A new gourmet chocolate shop is coming to a location in the heart of Old Ashburn. It’s called Veritas Artizen Chocolate and they are taking over the JR’s NY Soft Serve & Italian Ice shop on Ashburn Road.
JR’s, a small ice cream shop, opened back in April 2018. Word of the deal between Veritas and JR’s came this weekend via social media. Veritas has bought the shop and will keep much of the JR’s menu intact while also adding items such as gourmet chocolate candies, chocolate covered strawberries and gift fruit bouquets.
“Veritas is bean to bar chocolate produced in the heart of the Loudoun County, Virginia wine country,” reads the brand’s website. “We source our beans from Direct Trade farmers in South America to ensure a higher quality product and better outcome for the growers. We use only cacao beans and sugar in our dark chocolate and add only milk powder and cocoa butter to our milk chocolate, making this as pure as you can get.”
No word on when exactly the transition from JR’s to Veritas will take place, but they did say rebranding — as in renaming the JR’s space — will be happening soon.
JR’s suffered from what appeared to be a lack of interest by the owner(s). My family and I would go there and find the space to be a mess, the young staff bored and disinterested, usually sitting on the floor behind the counter while staring at their phones. I can tell you since I have experience in the ice cream shop business that there was no training being done- employees didn’t know the difference between chocolate syrup and hot fudge, they didn’t know how to portion adequately, etc. Plus, the shop closed all winter, so it was clearly just losing revenue during that time. Needless to say, this change is not a surprise. I just hope the new owners are seen and heard and they train the staff properly. One thing JR’s did that bothered me was they let young (16, 17- year old) girls work shifts by themselves at night- to me, that’s a no-no. A young person should never work alone like that and shows me that the owners didn’t care about the employees’ safety.
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