Askinosie Chocolate – Part 1: The Company

Being a compulsive email checker often proves useful, like last month when I received (and responded to, within a half hour) an email from Bittersweet Café about a tasting and discussion led by Shawn Askinosie of Askinosie Chocolate. I knew a little bit about Askinosie’s profit sharing methods, but I looked forward to learning more (and tasting chocolate, obviously).

The event took place on a Tuesday night, and around twenty people who also responded fast enough to make the cut showed up. We sat down around tables at the back of the first floor of the store; Askinosie stood in front of us, telling us his story and going through a slideshow on his laptop, while his wife Caron prepared and passed around the samples that I’ll talk about in my second post.

Shawn Askinosie was a criminal defense lawyer in Springfield, Missouri for nearly twenty years, defending people charged with murder and other serious crimes. His work started taking a toll on him and his family, and he realized he needed to pursue another line of work. Food was a passion of his; he was into barbecuing and considered going into the cupcake business for a while. But in May 2005, it came to him that he should be making chocolate. (I’ve had this thought before.) So he started making chocolate, first at home, and when that proved too messy for his wife, at his law office.

Askinosie’s beans come from two regions: San Jose Del Tambo, Ecuador, and Soconusco, Mexico, a popular cacao-growing region during Aztec times. Interesting, he’s one of the first people outside of Mexico to use those beans in over 100 years. I don’t remember him talking a lot about how he learned about the chocolate making process, but he did say he learned about the growing, drying, and fermenting of beans from the farmers. His lead farmer in Mexico is a trained agronomist, which probably helped a lot with refining the process.

The most interesting thing about Askinosie chocolate to me is the profit sharing mechanism. Askinosie pays farmers an above fair trade wage, and then shares 10% of the profits from chocolate made from beans from their farms. He also shows them his books, so they know how the profit is calculated. Profit sharing encourages the farmers to improve their product, and Askinosie provides development training for them to learn more.

Once he had his factory running, Askinosie went through several months of problems with the tempering process, partly because the bars don’t contain soy lecithin, an emulsifier that helps during tempering. Askinosie is one of only a few small batch bean-to-bar chocolate makers in the US, and apparently they’re a secretive bunch; besides one person from Guittard (which is a larger company), he didn’t have a lot of community support. It wasn’t until summer 2007 that Askinosie’s chocolates appeared on the market.

Other neat tidbits:

- Askinosie mentioned that he likes to pair chocolate with tequila. He also likes to pair chocolate with beer, like Dogfish Head Ale and Rogue Dead Guy (beers with a bite).

- Kids who live at the local homeless shelter and go to the nearby elementary school attend “Chocolate University,” where they learn about chocolate and entrepreneurship; the admission price for factory tours goes toward this program.

- Women from the local women’s shelter get paid to tie the strings, originally from the bags of cacao beans that arrive at the factory, onto the top of the chocolate bars.

- The packaging on the products is really slick, and so is the website; the bars come in brown packages, stamped with info and pictures of farmers, and contain maps of the area where the cacao is grown. According to Askinosie’s wife, he oversaw the package design.

- The Askinosie logo is the orange of UT, which is Askinosie’s wife’s alma mater.

Askinosie seemed like a really nice guy, and I look forward to seeing what he comes out with next.

Tags: Askinosie