Above: Elaine Read and her husband, Matt Weyandt, make Xocolatl chocolate bars; photos by Joe Earle
At Chamblerlain’s Chocolates, the walls speak for themselves. Little sayings are painted here and there: “Chocolate won’t solve anything, but it’s a start.” “All you need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.” “Chocolate calories don’t count.”
And the chocolate philosophy doesn’t stop there. M.J.—“It’s for Melinda Jean,” she said, “but only my daddy calls me that.”—O’Neill, owns and runs the Roswell chocolate company with her husband, Brian.
One recent afternoon, as M.J. boxed white chocolates molded to look like peaches and dogwood flowers for delivery to an engagement party that evening, the T-shirt beneath her apron proclaimed, “Chocolate is a vegetable.” On the back: “Eat your vegetables.”
The O’Neills took over Chamberlain’s more than four years ago. M.J. says the business is about three decades old and is one of Atlanta’s oldest continuing chocolate shops. It’s had five owners—none of them named Chamberlain, M.J. said. The business’ original owners called it Chamberlain’s because “they thought it was a fancy French name,” she said, and it stuck.
Now, at the new shop, café and factory that they recently settled into a Roswell strip center, the O’Neills turn out confections in thousands of different shapes, from molded quarter-pound chocolate stars to chocolate-covered French-fried onions. Their offerings range from 75-cent chocolate bars to $25-a-pound chocolate truffles.
Brian’s business card identifies him as “the chocolate guy.” M.J.’s card labels her as “chief chocolatier.”
The O’Neills weren’t chocolatiers originally. “We’re both I.T. runaways,” M.J. said. Computer jobs brought them from the Midwest to Atlanta, but after a while, she said, they decided their work required them to spend too much time on the road.
They started looking for a business of their own and found the chocolate shop was for sale. It offered something that appealed to each of them.
“I’m the software side and he’s the hardware side,” she said. “I didn’t want to make carburetors and he didn’t want to paint. This was a happy medium. It’s got a lot of machines for him to play with and a creative side for me.”
Now they turn out confections in one part of their business, and host parties for children and chocolate-making sessions for seniors in another.
“Seniors are fun,” M.J. said. “They’re always happy to be here. They like the hands-on experience we have. They’re very interactive, which is nice.”
There are two types of chocolate makers. Those like the O’Neills buy chocolate in bulk and melt it down to make candies and other chocolate treats. Others, such as Elaine Read and her husband, Matt Weyandt, are in the “bean-to-bar” part of the business. They turn cacao beans into richly flavored chocolate.
Read and Weyandt own Xocolatl (which they pronounce “chock-o-lat-tul”), a company based at Krog Street Market near downtown Atlanta. It’s named for the word that described chocolate to the Aztecs and, which they point out by a happy coincidence, ends in the letters “A-T-L,” a standard designation for their hometown.
Read came late to chocolate. “I didn’t like chocolate growing up,” she said. “To me, it was always too sweet. I always went for apple pie.”
That changed when the couple lived in Costa Rica. On their first trip to the Central American country, they were backpacking refugees from political campaigns in the U.S., Read said.
A few years later, they returned, taking their kids with them, and lived for about eight months in the jungle near the beach. “We had a wooden house, a two-bedroom house, about 250 square feet,” Read said. “We had a toddler and a baby. Everything was always wet. We were in the rainforest.”
While there, they discovered local farmers markets and “a gaggle” of local farmers who were producing chocolate from cacao seeds. Some were American ex-pats like them, she said.
It was a revelation. “When I was a kid, my family had gone to the Hershey factory in Pennsylvania,” she said. “I thought chocolate was sort of man-made. I had no idea [it came] from the seed of a fruit.”
After they returned to Atlanta, they made chocolate as hobbyists, Read said. Then they sold bars at community festivals. They set up their full-time shop in the Krog Street Market in 2014, just a couple of months after the market opened, she said.
Now they make chocolate from beans imported from Peru and other South American, Central American and African countries and sell their hand-made chocolate bars for $9 or $9.50 apiece, three for $25 or five for $42. The also offer tours and tastings.
“We knew we wanted to get away from desk jobs,” Read said. “My job for 15 years was sitting at a computer and reading emails and writing emails. …We wanted to do something that we made. We wanted to make something.”
Kristen Hard, whose 15-year-old business, Cacao, also makes chocolate directly from cacao beans, expresses an even more ambitious goal. She wants to make the best chocolate in the world.
Before she started her company 15 years ago, Hard was working as a private chef. As a girl, she had always been interested in science and in inventing, she said. “I kind of had this brain where I have a balance with this obsession for science and for art,” she said.
She realized in her early 20s that chocolate came from processing the seeds of a plant, and “it blew my mind. It was like all these dots connected… like the stars aligned.”
When she started Cacao, Hard said, she was among a handful of custom bean-to-bar chocolate makers in the country. Her business has drawn national attention. Notices from magazines such as Travel + Leisure, Food + Wine and Oprah decorate the walls of her office in her northwest Atlanta factory.
Cacao sells $8 chocolate bars and a variety of specialty confections, such as truffles or $21.50 Salame di Cioccolato, which looks like salami, online or through her company’s Buckhead shop or café in Virginia Highland.
Hard said she’s now working to convince cacao farmers to grow rare varieties of the cacao plant and she wants to create a marketplace that would allow farmers to be able to afford to grow those varieties.
“Over the last 100 years, cacao has been bred [to increase] disease resistance and yield,” she said. “They have bred out flavors.”
She said she’s trying to entice farmers to grow heirloom varieties that produce fruit that is sweeter and less bitter. “I’m looking for the rarest, the less than 1 percent, cacao,” Hard said. “It exists. It’s really hard to find.”
At the same time, she said, cacao farmers are aging, so a way must be found to encourage younger people to replace them on the farm.
“I am trying to redefine things so our children and children’s children will have this,” Hard said. “I just feel like there is a way to make a change in this world if you put your mind to it.”
And, while we can, to enjoy a bit of chocolate along the way.
Chocolate Shop & Factory Tours
Chamberlain’s Chocolate Factory
1575 Old Alabama Rd., Roswell 30076
678-728-0100
Their list of events includes Adult Chocolate Making Classes & Senior Field Trips.
Krog Street Market, 99 Krog St., Atlanta 30307
404-604-9642
Visit their website for info on tours and to sign up.
The Shops Buckhead, 3035 Peachtree Rd., Atlanta 30305, 404-228-4023
Virginia Highlands, 1046 N. Highland Ave., Atlanta 30306, 404-892-8202
Cacao Factory, 202 Permalume Pl., Atlanta 30318, 404-221-9090