Makers Series 9: Fruition Chocolate

Fruition Chocolate was founded in 2011 by Bryan Graham and is based in Woodstock, USA. The company is known for stone-grinding cocoa beans as a means, Bryan says, of accentuating their inherent flavor. Fruition Chocolate won the gold medal for “Best in Competition” at the 2016 International Chocolate Awards. In this episode, Bryan tells us about his pastry chef training, the story behind the Corazon de Dahlia bar and how the proceeds help children in Peru, and about recreating flavors in chocolate that he loved in his youth.

Please join us in tasting the Corazon de Dahlia Milk Chocolate Quinoa Crunch bar. Learn more at theslowmelt.com. For more information on Fruition, head to their website (www.tastefruition.com), and use code “slowmelt” for a 15% discount from now until October 15, 2017. You can also purchase an exclusive bar bundle, including all nine bars featured in the Makers Series, at Chocolopolis.com (in the U.S.; use code “slowmelt” for a 15% discount), and find most of the bars in a subscription box by BeanBarYou.com.au (in Australia).

This episode is brought to you with the kind support of these sponsors:

• Rottar Grinders: Chocolate grinders designed and built by a chocolate maker in the USA. Learn more at www.rottar.com.

• Blue Apron: $30 off your first order with free shipping at blueapron.com/chocolate.

• Audible: Get a free audiobook of your choice and free 30-day trial at www.audibletrial.com/chocolate.

Soundtrack: "Soldier" by The Slackers. Hear more at theslackers.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The Slow Melt is sponsored in part by Ecole Chacala, the award-winning school for chocolate makers and chocolateers. You'll learn from professional instructors, master techniques, and create mouthwatering recipes while interacting with your classmates and tutors all online. For more information, visit ecolechala.com.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Welcome to the Slow Melt Maker series. I'm Simron Seti, and today I'm speaking with Brian Graham, the founder of Fruition Chocolate, based in the United States in Woodstock, New York. Hi, Brian.

SPEAKER_02 0:53

Hi, Simren. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:55

I'm really well, and I'm really, really excited to talk to you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:00

You're welcome. Yeah, I'm I'm thrilled to be on.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

How did you learn to love chocolate the way you do?

SPEAKER_02 1:08

To be honest, I grew up eating a lot of sweets and candies. Nothing on the finer end of things, but food was always such a big part of my life. I I would spend weekends on my on my grandmother's dairy farm where we would like pick produce and like she taught me how to bake. And all I ever wanted to do was work with food. And somehow there's there's a very long story that we can get into. Uh I decided to focus on chocolate. But it but it took you know a couple decades to get to that point.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

And that point, I mean, that included training at the International Culinary Association. Is that right? ICA?

SPEAKER_02 1:44

I was a student at the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

And was that one of the places where where chocolate became a viable option for you?

SPEAKER_02 1:54

Yeah, that was a really formative experience. Before that, I was I was working at a uh fine dining restaurant in Woodstock, New York called the Bear Cafe. Uh I started out there when I was 15 as an assistant to the pastry chef, and then I became the pastry chef when I was 18. So it's all I had really been doing from a pretty young age. But I got to a certain point, I think when I was 25 or 26, that I wanted to get a really formal education. And because the CIA is right in our backyard, and it's a it's a place that I'd always wanted to go to, but never really could afford it. You know, I finally got to the point where becoming a student there was a viable option. So around the time I was 25 or 26, I enrolled, and you know, it was the greatest two years of my life. And during that time, um I took a chocolate and confections class, and that's where I first got exposed to like making fine confections and chocolates. And um, through that, I also started, you know, getting the bug to learn about chocolate making. So uh that's that's kind of where it all started in 2006 or 2007.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

And so how did you actually start fruition?

SPEAKER_02 3:06

I I wanted to learn about the process of making chocolate, which isn't really something that was covered in the chocolates class at the CIA, but I sort of pestered the instructor and I wanted to learn more, and he turned me onto some like really dense technical manuals. So I started reading it, and then I discovered chocolatealchemy.com and I, you know, got my first little melangeur, and I was, you know, roasting cocoa beans in my my apartment at home and just essentially making really, really bad chocolate, but you know, at the time just learning the process and you know, learning what I liked and what I didn't like. And um, it sort of snowballed from there. And I was I was just doing it as a hobby at first. And after a few years, after I graduated from the CIA, I also worked there for a couple years. And all of this time I sort of knew that I wanted to do something in chocolate. And then around 2010, my wife and I both quit our jobs and took some time off because we knew we were going to start the business. And we just wanted some time to work on the business plan, travel. We did a five-month road trip across the United States and went backpacking in New Zealand and you know, trying to figure out what fruition ultimately would become before it had a name, before it had, you know, uh a location.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

And um, so you knew it would be chocolate, but you didn't know how exactly it would manifest.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

Yeah, exactly. We didn't we didn't know how, we didn't know exactly what it was gonna look like, we didn't know where. So um, so we traveled a lot and we were trying to find the right place in America to settle down. We started thinking about owning a chocolate shop and and what could make us special. Uh, and we did we didn't want to be like every other chocolate shop out there with a big case of you know a thousand different flavors of bonbons. We decided that what would make us special is we would make all of our own chocolate and then turn that chocolate into confections and bonbons. From the beginning, I've always looked at myself as more of a chocolatier who just happens to make their own chocolate. And once we got started with fruition, um, it almost became more about the chocolate itself and the confectionary stuff, you know, became a side note almost.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

It's interesting because we can see how that folds into the chocolate because the inclusions that you offer, I mean, they're so wide-ranging from corn to passion fruit to quinoa. I mean, it's extraordinary to look at the kinds of things that you bring into a bar and and the way they all come together. Before we move into kind of the nitty-gritty on where you source your beans and certification and stuff, I want to know how did you decide on the name fruition?

SPEAKER_02 5:52

It's it's funny. That was almost the hardest part in the beginning. It was like figuring out the name. I certainly didn't want it to be, you know, Brian Graham chocolates or something like that. The word fruition just popped into my head one day. I I think we were walking down the street in Portland, Oregon. And I thought, like, that's a good strong word. Let's use that. Without really thinking about the meaning very much until uh until later. And then as we started thinking about it more, uh, fruition means the you know the realization of a dream. So, you know, we're finally realizing this this dream that we've had for a long time to start a chocolate business. Um, and fruition means bearing fruit, and you know, cacao, of course, being a fruit. So um so it it started to make sense, but but it started to make sense only after we decided on the name.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

You lived into the name. That's awesome. Yeah. Okay, so how do you define the company? Tell us a little bit about the backstory of how big you are and and this whole setup.

SPEAKER_02 6:52

Yeah, we started out really, really small, like most makers do. I I mentioned before that we we took a road trip and we were working on the business plan and trying to figure out like where we wanted to start this business. Um, and after this whole, you know, five-month trip, we wound up back home in Woodstock, which is home for myself and home for my wife. And we didn't really have a good idea of where we wanted to be. So we thought, what the hell? Let's just find a place and start making chocolate. So we found this little place that used to be an ice cream joint and burger place that I used to go to when I was in high school. And we we started the business there because it was available and it was cheap. We never intended on having a retail store because we're in a very rural area. We thought our business was going to be mostly wholesale and online. So it didn't really matter where we made the chocolate. Um so we got started, you know, hardly any money. You know, we blew it on that long trip, all of our savings, but we we started with essentially nothing, you know, our meager savings and you know, a small loan from family and got started there. In the past five and a half years, we've grown to be, you know, seven employees. We're making about a ton of uh chocolate a month, which I would say is like, you know, we're certainly not the smallest, but we're certainly not the biggest craft chocolate maker. And our our sales are split about it's about 50% wholesale, and then the other 50% is split between retail and our two stores and our online sales. So it's a it's a nice mix.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

It sounds like you're in a really good spot. Do you want to get much bigger than this?

SPEAKER_02 8:32

You know, I I get asked that quite frequently, and the answer that I always have is yeah, of course I want to get bigger. I want I want to get as big as we possibly can so long as we can maintain or or exceed the quality that we're producing right now. You know, I'm fairly confident that we can become bigger and make even better chocolate, but you know, we we have no dreams of becoming like a you know a really large industrial type chocolate maker. We take pride in it, in it being handmade and and and having human beings like involved in the process of making chocolate.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

What terms do you find really useful in trying to talk about who you are?

SPEAKER_02 9:12

I would I would call us a craft chocolate maker. How I would define that, I I don't know. I mean, that that's one of the things that I know you've talked about a lot is you know, that there's no set definition of what that is. The the way I look at it is, you know, we don't we don't pour cocoa beans into one end of a system and then out the other end of that system comes fully packaged wrapped chocolate bars. There's a person, there's a a craftsman or craftswoman at you know every step of the way. So we have systems in place where maybe we're we're roasting a particular bean and we have we have a good idea of what that roast profile is. So, you know, you could just set a timer and walk away, but instead of doing that, we're there along the way and we're smelling it and we're listening to it and we're tasting it. So it may be a few minutes more, it may be a few minutes less roasting. And this the same goes for you know every one of those processes, especially conching, where we do have set times and temperatures and airflow and all of that stuff. But you know, we we may tweak it from batch to batch. Conching is one of the last steps in the in chocolate manufacturing. What it's doing is it's making sure all of those little particles of cocoa and sugar and maybe milk powder, if it's a milk chocolate, are you know smoothed out and evenly coated with cocoa butter. Um, it's also making sure that potentially any any remaining moisture evaporates out, and it's also pulling out some volatile compounds, acidity and some astringency.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

Where do you primarily source your cocoa beans from?

SPEAKER_02 10:48

So we we use a lot of cacao from the Dominican Republic. We're using a lot of beans from the Oco Caribe Cooperative. Uh it's just a good solid cacao. You know, it's fruity, it's it's a little bit floral, it's acidic. Um, and you know, sometimes when we roast it a little bit darker, it's got like a good base chocolate flavor. Um, so that's that's one that we use in a lot of different bars. Some blended bars, some flavored bars. We use that one a lot. We also use a lot of beans from Peru, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Ecuador, mostly Central, South America, and the Caribbean right now.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Your chocolate isn't certified, right? Can you explain why?

SPEAKER_02 11:27

You know, it's it's not that we wouldn't necessarily like to have some of our chocolates certified. And we and we certainly do use a lot of um certified organic cacao and all of the cane sugar that we use is certified organic, but we haven't gone the extra step and had our facility certified. There are some beans that we use that aren't certified organic, but you know, because we know where those beans are coming from and we know that they're grown to or exceeding organic certification standards, we're we're happy to use them anyway. So just so long as we know where they're coming from, um, we're okay with that. And and when we explain that to our customers, generally, even if they're looking for something that's strictly organic, they'll get behind it too.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

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SPEAKER_01 12:54

So I'd like to talk a little bit about your packaging. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about the process around how you developed your logo and this particular way of expressing who who you are.

SPEAKER_02 13:06

We wanted something bold. The biggest idea was that you know, when you walk into a store and there's a whole shelf full of chocolate bars that, you know, ours would jump off the shelf and you and you'd see it from across the room and say, what is that? And then you'd be drawn to it, and you know, you'd want to walk up to it, and then you'd pick it up and and see what it was. So it's pretty bold. You know, there's some there's some bright colors, not too many colors. So you can you can quickly identify which one of our bars is which by just which color is jumping out at you.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

Yeah, it is very reachable.

SPEAKER_02 13:39

Yeah, yeah. Um, well, just wait, wait a few months or a year, and you'll probably see something entirely different because we're we're always changing and and evolving.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

What do you wish chocolate lovers better understood about chocolate and chocolate making?

SPEAKER_02 13:55

There's a lot of work that goes into it. And and also that you know, chocolate's a food, it's not a candy, and and that it's an agricultural product, and you can dive into it as much as you want and taste different origins and percentages and you know, from different makers, and and everything is going to be completely different. But the way I look at chocolate is it should be fun. I mean, you know, we all focus on making, you know, really extraordinary chocolate, but you know, I I never want to let it get out of my grasp that like it it's supposed to be fun. It's chocolate.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

I love that. I mean, I think about the fact that like this is something that many of us have loved for a long time. Like since childhood, that's where that fun connection is forged. We celebrate with chocolate, and I mean this is a little bit of a tangent, but you're a new dad. And I I wondered if anything about like seeing your daughter has changed the way you look at chocolate or you create your bars.

SPEAKER_02 14:55

No, you know, if if anything, it's sort of reinforced the way I look at making chocolate and confections because a lot of the confections that I make are sort of, you know, they're they're not really crazy inventive new flavors. Um, a lot of it is what I sort of call like refined simplicity. So we'll so we'll take like really classic flavor combinations and find ways to like reinterpret it and and make it new. And that's that's generally how I how I look at confectionery work. On the other hand, of course, like we do we do some some relatively interesting flavors. And you know, if if I could make you know the perfect well, there is there is no perfect Snicker bars other than a Snickers bar, but we'll take those those flavors and sort of you know reinvent it into something a little bit different.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

And you have been recognized for it in a number of different awards. You know, you are reinventing the classics, and I think that connection is one that it takes us back.

SPEAKER_02 15:49

Yeah, it's it's it's such a nostalgia thing for me. And you know, I I hope my daughter gets to feel the same way about that.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

And at the same time, you're innovating. I've been waiting to try this bar that we're gonna be tasting today. It's the Corazón de Dahlia, the milk chocolate quinoa crunch bar, limited edition. I'd love for you to tell us a story behind it while I start to open it up.

SPEAKER_02 16:14

Uh the the story begins with with my wife, Dahlia. Um, she she spent a lot of time living and volunteering in in Peru, uh, in Cusco up in the Andes. I think the first time she was there, she was 18, and she was living with uh with a host family and um doing some volunteer work and teaching, and she she wound up working on a lot of projects. Um, and then uh she and her host mother decided that they wanted to start their own project. So they started a small community development center uh about 30 minutes outside of Cusco in a little town called Saya. They welcome kids every day. There's homework help and um a bunch of services available to them. And um that project's now in its sixth year. I've been to Peru many times and absolutely love it there, and have fallen in love with the people and and the Andes. And and we wanted some way to combine uh her efforts uh in the nonprofit uh with the chocolate business's efforts. So uh so we developed this chocolate bar. It's basically a fundraiser. We only made one batch, there are only 3,500 bars available, and all of the proceeds are going directly to uh Corazon Dedalia.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

And Corazon, of course, means heart. This is a gorgeous bar. I love the the pink hues on the packaging, and I've opened it up. Gosh, the the aroma of maracuya, which is passion fruit.

SPEAKER_02 17:49

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

This is a beautiful bar. Tell me a little bit about what I'm seeing on the back.

SPEAKER_02 17:56

Well, to start, it's it's a 58% dark milk chocolate, and we we kind of wanted to throw a bunch of Peruvian flavors at it in a way that makes sense, though. The the first flavor, aside from the milk chocolate, is uh there's a little bit of pisco in it. So, in the same way that we use bourbon to flavor our um Hudson Valley Bourbon bar, we infuse the nibs with um pisco. Pisco is a great brandy. Pisco sours, I think is like the national drink of Peru. It's one of the greatest cocktails out there. So there's a slight hint of pisco in the in the cacao, and then we make it into a 58% dark milk chocolate. Uh there's puffed quinoa in it, and then um lime zest, salt from maras in Peru, and maricuya, passion fruit.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

Wow. I've taken my first bite. It's all those things. Tell me how how do you work on proportions? Now I've got my mouth full, but like how do you know how much lime salt is the right amount of lime salt?

SPEAKER_02 19:06

It's it's just a lot of trial and error. It's funny. I I taste these things in my head well before we ever make them. So I'm I'm thinking about the the flavor combinations and how they would go together. And I decided that these are the flavors that we're going to use because it makes sense to me. Uh, but it's really not until we have all of the components and we put it together and we temper and mold a bar that we actually get to taste it. You know, it worked out really well. I'm super happy with this bar. Uh, figuring out the right proportion of passion fruit and salt and lime, that was that was a little bit more difficult because passion fruit is such a dominant flavor. Um, but that's kind of nice because when it when it hits your tongue, you get that giant burst of the tartness of the passion fruit, but it disappears almost immediately. And then you've got the salt and the lime, and then the chocolate starts to melt.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

You forced me to take another piece. I had to taste it all over again. Exactly. And it's that sequential release of all these flavors. What else do you want to tell us since my mouth is full?

SPEAKER_02 20:14

Well, it was, I mean, it was sort of an experiment because we're only selling this retail in our stores and through our online store because all of the proceeds are going to this nonprofit. And we didn't, you know, we didn't want to lose any of those potential dollars by selling it wholesale. Uh, but what's really great is there are a few of our most valued wholesale customers who have decided to carry it anyway and not take any markup from it. So it's it's really it's really interesting and something we haven't tried before. So uh it's it's likely that this you know may be a good way to um think up and create delicious chocolates and also support a good cause. So um so I'm I'm excited about it.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

That's awesome. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 21:04

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 21:06

Let's shift gears a little bit. We've talked about your chocolate. What's your favorite bar, your current favorite, made by another maker or manufacturer?

SPEAKER_02 21:16

Oh, you know what I you know what I've been snacking on a lot is the the Maison Maru uh coconut milk bar. After the big chocolate show in New York last year, uh we we bought all of their remaining bars after the show. Well, we I should back up and say that um we we sell other makers' products in our in our Woodstock store. So we have a really nice curated library of other other chocolates in our store. So we bought those bars for that purpose, but um I've been eating most of them. No, that I think I think that one's really special because I I absolutely love everything that Maru does. And and they're making this coconut milk bar that you know it's not just using coconut as a substitute for milk. Um, it's meant to be a flavor. So it's just this burst of coconut. I don't know how they do it, but it's it's really one of my favorite bars right now.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

What advice would you give to new makers? There are there's such a proliferation now, and I know they could benefit from your insights.

SPEAKER_02 22:23

To be honest, I I don't know because I I don't know if I am qualified to give good advice only because even though we've grown and we're, you know, we're semi-well recognized in the in the craft chocolate world, um, I honestly still feel like we're making it up as we go along. So I don't know. I I mean the best thing I can say is like read literally everything you can find about chocolate, taste everyone else's chocolate, and then try to decide what kind of chocolate you like and and make that. Because the the chocolate that we make at fruition, it's it's really chocolate that I want to eat myself. And we we lucked out that other people have the same palate that I do, I guess. I I don't I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

That is such a humble answer coming from someone who won Best and Show at the International Chocolate Awards. And you know, it's interesting because so many talented makers I've I've spoken to over the years across foods often come back to this idea of I made something I would love. And then from there everything kind of forms. Like that's the touchstone, which is pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_02 23:32

Yeah, yeah. I mean you have to really truly be behind what you're making yourself.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

Do you eat a lot of your own chocolates?

SPEAKER_02 23:40

Um, no, I don't. I I really don't. I mean, if of course I taste everything and I develop everything, and I, you know, I check in on every batch and taste everything. Um, the only chocolate of ours that I eat with any regularities are 100% unsweetened chocolate. I mean, I I know it sounds bizarre coming from somebody who makes chocolate and and candy for a living, but I don't I don't really like sweet things and I don't eat a lot of sweet things.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

Again, I actually think that's reflected because you never go crazy with the sugar in all the bars I've ever tried from you. It's never been like sugar hits you over the head. It's always something more interesting. So, well, is there anything else you'd like to add?

SPEAKER_02 24:19

Uh no, I don't I don't know. This this has been great.

SPEAKER_01 24:23

Thank you, Brian.

SPEAKER_02 24:24

You're welcome.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

Podcast listeners, you can learn more about Fruition Chocolate on their website, TasteFruition.com. And use the code SLOMELT to get a discount off any order. You can also order the Maker Series tasting pack, featuring every bar we'll be tasting in this series, exclusively through chocolopoulos.com. Check our website, slowmelt.com, for all details, dates of promotion, and discount information. You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at Slow Melt. The Slow Melt Maker series is mixed and produced by Katie Ranky with guidance from John Corey Campbell, and written and edited by me, Summer Safety, with support from Sasha Woodruff. Our title track Soldier is written and performed by the Slack group. If you like what you're hearing, please tell your friends, consider giving us a review or a donation, and subscribe through your favorite podcast app. ChacoLove and thanks for all your support.