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Sustainable and Delectable: The Story of Wild Blue Chocolate with Mike Sever
Manage episode 320339132 series 2792654
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Americans love all food, from all regions, and they want what they want when they want it. The questions many craft food brands wrestle with is how can you be a GOOD FOOD brand when your product is something exotic? What do you do when you make a product every American loves, but you can’t possibly source it locally?
Wild Blue Chocolate started their business by answering that question first - diving knee-deep into the chocolate production process to make sure that each step of their process is rooted in sustainable, beneficial, and profitable decisions all the way from the harvested cacao bean to the final chocolate bar.
In this episode, we have one-half of the dynamic duo and artists at heart behind this award-winning brand. Mike Sever talks about the origin of Wild Blue and how he and his wife strive to apply their best practices and successfully use cacao, an ingredient that’s not locally grown and requires specific climate conditions, to have a healthy living lifestyle and be sustainably grown.
Wild Blue’s product, 75% Guatemala San Juan Chevite bar, was among the winners of the Good Food Awards for 2022, beating out about 2,000 other entries. This is a true testament to how they continue to help support the sustainability efforts around chocolate in providing an alternative to mass-produced chocolate.
Listen and learn the keys to GOOD FOOD success:
- Know your providers and understand their practices
- Source your other ingredients from as near as possible
- Craft the highest quality product possible, even if that limits batch sizes to extremely small production runs
Virginia Foodie Essentials:
- We work from a transparent standpoint. We don't work directly with farmers. However, we do work through transparent networks that ensure that it's not a commodity. Chocolate should not be viewed as a commodity. It should be viewed with direct impact to farmers. - Mike Sever
- There's very much of a science and a craft to what you're doing. And it's really labor-intensive. - Georgiana Dearing
Key Points From This Episode:
- Why it’s important to put quality in every step of your production process
- What working with transparency and partnering with small, out of country suppliers looks like
- How Mike and Jesse intend to keep Wild Blue Chocolate small but maintain its presence in Virginia
- Seeing your product and ingredient (chocolate and cacao) not merely as a commodity but a driver of change in its community
- Balancing simple ingredients with expansions through partnerships as a path to innovation
More About the Guest:
Mike and Jesse Sever are the founders of Wild Blue Chocolate, as a result of loving the art of chocolate-making from two ingredients – eliminating the need for emulsifiers, oils, or ingredients you can’t pronounce.
They strive to make chocolate in its simplest form by using transparently sourced organic cacao and choose to use maple sugar, which has a lower environmental footprint than cane sugar.
Follow Wild Blue Chocolate:
Follow The Virginia Foodie here:
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