn Tempesta?

Bonnie Lynn Tempesta helped pioneer the gourmet food movement in the United States. Called "the Queen of Biscotti." Tempesta "effectively started the national biscotti craze."

With her mother Aurora Marcheschi, Tempesta founded La Tempesta Bakery Confections in 1983. The bakery grew to become the largest biscotti maker in America, producing 300,000 biscotti cookies daily and generated annual revenues approaching $9 million by 1995.

In 1982, Tempesta used her Florentine aunt Isa Romoli's recipe to produce biscotti — the flat, crunchy, twice-baked cookies traditionally used by Italians to dunk in wine or espresso. Baking them from home, she began selling them to her employer at Confetti, a downtown San Francisco chocolate shop. With a $15,000 loan from her brother, Cork Marcheschi, "a noted neon light sculptor," Tempesta rented a 200-square-foot commercial kitchen in South San Francisco. She began producing a long, thin biscotti known as "biscotti di Prato" and sold them door-to-door to San Francisco’s specialty food shops.

By 1984, La Tempesta biscotti were available at Neiman Marcus and Lord & Taylor, followed by Bloomingdales, Macy’s and Dean & Deluca.