Q&A With Founders of Ritual Chocolate

Ritual Chocolate (Denver, CO)

Move over craft beer! Craft chocolate is taking Colorado by storm. Chocolatiers across the state are stirring up inventive chocolate flavors and designs sure to satiate any chocolate craving. Made with gourmet ingredients and lots of creativity, these chocolate confections add a touch of sweetness to the Colorado culinary landscape. Read more about the similarities between winemaking and developing the perfect chocolate bar in our Q/A session with Ritual Chocolate founder/owner Robbie:

Q: How did the Ritual Chocolate come to be?

A: First, Anna and I (Robbie) met, then we fell in love, and then we decided to make chocolate together. As the story goes, we were already eating chocolate regularly, but we were also beginning to develop a taste for fine food and drink. We quickly realized that most of the chocolate we were buying from the store wasn’t of a particularly good quality. At the same time, we felt like we wanted to start a business together and chocolate seemed like the perfect idea. So we set out on a mission to make incredible chocolate together. That was in the Spring of 2009. We finally launched in 2011.

Q: How do you find inspiration for flavors? What is the most popular?

A: Unlike cooking, baking or even doing what chocolatiers do, we don’t necessarily add flavor to our chocolate. We source our raw ingredients (cocoa beans) based on the inherent flavor that is the result of genetics, terroir and post-harvesting practices. We are more like wine makers, in that, we take our cocoa beans and carry them from the alchemy-like chocolate making process to create dark chocolate. Our only other ingredient is sugar, so all the flavor you taste is from the cocoa bean itself (similar to a good wine; just grapes). Our most bars right now are the Balao and the Madagascar.

Q: How has Colorado responded to Ritual Chocolate?

A: Colorado will never be the same. Just kidding. There wasn’t a Colorado-made, bean-to-bar chocolate being sold anywhere in Colorado when we launched, so the whole concept itself was confusing for everyone. After a few years of describing what we do and how it’s different, we’re finally gaining a pretty good following in Colorado. However, “Colorado” is a lot of things. Each big city (Denver, Boulder, Ft Collins, Colorado Springs, etc) is almost its own universe so we tend to find very different stores and customers to work with everywhere in the state.

Q: What do you most love about Colorado?

A: We just love the West. We embrace our inner nature-loving hippy and we really just thrive when we’re outdoors. We love road and mountain biking, running, hiking. Nature is our temple. We’d be outside all day if we had the time. The dry climate is also great for making chocolate. We can arguably make a better chocolate because of the dry air: it improves our cocoa bean storage; it improves our viscosity; our conching effectiveness and it even helps us reduce our electricity usage. With so much sun, we’re hoping to go 100% solar in the next 5 years; which would be great because we use a lot of electricity during the chocolate making process.

Q: What is something readers would be surprised to know about you?

A: We started this business at a young age, I was only 24. For the first three years it was just the two of us, Anna and I, doing all of the making, wrapping, delivering, etc etc etc. Now we have two full time production employees and an intern. Anna is English, born and raised (but she has dual citizenship). My great grandmother made chocolate bonbons and truffles 100 years ago in Utah. Most people would probably guess that we’d be pretty unhealthy because we eat chocolate all day, but we’re actually not doing too bad, yet.