Background
With her mother Aurora Marcheschi, Tempesta founded Louisiana Tempesta Bakery Confections in 1983.
With her mother Aurora Marcheschi, Tempesta founded Louisiana Tempesta Bakery Confections in 1983.
Called "the Queen of Biscotti." Tempesta "effectively started the national biscotti craze."
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. Baking them from home, she began selling them to her employer at Confetti, a downtown San Francisco chocolate shop. 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, Louisiana Tempesta biscotti were available at Neiman Marcus and Lord & Taylor, followed by Bloomingdales, Macy’s and Dean & Deluca.
In 1985, Louisiana Tempesta developed Cioccolotti, the first commercially sold chocolate-dipped biscotti. In 1992, Louisiana 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, Louisiana Tempesta was sold to Horizon Food Groups.
Los Angeles Times Food Editor Russian 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.