Blog

The U.S. Supreme Court decided today that 6 former child slaves who were kidnapped at a bus station in Mali, driven across the border to the Ivory Coast, then sold to farmers for $40 apiece to harvest cocoa beans had no grounds to bring a lawsuit against Nestle for human rights violations. The claim was …

To Our Customers, Chances are, you’ve seen last week’s viral Washington Post article, “Cocoa’s Child Labors” detailing how much of the world’s commercially produced chocolate is made from child labor (a lot). Sadly, this fact is not new to us. In fact, when I founded Askinosie Chocolate in 2005 I was inspired to base our company on Direct Trade practices specifically to combat the issues of child and slave labor in cocoa…

The crisis is physical, emotional, spiritual, financial, political and existential. It’s individual and collective. There’s a kind of unsettling dissonance in these feelings like being in the trough of massive ocean swells buffeting us about daily without the ability to even see the crests. At least that’s how I feel much of these days.  There’s …

If you listened to me play the guitar for 10 seconds you’d think I know what I am doing, at 20 seconds  . . . not so much. There’s only so many cool sounding ways to play Smoke On The Water and La Grange. My parents bought me a second hand Gibson LG acoustic guitar …

Our Coconut Milk Chocolate Bar took home the GOLD this past week! It was chosen by the Specialty Food Association out of thousands of entries from all over the country, across dozens of specialty food categories to receive this prestigious industry award. I am so proud of all of the hard work that went into making this vegan + dairy-free bar. The beans are from Ecuador and my good friend and long time farmer partner Vitaliano and his son Moises…

A couple of weeks ago I bought myself a gift: Paesano bread from my good friends at Zingerman’s Mail Order. I have been enjoying this rare treat immensely, grilled on the Big Green Egg last night and toasted this Labor Day morning…

I just returned from leading a group of 15 local high school students to visit cocoa farmers in a remote Tanzanian village on Lake Nyasa in the shadow of the Livingston Mountains. Since 2010 this journey has been part of our Chocolate University program inspiring local students that business can be a force for good in the world. More importantly we give students an opportunity to receive radical hospitality…

We leave in three days for rural Tanzania with 14 local high school students in tow. They’re an elite group of students who competed to be part of our Chocolate University high school program. We launched the project in 2009 and have been taking students to Tanzania ever since. Hold that thought…