Go beyond Hershey's this Valentine's Day
Haven't bought your Valentine's Day candy yet? Try these Earth-friendly chocolate brands made by small businesses as an alternative to big-name brands.
People send messages of love with cards and flowers — and with chocolates. The candy is synonymous with Valentine’s Day. This year, why not show your love for both your sweetheart and Planet Earth by giving Earth-friendly chocolate?
I recently offered samples of seven chocolates to shoppers at MOON Co-op Market. Each of the bars contained around 70% cacao beans and were made with organic and Fair Trade ingredients. In contrast, a Hershey’s Bar is around 11% cacao, meaning 89% is sugar, milk, milk stabilizers, and various unspecified “artificial” ingredients.
First in alphabetical order is Chocolove. Its founder and owner Timothy Moley started the company in 1995 in Boulder, Colorado, after a stint working as a USAID volunteer in an Indonesia cocoa field. Inside each wrapper is a poem, such as “Ask Me No More” by Thomas Carew inside the 70% bar.
Endangered Species Chocolate is the most local of the seven options featured here. Although founded in Talent, Oregon in 1993, the company moved its operations to Indianapolis in 2005. Each wrapper illustrates an endangered species that the company helps to protect with some of its profits.
Equal Exchange is a producer-owned co-op founded in Massachusetts in 1986 by Jonathan Rosenthal, Michael Rozyne and Rink Dickinson, all former managers of food co-ops (like MOON) in New England. Equal Exchange co-op in turn sources its cacao beans from grower-owned co-ops in Latin America.
Hu Chocolate was started in 2013 by Jordan Brown, Jason Karp and Jessica Karp to supply their paleo restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village that they had opened a year earlier. In 2020, during the COVID pandemic, they closed the restaurant and focused on making chocolate.
These four chocolates are relatively similar to each other. The principal difference among them is how the 70% cacao is made less bitter. Hu uses organic unrefined coconut sugar, whereas the other three use organic cane sugar. Endangered Species and Equal Exchange contain organic fair trade vanilla, which also reduces the bitterness.
The other three bars we sampled are more distinctive. Lily’s and Red Delight do not sweeten with sugar. Lily’s, founded in 2010 by Cynthia Tice and Chuck Genuarde in Philadelphia, is sweetened with stevia, which is extracted from the leaves of the Stevia rebaudiana plant, native to Brazil and Paraguay.
Red Delight, which is produced in Latvia, has been imported to the United States only since 2019. Its two sweeteners are maltitol (produced from corn syrup) and erythritol (produced from fermented yeast).
Finally, Taza Chocolate, founded by Alex Whitmore and Kathleen Fulton in 2005 in Somerville, Massachusetts, is sold in disc-shaped bars instead of rectangular bars. Taza’s organic cocoa beans are ground using granite-carved stones, a process that Whitmore learned as an apprentice in Mexico. This minimal processing results in a rustic gritty texture that is quite different from the more familiar rectangular chocolate bars made with cocoa beans creamed into a smooth butter.
Hu, Lily’s and Taza rose to the top of the favorites list during this year’s sampling. Red Delight did get one first-place vote. In previous years, Chocolove and Equal Exchange have finished at the top. The grittiness of stone-milled Taza and the sugar-substitute in Lily’s appeal to some and not to others.
No matter which of the seven you choose, your loved ones will thank you for giving Earth-friendly chocolate made with organic and Fair Trade ingredients.
James Rubenstein is president of the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press and professor emeritus of geography at Miami University.
