Academy of Chocolate Awards 2024

Academy of Chocolate Awards 2024

We recently found out that our 70% dark chocolate made from Peruvian cacao received Silver in the 2024 Academy of Chocolate Awards in London, England.

The Academy of Chocolate Awards is one of the big awards held around the world each year, and in 2024 the Academy received 1,400 submissions from chocolate makers on six different continents. Here's what the judges said about our entry, which made us blush a bit:

"This chocolate offers a unique and captivating flavour profile, with bright fragrance and fruitiness followed by smooth creaminess. The melt is superb, and the experience evolves as new flavours develop throughout, with a lasting finish. It begins with sweet dried fruit notes, followed by gentle citrus, and finishes with a cocoa aftertaste that lingers. The thin bar ensures a smooth melt, highlighting its origins and reflecting a well-balanced, enjoyable creation."

Our single-origin Peru chocolate shared Silver in the category of “Plain Dark Chocolate, Bean-to-Bar” with 85 other chocolates from around the world, while 13 chocolates received Gold and 127 Received Bronze. The chart below shows where the 86 Silver and 13 Gold-winning submissions were made. As you can see, North American craft chocolate makers had a good showing in this year’s awards!

The judges for these awards are folks from the chocolate industry, the culinary arts, and journalists. The judges assign a rating of excellent, good, average, poor, or very poor across six different attributes: texture, formulation, taste, execution, mouthfeel, and aftertaste.

When we sent in our single-origin Peru chocolate back in September, it was this critique and feedback that we were most interested in - and expecting. So it was both a surprise and an honor to get notified that they liked what we made enough to give it a Silver this year.

This feels pretty exciting for our little chocolate company in Bozeman, and it’s a bit wild to see our name on the award list alongside makers we look up to from all corners of the chocolate-making world.

A few big big THANK YOUs

Thank you to all the folks at Ucayali River Cacao in Pucallpa, Peru who grew and fermented this awesome cacao during the 2022 growing season. The work of cacao farmers and fermenters is a huge piece of the chocolate-making process, and this award highlights the quality of cacao they are growing in the upper-Amazon basin of Peru. Also a big thank you to Gino at Meridian Cacao for connecting us with this cacao.

Thank you to Pam Williams and all the instructors at the Ecole Chocolat Professional School of Chocolate Arts for showing us the chocolate-making ropes and giving us the foundational knowledge, resources, and inspiration to make bean-to-bar chocolate in a warehouse in Bozeman.

Thank you to our good friends Meesh and Stacy for seeing something special in the chocolate that we were making from Ucayali River Cacao last spring, and giving us the stoke to keep refining the recipe.

Thank you to Natalie and Amelia at Treeline Coffee Roasters for inviting us to roast cacao in one of their coffee roasters last Spring. That first roasting session led to a lot of good things, including us renting a warehouse with a coffee roaster in it.

Thank you to our good friend Joe and the folks down at FedEx who said “we got you” when I showed up with a box of chocolate and zero idea how U.K. customs worked and asked if the chocolate could be in London in 48 hours.

And thank you to everyone who has tried our chocolate, given us feedback, signed up for a chocolate subscription, or connected with us about chocolate in some way. Your support and interest has really meant a lot over the last year and made it possible for us to send chocolate from Bozeman to London for review and feedback.

We have some celebrating to do around this topic in the coming days and weeks, and we hope you will join us either in person or in spirit.

Thank you for reading this , and for being part of what we have cooking down at the warehouse on Bozeman’s east side.

Sincerely,

Logan & Lauren

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