Interview with Robbie Stout, co-founder
Q: How did you get involved in this business?
A: Anna Davies and I founded Ritual Chocolate in 2010 with the intention of making great chocolate. We had a general interest in food and beverage but we saw a lot of potential for improving the industry through chocolate. More than any other food or drink out there, we saw a disparity between the quality available and the potential for improvement.
Q: What distinguishes you from other businesses in your category?
A: Obviously, we’re in the category of “chocolate bars” which includes everything from cheap Hershey’s candy bars to fine chocolate such as ours. Our specific category is bean-to-bar fine chocolate, meaning we make chocolate from the raw cocoa bean and process it into finished chocolate. Bean-to-bar is different because most other companies buy finished chocolate and then melt it into bars (we call them “melters”). Within the bean-to-bar category, we take an extreme approach to quality by producing our chocolate on vintage, specialty chocolate-making equipment. Modern equipment is designed to do the processing in a single step. We break down our grinding, refining and conching processes into four steps so we can fine tune the quality of our chocolate. There is no other chocolate factory in the country (or the world) that makes chocolate like us. We work with five cocoa farms in Madagascar, Peru, Costa Rica, Belize and Ecuador. Each of these farms produces quality that we consider to be in the 99 percentile of all cocoa farms.
Q: What do you like best about your line of work?
A: I enjoy the complexity of what we do because it always keeps us on our toes. Each year, the harvest is a little bit different, so we always have to slightly tweak our roasting and conching from year to year. I like the challenge of presenting education information to our customers so that they can understand more about what we do (which is part of the reason we are opening a retail store). I like the challenges and creative energy required to increase our capacity while maintaining or improving our quality. I guess we just like challenges.
Q: What is your business’ biggest challenge?
A: Because our bean-to-bar segment of the industry is so new, we have a lot of work to do in terms of educating and defining what we do for the mass market. The concept is a new one. Chocolate is generally considered to be a cheap candy, so attempting to convince the general public that it can be a high-priced fine food is a big challenge.
Q: Something people might be surprised to learn about you or your business:
A: Most people are surprised by how small our business is because we’re fairly well distributed. When someone sees our product on the shelf at Whole Foods, in San Francisco, Brooklyn, Los Ageles or Portland, they assume our company is “big.” But for a long time it was just a few of us making and distributing all of the chocolate.
Profile
Business: Ritual Chocolate
Address: 3153 Larimer St.
Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday
Founded: 2010
Contact: ritualchocolate.com, ritualchocolate@gmail.com
Employees: 3
