Alumni profile: Anne-Francoise Weyns, S.M. '94

For Anne-Francoise Weyns, innovation and design is like magic. It starts as an idea in someone’s head, whether it’s a bridge, a mathematical model of the ocean, or a new piece of chocolate. Through effort and iteration, that idea takes shape, almost like a living organism. Several months later, and it’s on the shelves, available for customers.

“I always found the process of creating a product quite satisfying,” said Weyns, S.M. '94. “I like people who make things, because I can see what goes in and what comes out. It’s a part of you that’s gone out into the world, and then obviously you hope that people like it. A lot of your own personality goes into it, and I found that really interesting.”

After getting her master’s degree in engineering sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Weyns spent six years as a management consultant at McKinsey. Wanting to build something of her own rather than assist other businesses, Weyns founded Artisan du Chocolat, a luxury chocolate purveyor in the United Kingdom. In her 25 years as founder and “Chief Chocolate Adventurer,” Weyns grew the company into one of the premier luxury chocolate retailers and restaurant suppliers in the country, gaining the attention of world-renowned chefs such as Gordon Ramsay.

What started as a partnership between her and a chef friend eventually grew into a company that, as of its 2020 acquisition by hedge fund-backed former Godiva CEO Mohamed Elsarky, had over 80 employees, retail locations in multiple countries, usage in several Michelin star restaurants, and even a trip to space as the favorite food of a NASA astronaut.

“When I started the company, the United Kingdom was quite behind the food scene compared to continental Europe,” she said. “I thought it was a good time to try to break in. My mentality was to try it, if it succeeds, great, if not, do something else. Whatever you do, you do it to the best of your ability. What you do is secondary to how you do it. I thought chocolate could work, so I decided to throw everything I had into it.”

Born in Belgium, Weyns came to SEAS after receiving her undergraduate degree in civil engineering at the University of Liege. Most interested in the mathematical modeling aspects of civil engineering, Weyns was drawn to the oceanographic modeling happening at SEAS at the time, especially the work of Allan R. Robinson, then-Gordon McKay Professor of Geophysical Fluid Dynamics at SEAS and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. She even did a summer fellowship at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod before completing her master’s in just one year.

“It was something I was really interested in, and Harvard is obviously a very prestigious university,” Weyns said. “My parents were civil servants. They didn’t go to university, so I jumped at the chance.”

Oceanography didn’t end up directly informing her future career, but SEAS has always been as much about learning the engineer’s mindset as it is about learning engineering textbooks. Her classes weren’t easy – “I remember one particular class where I’m not sure a single personal passed,” she said – but she learned resilience and perseverance. When it came time to start her own company, that discipline proved essential.

“The mindset of striving for excellence is something I’ve kept through my time at university and Harvard,” Weyns said. “Sometimes it takes the same amount of time to do something halfway as it does to do it properly, and Harvard instilled in me a personal standard that if you do something, you do it to the absolute best of your ability, or you go do something else. It’s not a gift to you, and it’s not a gift to the world, if you do something half-baked.”

Weyns initially planned to just work at McKinsey for a year or two before pursuing a Ph.D. in oceanographic modeling, but ended up staying there for 6 years. While initially she focused on the business side of building Artisan du Chocolat, when the chef she worked with left, she eventually took on an even larger role.

“You’d have to go all the way back to my great-grandparents before you find a trace of entrepreneurship,” she said. “I ended up supervising everything – a lot of product development, a lot of innovation, but also supervising production, dealing with clients and doing typical entrepreneurial work. When you start a business from scratch, it changes every year. I was there for 25 years, but they weren’t 25 equal years. Every year looked different from the previous year. It was the same business, but there were always different challenges with different clients and different requirements.”

Overseeing so many different departments eventually became unsustainable for Weyns, who began to feel like she’d become a “bottleneck” who was actually slowing down her company’s growth. That led her to sell the company in 2020. She stayed for four more years before exiting for good. In 2024, she founded Sloth & Spoon, another specialty food purveyor in the UK.

Starting over from scratch again isn’t easy, because “you don’t have the same energy at 50 years old that you had at 25.” But Weyns knows that if she had the resilience to make it through Harvard, and the resilience to build a successful luxury business from the group up, then she definitely has the resilience to do it again.

“A lot of the admin stuff, such as registering the trademark or website domain, you know how to do that,” she said. “I still have a lot of contacts in the industry after 25 years, so I have people I can ask for guidance and advice. It’s definitely easier on some level the second time around, because you’ve done it once before.”