Materials Matter: Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate

“Operating a wood shop and a chocolate factory has always been very similar in our eyes,” says Adam. “In a woodshop, you interact with the machinery to transform a rough sawn board into a beautiful piece of furniture. The tools allow you to repeat a step in the process with extreme precision time and time again. The machinery allows you to produce a product with consistent quality in a reasonable amount of time. In the chocolate factory it is much the same. We transform raw, rustic cocoa beans into a delicious chocolate bar. The equipment we use allows us to precisely control the process with high degree of consistency, at the same time giving us the ability to put our artistic stamp on our products.”

Every chocolate bar in Dick Taylors' single origin collection is crafted with only two ingredients; cane sugar and finely sourced cacao. Dustin states, “Cocoa trade has a long history of terrible labor practices, and poor wages that have kept small shareholder farmers in poverty for centuries. It is important to us to do what small part we can to make a real difference in the lives of the farmers that we buy cocoa from.”

There is, however, a third ingredient to all of this…their packaging. “For us, quality ingredients are everything,” Dustin continues. “We can buy great cacao and make terrible chocolate out of it (we have done that plenty), but you will never make something great out of garbage. The same goes for packaging. The first thing we ever selected in our packaging was paper stock, it is the raw ingredient.”

All packaging for Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate bars are printed with a combination of offset and letterpress on Mohawk Via Linen Natural 100 Cover. The subtle crosshatched texture and the cream color is the perfect solution to convey the elegance of their brand.  

“Consumers can feel the quality by just picking up a bar. Our hope is that people will buy a bar and be able to taste and feel the hard work and craftsmanship we put into every aspect of making our chocolate.”

So, what’s next for Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate?
“More and more chocolate! We are in the process of restoring an old building from the 1800s to be our new factory location on the waterfront in the center of Old Town. And we’re developing new products in new categories with all new packaging.”