Every autumn for the last four years, we have spent a lovely weekend communing with like-minded, sustainability-focused eaters, drinkers, and makers in Chapel Hill at TerraVITA Food & Wine Event. Jael and I love doing these events, for some obvious reasons, and others not so obvious. Of course, it gets our chocolates into the hands of potential patrons and resellers, but it also lights a little spark in our hearts that was first lit when we got our start, seven years ago, selling our wares under a tent at the French Broad Food Co-op Saturday tailgate market. Now that sends me back! Sam was a toddler, Max a babe-in-arms, and Jael and I were stuffing our car with truffles and brownies to get Asheville excited about our unique style of chocolates.
I digress. Last October, one of the regular attendees at TerraVITA was an organizer for the Charleston Wine + Food Festival. She made a very compelling case that we needed to get involved with this event; that chocolate was generally under-represented there, and that many Charleston attendees would have familiarity with our beloved Asheville brand. In retrospect, boy was she right! Charleston is the fourth major wine and food festival in which we participate: first was TerraVITA, then Atlanta Food & Wine Festival started 3 years ago (we’ve exhibited every year since), Asheville has begun putting on their own awesome wine & food festival (coming up on their third year), and now we are rounding out the list with Charleston.
Photo by Charleston Wine + Food Festival
In many ways, Charleston’s food scene has all these other venues beat. They’re a hotbed of James Beard Award-winning chefs, and the unofficial seat of the Southern food renaissance in which we find ourselves of late. Certainly not the only noteworthy food town of the south! But a 4 hour drive from Asheville, we know now how critical it is for us to have a presence there; both for name recognition when South Carolina food enthusiasts tour Asheville, and for their own daily chocolate consumption. We want our silky smooth bean-to-bar ambrosia on the lips of the food cognoscenti, the chefs, and anyone else who gives a crap from whence comes their food!
Photo by Eliza Bell Photography
This is how the festival went down for us. First, the players. With Jael in Costa Rica for a much-deserved 40th birthday yoga retreat, I (Dan) had the able assistance of Hannah for the weekend. Much to our fortune and pleasure, Hannah Rechtschaffen has recently returned to our organization after a many-year hiatus, during which time she made impressive impact in the spa industry, rising up the chain of command to manage Suraj, one of Asheville’s best spas. She originally worked the Chocolate Lounge floor, deftly executing our high standards of customer service. We snagged her back for a different role: Wholesale Accounts Manager and Business Development. Hannah’s helping us spread the good gospel about our wholesale offerings, from retail bars to bulk chocolate and, soon, several other offerings. She did that in spades at #chswff (as it’s called in the twittersphere).
The main event. We were posted for the weekend in the Grand Tasting Tent, a cozy selection of fine purveyors of everything from squid to wine to cheese, restaurants, and little old us. Well I don’t think I’m over-reaching to assert that our table was the most crowded in the tent. At least from our perspective. During the two 2-hour sessions per day, Friday through Sunday, wine-sipping attendees were oohing and ahhing over our offerings. Friday, I’m not gonna lie, was a little tough. The temperature never climbed north of 49 degrees, with a cold mist or rain throughout the day, but people weathered the chilly air and ate a hearty helping of our truffles and bar samples. Saturday and Sunday were true Charleston spring days, and the whole place was brimming over with good vibes.
Photo courtesy of The Local Palate
The stats. Though sales weren’t the emphasis of this festival, we were given the opportunity to sell pre-packaged collections and bars at our table. Folks had their choice of our Signature Collection or an abbreviated 3-variety version of our Caramel Collection. To our great delight many attendees walked away with a little blue box tied with a pretty brown bow, or a stack of colorful ribbon-clad bars. Attendees relish the opportunity to taste, and taste they did! We sampled over 2000 tasting segments of our 9-bar collection and close to 4000 truffles and caramels! To round out our offerings, we presented our Theobroma Cacao t-shirts for sale, and had a demo grinder full of Costa Rica 75% to give away by the fresh chocolate spoonfuls.
Collateral effects. Charleston isn’t currently home to a bean-to-bar chocolate maker. They have some good confectioners, don’t get me wrong, but nobody has yet filled this niche in their food-centric community. When I sat and pondered what my dream-come-true would be from a Charleston outreach mission, top on the list was connecting with pastry chefs to consider using and featuring our chocolate. Sure, I want the chocolate-buying public to have ready access to our bars in their favorite retailers; but how much more so would they be yearning to buy if they saw it on the menus of their favorite restaurants? We came with an ace in the hole. Esteemed rising-star Chef Katie Button, of Curate and Nightbell in Asheville, presented dessert at a top-notch wine dinner which featured French Broad Chocolates’ Limited Edition single farm Panama 78% (not yet available in bar format, but coming soon). One of Asheville’s own using our chocolate in a tobacco-infused dessert that will soon be added to the menu of the new awesome nightclub, Nightbell! By the end of the weekend, we had 500 gram tablets of our single origin chocolate in the hands of some of our favorite chefs in Charleston. Not to mention a burst of new interest in carrying our chocolate bars! (If you happen to be reading this and would like to try working with our craft chocolate or selling our bars, please let us know at wholesale@
frenchbroadchocolates.com.)
The weekend at Charleston Wine + Food Festival was well worth the hard work we invested and chocolate we crafted. French Broad Chocolates is right at home in Charleston, among its top-caliber chefs and fine food fanatics. Right now, you can find us at the Southern Season in Mount Pleasant, Avondale Wine & Cheese, and at the Elliotborough Mini Bar. We are appreciative of these relationships, and very much look forward to the new ones! Coming soon, we hope, are a set of family-run fine wine and tobacco stockists, an island resort, the Charleston Whole Foods, and a partnership with a couple of craft distillers for a new chocolate spirit… And if we really fished our low-country wish, a few of our chef crushes will be using our chef tablets in their desserts! Too soon to mention names; details to come. I can’t wait to see how this Charleston journey unfolds!