Bonnie Lynn Tempesta, Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetBonnie Lynn Tempesta
American business woman
Date of Birth: 
About Bonnie Lynn Tempesta
- Bonnie Lynn Tempesta (January 5, 1953 – September 25, 2014) 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 (19 m2) 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.
- In 1985, La Tempesta developed Cioccolotti, the first commercially sold chocolate-dipped biscotti. In 1992, La Tempesta’s Biscotti di San Francisco made the Washington Times 10 Best New Products list, and The Washington Post rated it the number one domestic brand.
- Collaborations with renowned San Francisco chocolatier Joseph Schmidtfollowed.
- In 1994, Tempesta created the non-profit Teen Inspiration Foundation.
- In December 1997, La Tempesta was sold to Horizon Food Groups. In 2012, Bonnie started a small, philanthropic baking company in Kenwood, CA, called Boncora (the name Boncora is derived from Bonnie's name, “Bon,” and “ancora,” which means encore in Italian.) Her handmade Tuscan-style almond cookies are twice-baked in the regional style of the famous Biscotti di Prato of Prato, Italy.
- Los Angeles Times Food Editor Russ Parsons called Boncora Biscotti "dynamite" in his Daily Dish column on September 14, 2012.
- She donated a portion of every sale to a favorite cause: Pets Lifeline of Sonoma County, a local nonprofit animal rescue organization. Bonnie Tempesta died on September 25, 2014 at her home in Sonoma after a brief battle with cancer.
- She was 61.
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