We had an incredible weekend at the Northwest Chocolate Festival!  Thousands of craft chocolate lovers descended on the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue Washington to enjoy two days of tasting chocolate from some of the best craft chocolate makers in the world.  There were also numerous informational presentations, including one by us.  Monica was on the main stage along with our Nicaragua cacao farmer Giff Laube to talk about our latest Limited Release “Yasica” bar. We crafted this bar with an extremely rare ancient Nicaragua Criollo bean which Giff has been carefully propagating for over ten years, after finding the trees…

The 2023 International Chocolate Awards Americas Competition winners were just announced and our Almendra Blanca bar won USA Gold in the Micro-Batch Plain/Origin bar category!  We had 21 winners in total, and the full list is below.  Most are still available in our online shop. The Americas competition is for chocolate makers throughout North, South and Central America.  Each of our winners is now eligible to compete in the World Finals competition, which is when winners from every region compete to see who’s the best of the best.  Winners will be announced on November 26th in Florence, Italy – see…

The 2023 Good Food Awards ceremony was held this past weekend in Portland, and we’re excited and proud to announce our Ucayali bar is a winner.  This is our 6th consecutive win!  Check out the complete list of winners here. In addition to celebrating exceptional craft products, the Good Food Foundation requires that all entrants meet strict environmental and social responsibility standards.  Also, each region is limited to only three winners in each category, which makes this award even more special.   We’ve sourced our cacao for this bar from Ucayali River Cacao for the past six years, following our…

We’ve read many articles over the years describing the potential health benefits of dark chocolate, but haven’t posted about them.  Why?  Well, one reason is we’re not medical professionals, and can’t independently verify any of the claims we’re reading.  Another is that there’s an obvious conflict of interest when a chocolate maker mentions how healthy chocolate could be. But, at this point we’ve seen so many articles referencing studies which suggest non-alkalized dark chocolate may have numerous health benefits we can’t help ourselves.  So, with the caveat that we are not medical professionals and full disclosure that our providing this…

Understanding where your food comes from is incredibly important.  Most people usually have very little understanding of where their food is grown, the process by which it reaches them, and the prices paid to everyone involved in the journey. Not having even a basic understanding of food supply chains helps give rise to numerous problems, including the entrenchment of unsustainably low prices paid to the farmers at the beginning of the chain.  This is the case with cacao – the global commodity price is so low it results in cacao farmers becoming locked into endemic poverty.  Prices are low for…

Chocolate comes from a fruit!  In this video from our sourcing trip to Ecuador we show you how to open a ripe cacao pod.  

When we communicate our chocolate’s value proposition, one of the terms we use is Bean to Bar.  Being craft chocolate makers so heavily involved with the weight and intricacies of daily production, it’s easy to forget that many consumers still don’t fully understand the depth of information contained in that loaded term.  Actually, it’s not forgetting; we don’t often have the opportunity or the universal platform to dive deep and explain Bean to Bar’s complexity, nuance, and real-life implications. We are not the only ones in the fine chocolate value chain who struggle with clarity and communication.  Writer Sharon Terenzi…

The Northwest Chocolate Festival is the largest craft chocolate festival in the country, and this year we were very happy to be back at the festival in person!  It was an incredibly fun time, and it was awesome to see so many of our chocolate friends after so much time apart. As part of the festival they announce the winners of the Chocolate Alliance Awards, which are judged by some of the most experienced and respected chocolate experts in the world.  We’re proud to share we have 12 winners, including 9 Gold winners! Our full list of winners is below,…

Affet two years of virtual gatherings we were excited to finally attend The Northwest Chocolate Festival in-person this year!  It was two nonstop days of chocolate sampling and education, and it was incredibly energizing to once again be able to connect with people face to face.  We saw a lot of old friends and made a lot of new ones. There were also numerous presentations about all things chocolate and Monica was on a panel for the Fine Chocolate Industry Association.  Along with other craft chocolate professionals she’s been working on a glossary of terms with standard definitions agreed upon…

The awards for the International Chocolate Awards, America’s competition were just announced, and we have 15 winners, including Gold for our Asochivite with Maple bar – that’s more winners than any other chocolate maker in north America.  Our winners now go on to the World Finals, where they’ll be judged alongside the winners from every other regional competition. For the full list of awards visit our Award Winners page, and try all the winners for yourself in our online store!

We’re excited and proud to announce that we won seventeen 2022 Academy of Chocolate Awards – more than any other maker in North America!  Our winners include four golds: Special Reserve 100% Cacao Special Reserve, Putnam Rye Whiskey Special Reserve, Lawley’s Rum Special Reserve, Las Palomas Coffee For the complete list of winners check out our Awards Page. All of these bars are available in our online store and are currently in stock, so you can try all of the award-winners for yourself!

You’ve probably seen the term Fair Trade a lot on product packaging.  When you see that label you probably assume that people all along the supply chain, from farmers on up, are receiving a higher price for their product than they would otherwise.  But, that’s not always the case.  For example, with cacao it’s possible that farmers who pay money for a Fair Trade certification could get paid LESS than the already-too-low commodity price for cacao.  Does this mean Fair Trade is a bad thing.  No.  But it does mean that all of us need to spend more time understanding…

The Washington Post recently published an excellent article, “Cocoa’s Child Laborers,” detailing the issues with child labor and unsafe working conditions in the global cacao supply chain. The article explains how, for nearly twenty years, the large industrial chocolate companies have missed goals to eradicate child labor from cacao production.  These goals were set collaboratively involving many major industrial chocolate companies, members of the U.S. congress and representatives from foreign governments. Based on the numbers provided in the article it seems that over an eighteen-year span the major chocolate companies have spent less than 0.0081% of annual sales to address…

We’re a small business, and we actively search out and support other small businesses in our community.  We’d like to share why the concept of small business is so important to us. First, we should define what a small business is.  The US Small Business Association defines it as an independent business that has less than 500 employees.  While that may seem like a lot, the average small business size is 22.2 employees per company.  According to the SBA’s 2020 survey there are 31,720,139 total businesses in the United States.  Of that total, 31.7M are small businesses and 20,139 are…

We’re proud to announce our Boyaca bar is our fifth consecutive Good Food Award Winner! The Good Food Awards are unique in that all submissions must meet strict criteria for social and environmental responsibility. There are only three regional winners in each category, making these awards even more special. Try our Boyaca bar for yourself today, and try our four previous winners with our Good Food Award Winners collection!

We’re proud to share that our 2021 Sofi award winners are our El Carmen 77% bar, Classic Milk bar and our El Carmen Hot Cocoa! The sofi awards recognize the best specialty foods from around the globe, and were dubbed the “Oscars of the food world” by Bloomberg.  This year we won awards in three different categories:  Dark Chocolate, Milk Chocolate and Coffee & Hot Cocoa.  We’re the only chocolate maker to win an award in each category, and the only maker to win three 2021 awards. Our 2021 Sofi award winners are available in our online store, and we…

It’s that time of year again!  Time for all the ghosts at our 200 year old farm to once again haunt our historic barn. Considering they wait all year for this it’s understandable they go all out for the occasion.  In addition to our ghosts we think neighboring specters show up as well.  💀💀💀 Although our spooky barn isn’t open to the public please join Monica and me for a video tour of this year’s spookiness.  Not only will it get you in the Halloween spirit but you may come away with some ideas for your own Haunted House!  …

The International Chocolate Awards just announced the winners of their Drinking Chocolate Competition and we’re proud to announce our Asochivite Hot Cocoa won Silver and our Almendra Blanca Hot Cocoa won Gold! In addition the Almendra Blanca took home the prestigious “Best in Competition” award, being judged the best single product in the entire competition in any category. Pressing our own cocoa butter to make our single origin cacao powder is a lot of work, but the results are worth it! For a full list of winners check out the ICA Drinking Chocolate Awards page.

Last year we were fortunate to make history as the first chocolate maker to sweep the Dark Chocolate category at the Specialty Food Association’s annual Sofi Awards.  This year we not only repeated the feat, winning Gold, Silver and Bronze, but took home Best New Product as well! The Sofi awards, which Bloomberg dubbed the “Oscars of Artisanal Foods,” celebrates the best specialty food products from around the world.  Past winners in the Dark Chocolate category include such notable names as Thomas Keller. Our winning chocolate bars this year are different than our winning bars from last year, meaning we…

We’ve been doing live videos to show various aspects of our chocolate making process, and people who’ve missed them have asked us to post them online.  So, our YouTube channel was born!  We’ve posted all of our Instagram Live videos and will continue to add more as we make them.  Find out how we make our award-winning chocolate, how to make chocolate at home, and more!

One of our goals when we started was to make great tasting, ethically sourced craft chocolate available to as many people as possible.  Most high quality single origin bars were priced in the low-to-mid teens, which was more than many people wanted to spend to try something new.  After all, what if they didn’t like it? We made the price low enough that trying craft chocolate wasn’t as big a risk, hoping it would encourage people who had never tasted single origin chocolate to give ours a try.  And it worked!  We can’t count how many people over the past…

Chronicle came to visit us and showcase our chocolate making process!

We’re heading to Ecuador and Peru next week for a sourcing trip, so this seems like a good time to talk about how we buy our cacao beans. You’ll often see two terms describing how chocolate makers buy their beans: “Fair Trade” and “direct trade.” There’s a lot of confusion about what these terms mean, and for good reason – it’s a bit complicated. These two buying methods may sound similar, but they’re very different. Fair Trade means the producer (such as a farmer or cooperative) has paid an up-front fee, and continues to pay annual fees, to a for-profit…