The owner of a Spokane Valley chocolatier, Chocolate Myracles Inc., says she is looking for a larger production facility to help the business meet increased demand for its products.

The owner, Julia Balassa-Myracle, says she is looking to lease about 1,000 square feet of space in the Spokane Valley where the company can produce its chocolates. She has been making chocolate at her Spokane Valley home since she started the business in December 2005, and says she plans to continue to use that space for product development once a new production facility is on line.

Chocolate Myracles produces truffles, bonbons, and poured chocolates, which are solid chocolates poured into a mold pattern. It sells its products wholesale to hotels, wineries, boutiques, and gift stores, as well as retail to individuals.

The company's sales jumped 33 percent this past Valentine's Day holiday, compared with a year earlier. Overall for this year, wholesale numbers are down a bit, but retail sales are up, she says. Some of her wholesale customers closed operations during the recession, she says.

With a new production facility, she says, she would be able to hire one to three full-time employees. Currently, she is the only employee, though she has hired temporary employees in the past. She hopes to have a new location by September, and says she is working with a commercial real estate agent to find one.

"It would be nice before the next season," which starts in October and runs through February, the months when chocolate sales are at their best, she says. She says her company also could sell some chocolates from that production facility.

Balassa-Myracle says she currently can produce about 500 pieces every three days working by herself, but each employee could increase that production by another 500 pieces if not more because of new machinery she would have at the new production facility, she says.

By September 2010, she says, she also would like to lease as much as 400 square feet of floor space here for an "old European-style" chocolate retail shop.

Balassa-Myracle grew up in southern Mexico and northern Guatemala, where she was exposed to the chocolate-making process, and learned how chocolate is incorporated into different foods, she says.

She moved there from the U.S. when she was young because her mother was an anthropology professor.

Before starting Chocolate Myracles, she worked as a corrections officer in California and here.

"I had always wanted to do something with chocolate," she says. "I just always loved every aspect about it."

Chocolate Myracles' chocolates are given to customers at The Spa at the Coeur d'Alene Resort and to new residents at the retirement community Fairwinds-Spokane, in Spokane, she says.

The chocolates are sold at Coeur d'Alene Cellars and Barrel Room No. 6, both in Coeur d'Alene; Chocolate Apothecary, in Spokane; Latah Creek Winery & Gift Shop, in Spokane Valley; and Noni wine bar, in Priest River, Idaho, Balassa-Myracle says. Graceful Baskets, of Spokane Valley, includes the chocolates in the gift baskets it sells, she says.