Chocolopolis 2.0

Left: Curated chocolate used in our gift bundle and in our full-size bar tasting class. Right: Lauren swimming in Elliott Bay in October.

When I closed the Chocolopolis retail store last July I wasn’t sure where (or if) Chocolopolis would go from here. I figured I’d take a break and see what happened. I rested for a few months, started swimming in the icy, cold waters of Puget Sound (in a wetsuit) and took things day by day, wondering where life would take me. But I couldn’t stay away from Chocolopolis, mostly because of you, our wonderful community. I decided to relaunch the website to focus on the amazing chocolate community that Chocolopolis has become over the last thirteen years and to continue to enjoy chocolate with you.

While COVID has brought many terrible things to our midst it has also created a spirit of innovation that changes the way we think about gatherings. Driven by necessity, I’ve conducted many virtual chocolate tastings these past few months. This paradigm shift that came about out of necessity has removed barriers to tasting chocolate with community members around the country. It’s been liberating and fun. Not only has it allowed me to share chocolate with a wider audience, it has enabled me to focus on my true passion - telling the story of cacao and chocolate.

One of the things I’ve always loved about my job is being an educator. While I am not a teacher by training I am a teacher by aptitude. I love thinking about how to organize information in a way that is meaningful to my audience. What’s going to resonate with them and make them think? What will keep them engaged? Choosing to display chocolate bars by cacao origin (instead of by brand) was a physical manifestation of how I did this at Chocolopolis. Just by browsing the displays named after cacao-growing regions you could infer that cacao comes from regions like Madagascar and Ecuador and that perhaps those regions make a difference in taste.

One of my first jobs out of college gave me the opportunity to teach, but not in the traditional sense. I’d finished my two-year program as an investment banking analyst at Merrill Lynch and I was looking for my next role. There was a software development group that supported investment banking and I decided to join them. While it was considered an odd choice by my former colleagues (moving from a revenue-producing group to a support group), I did it because the team leader was a visionary. It’s one of the only times in my life I’ve taken the advice that you should choose your job based on the manager, not the job itself. It was a very good decision.

Merrill Lynch was one of two Wall Street firms beta testing Excel. This was in the days when Lotus 1-2-3 was the ubiquitous financial tool. I had the job of training investment bankers to use Excel, which was surprisingly challenging given that the Excel “WYSIWYG” interface was much more intuitive than Lotus 1-2-3’s DOS-based interface. But it was during this experience that I began to understand that I was good at teaching and that I enjoyed it tremendously. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to share information in ways that was relevant to my audience, whether it was investment bankers learning to create Excel macros or COBOL programmers struggling to use a mouse for the first time.

I’ve been thinking about these experiences a lot lately and feeling very happy with the decisions I made to pivot Chocolopolis, which I’m calling “Chocolopolis 2.0”. I love leading chocolate tastings. I get to weave history, politics, economics and geography into my tasting presentations. Chocolopolis 2.0 has allowed me to spend more time with chocolate lovers and open their eyes to the complex issues associated with cacao farming and chocolate making.

Our virtual environment has also allowed me to partner with talented chocolate makers to put together events that would not have been possible in the past without a trip to Seattle. We’ve had sold-out virtual events with KahKow and Fresco, each event focused on experts who helped us get to the root of flavor in chocolate, whether that flavor came from fermentation recipes or roasting and conching treatments.

What lies ahead? There are so many interesting things in our future! I’m working on new events and experiences with craft chocolate makers and online chocolate sellers. I continue to lead chocolate tasting classes and private events. I will be announcing new opportunities and experiences soon, and I hope to be able to offer a special event with a chocolate maker each month. When we’re able to travel again we’ll relaunch our chocolate trips to chocolaty-places around the globe.

Thanks for being a part of our chocolate community. I look forward to sharing Chocolopolis 2.0 with you!