Phillip Ashley Rix will hold a soft opening of his new shop, “GXXD. Chocolate by Phillip Ashley,” on Black Friday, November 27th, at 910 West Poplar Avenue, Suite 4 in Collierville, Tennessee. The grand opening will begin February 8th and continue through Valentine’s Day week.
The new place is going to be sweet. “It’s still a chocolate shop,” Rix says. “Much of what we’ve always done. Distilling it down to our very best. A lot more focus on turtles and some of the signature chocolates. A lot of it will be seasonal, focusing on celebrations, the holidays.”
Also planned are his signature bonbons, bourbon pecan pralines, bleu cheese chocolate, and Grand Marnier blossom honey chocolate.
This will be Rix’s first retail shop since his Cooper-Young store closed in 2019. He describes his new shop as “sleek. Chic. We’ll have artwork on the walls. Some really cool paintings.”
On November 11th, Rix relaunched his website, gxxdchocolate.com, for online ordering.
Rix, who was featured on Food Network’s Chopped Sweets and ABC World News Tonight with David Muir, says, “I’m just trying to renew my focus on craftsmanship. Making pivots. Just getting things figured out after a lot of changes. Figuring out what’s next.”
His mom, Arnettie Rix, passed away in 2023. “She was just a very big part of operations. She did all the customer service, a lot of the administration stuff. She was an integral part of what was going on up to that point. So, that created a big vacuum when she left.”
But, Rix says, “Making chocolate is still the thing for me. Just kind of getting back to, in a way, the roots of what I was doing. And focusing on doing really good work.”
Giving back is part of that. “Part of every box we sell, we will donate a dollar to causes and things like that.”
A native Memphian, Rix grew up in the Raleigh area. Just about everyone in his family cooked, but his Grandmother Jean was his biggest influence. Rix’s chores included shucking peas and cleaning greens. “I grew up eating whole, raw turnips like apples.” Along the way, he “found a love for cooking.”
Ironically, ice cream instead of candy was a bigger thing for him as a child. “From a candy standpoint, growing up, Snickers and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups were probably the two things that stood out.”
What made him “even think about doing chocolate” were special times when his mom bought Godiva chocolate truffles for him on shopping mall trips. “[They were] my first exposure to, I guess, what you might call ‘fancy’ chocolate,” he says.
In his 20s and 30s, Rix worked at “corporate America jobs. FedEx and a few other places doing sales, marketing. That sort of stuff. The plan was to climb that corporate ladder and do that whole deal.”
But he also thought about culinary school. “When I decided chocolate was the route I wanted to go, I realized I had to create my own education,” he says. “Back then there were not really schools that specialized in chocolate.”
He learned by reading books, watching videos, and attending lectures. Everything from pastry design to how to make ganaches.
“When I started, I was just making samples and handing them out to people where I worked and that sort of stuff,” says Rix. “I started doing pop-ups before pop-ups were really a thing at different banks and things. I set up in their lobby, doing tastings.”
His first chocolate tasting was at Prichard’s Distillery in Kelso, Tennessee. “I’d talk about the nuance of the flavor profiles of the chocolate and how it pairs with the various types of whiskey they were making,” he says. “And I’d use tastings as live focus groups. What were people liking?”
Over the years he’s come up with “hundreds of different flavors, new collections, new holiday things.” One chocolate tastes like barbecue, another like a soul food dinner. “The whole goal was to be telling stories through chocolate,” he says.
But the main ingredient in Rix’s chocolates is probably the sharing of his experiences with people and places. “My personality, my view of life, my take on art,” he says. “And just kind of putting that into a chocolate.”
