Manon von Kaenel

A PASSION FOR COCAO    de Tourreil offers tastings to her customers.

I am at The Chocolate Garage, in downtown Palo Alto, which is exactly what it sounds like: a garage transformed into a small specialty chocolate store and tasting event venue. Founded by Sunita de Tourreil, The Chocolate Garage’s unique charm lies partly in its philosophy of “happy” chocolate.

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“Happy chocolate is chocolate where the farmers, or anyone who is on the supply chain, are getting a good deal,” de Tourreil says.

This can mean the chocolate is organic; single-origin, where the makers work directly with the farmers over a long period of time; direct or fair trade certified; or locally grown and produced.

“I call it happy, which is a very sort of generic, bland term, but it’s because there’s so many different ways for chocolate bars to have a positive impact,” de Tourreil says.

By promoting “happy” chocolate, de Tourreil hopes to help improve cocoa farmers’ conditions.

“There’s a lot of unhappiness in chocolate; there’s child slave labor, and really bad pay for farmers, so we’re focusing on carrying bars that have a really positive impact on the world,” de Tourreil says.

According to an International Institute of Tropical Agriculture study conducted in 2002, cocoa farmers in West Africa earn only $30-$110 in wages per year. Of the 600,000 cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, the the Save the Children organization estimates that as many as 15,000 children are forced to work as slaves.

In addition to helping cocoa farmers, de Tourreil praises her bars for bringing happiness to the consumer as well.

“There are all kinds of natural chemical structures and compounds in chocolate that have positive effects on people,” de Tourreil says. “People say that it helps put people in a better mood, and it’s supposed to have anti-oxidants.”

De Tourreil is trained as a molecular biologist, and was studying the human form of mad cow disease at University of California, San Francisco, before developing the idea of helping cocoa farmers by promoting “happy” chocolate.

“When I left that job [as a medical researcher], I wanted to do something that was still involving health, and making an impact on health, but something more basic than this disease that I had been studying that affected very few people,” de Tourreil says.

Part of her inspiration came from witnessing first-hand the work and effects of Yachana Gourmet, an organization based in Ecuador devoted to helping cocoa famers.

“I saw that one of the best ways to address basic things like access to clean water so children don’t die of diarrhea before age 5, or really preventable illnesses, was being addressed through a sustainable way of paying farmers for the chocolate that they were making,” de Tourreil says.

De Tourreil and Greg Wolff, her “business and life partner,” started up a fund to invest in companies like Yachana Gourmet. But the organization soon changed direction.

“Pretty quickly we realized that people like to eat chocolate more than they liked to talk about socially responsible investing,” de Tourreil says. “So we found a way to do chocolate tastings and educate people around chocolate and still use the funds and the profits from those tastings to feed our fund that we would use to invest in small companies.”

The Chocolate Garage came about when Wolff rented a space for his nonprofit, and inherited a small garage along with it. The two decided to renovate it and thus The Chocolate Garage was born — it officially opened June 2010.

“It [the formation of the Chocolate Garage] was kind of a combination of wanting to have more impact health-wise and then finding chocolate a really good means to connect with people,” de Tourreil says.

To connect with people through chocolate, de Tourreil opens The Chocolate Garage on Saturdays during the downtown Palo Alto farmer’s market, when she also manages a picnic table out on the street in front of the Garage, and on select Saturdays throughout the year. She offers customers tastings and numerous chocolate bars, which cost between $5 and $23.

“What I like to do is have people taste chocolate before they buy it, because it’s kind of overwhelming, to see so many bars and know what the differences are between them,” de Tourreil says.

The chocolates have an astounding variety in taste and texture. Some have a distinct lemon flavor, others are spiced with cinnamon or chili or cloves, and still others have nibs of salt or coffee or pepper, all with varying degrees of sweetness and smoothness. De Tourreil makes up for the relative smallness of The Chocolate Garage with her visible passion and knowledge for chocolate and the diversity in quality chocolate she offers.

De Tourreil also hosts scheduled tasting events during which she has groups blindly taste different types of chocolate, discuss their preferences, and learn about the cocoa production process.

“I usually go through that this is a cocoa pod, and it grows on trees in and around the equator, and explain a little bit about how they grow, where they grow, and then once they’re picked by the farmers, how you process them,” de Tourreil says.

De Tourreil’s demographic tends to be more women — because “women are more faithful chocolate eaters than men,” according to de Tourreil, but the tastings, which cost $25 per person with a minimum of eight people, are open to anyone and can be scheduled by contacting her at sunita@thechocolategarage.com.

De Tourreil also occasionally hosts other events, such as chocolate-making workshops or guest speakers from “happy” chocolate-related professions, that are publicized on her website (www.thechocolategarage.com) or her Facebook page (www.facebook.com/TheChocolateGarage.)

“[These events are] kind of out of the box and a very different experience,” de Tourreil says.

After attending an event or a tasting, the customer becomes a member with access to the discounted membership prices for the chocolate bars.

In the future, de Tourreil hopes to form a connection between a community in Central or South America and the Palo Alto community, through education and trips to cocoa farms.

“The mission for me is to try to connect the end-user, the consumer, the person who likes to eat chocolate, to the farm person,” de Tourreil says.