My childhood dream of having a pet monkey was fulfilled in the Ecuadorian jungle, at least for the time I was there.
Sunita de Tourreil
ECUADOR 2004-2010: the power of value add at origin
Sunita has been in the craft chocolate industry since her visit to Ecuador in 2004, so she is one of the OG industry folks who was there when it all started being born. What drew her in was cacao as a vessel for connecting the global south and the global north in a less extractive and colonial way. Parts of the global south having millennia of growing, revering, hybridizing and drinking chocolate, and more recently the global north has developed a strong penchant for chocolate in the form of bars.
Seneca on his cacao farm on the north shore of Oahu. He is one of the rare tree to bar makers, and is our on hand cacao and chocolate expert.
THE CHOCOLATE GARAGE
In 2010, after years of doing educational tastings without a location to host or sell bars, she opened The Chocolate Garage, with a 6 month old and a 2.5 year old. It is definitely best not to know what you are getting into when you start a business!
The Chocolate Garage served as a pioneer in educating customers, supporting the most talented makers and creating a community of folks who claimed “You have ruined chocolate for me!” Her focus was on transparency of the supply chain so that this new niche market could be part of the change desperately needed in chocolate, as well as a related element: finding the top quality bars, crafted to near perfection using kindly and carefully sourced cacao. She called this Happy Chocolate.
HAPPY CHOCOLATE EXPERIENCES 2016-2026…
Sunita started leading trips to origin for customers who were hungry for a deeper understanding of cacao and chocolate (fellow chocolate geeks!) and producing short documentaries (chocumentaries?) showcasing the inspiring business models and organisations working at origin (where the cacao grows). She took adventurous folks to Nicaragua, Cuba, Hawaii, Switzerland (not an origin, but famous producer) and India, and was all set to bring a large group to Vietnam when COVID hit.
To bring joy and deliciousness into people’s homes and office places, she shifted to doing virtual tastings for organisations and tech companies with international teams. A couple of years ago she did a 200 person tasting for Google with so many time zones that we needed to do a morning tasting and an afternoon tasting to accommodate the whole team.
The closing of The Chocolate Garage was necessary for personal life changes, and after a few years she transitioned to curating a collection each holiday season, to put together the most delectable curated bars of Happy Chocolate available. The vast majority of the bars we tasted at The Chocolate Garage while we were open, did not make it through our vetting process, either for quality reasons or sourcing reasons. This is still true today, disappointingly, so if you want a “no-risk” collection curated by a two decade veteran with insider information and a discerning palate, then you need to get on the Holiday Box list!