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. They’re on the front of the bar. I’ve been buying beans from this family for twelve years. I will be visiting them THIS coming week and celebrating this Gold award with the family. We’ve prepared a cool banner for them to hang at their farm. Our crew at Askinosie Chocolate put their hearts and souls into this bar. This chocolate won Silver at the International Chocolate Awards last year, and was a Good Food Award Finalist this year. But the Gold award catapults this chocolate bar into a whole other category.
If memory serves me we won our first Specialty Food Association award – a Silver – in 2008 for a dark chocolate bar made from beans from the same farmer as the Gold from last week.
When I started our little chocolate factory over twelve years ago there were two or three of us in the U.S. starting about the same time making bean to bar chocolate. Now there are probably close to 300. That does not include confectioners who make chocolate bars starting with chocolate someone else made. What I am trying to say is that there’s massive competition and many truly great tasting chocolate bars available. Let me suggest two makers in case you’ve not tried something from them yet; Dandelion Chocolate and French Broad Chocolate. You will not be disappointed.
All of the reasons mentioned are alone enough of a reason to be proud of this Gold award. But they’re not the real reason I am over the top excited about this win. The reason is that I always want our chocolate to taste a little bit better than our other vocational work; i.e., working with local students, supporting Empowered Girls/Enlightened Boys programs, funding and supporting school lunch programs. We talk about this a lot in our book, Meaningful Work, but we want you to buy our chocolate because it tastes great. We hope you keep coming back because you connect with us, our story and our work. I have long believed that if we do not focus first on the quality of product and instead rest on you buying our chocolate because you like the story then one day we’d end up with chocolate that tastes like sawdust.
We just broke ground on a pre-school for 300 children in Tanzania in partnership with cocoa farmers we’ve been working with for nearly a decade. Early childhood education in their village was part of their Ten Year Vision Plan we helped facilitate. This is a really big deal. It would be hard to put into words how meaningful this is to us and me personally. We will talk more about this in the coming weeks. I asked myself over the last several months “how will we top that work with our chocolate?” Can our chocolate be “better” than that work? This is what we mean when we write in the book or I say to audiences, “It’s not about the chocolate, it’s about the chocolate.” Both are true in a very non-dual sense. The Gold award validates, for me, the tip top benchmark of quality of our chocolate.
Our Chocolate University Pre-School Day Camp this past summer – a preview of the actual school to come
I am super competitive and want to win all of the contests we enter. But I’ve never looked at it as beating the other chocolate makers. I want to win because I know that if we keep feeding our souls by working with students and farmers then we can never stop trying to make the best tasting chocolate possible. By the way, this philosophy is not exclusive to chocolate. It could be your company and the product and service you make or provide. It’s not about the _________, it’s about the ________!