Allergens, Ingredients, and Our Process

We often get asked about allergens, ingredients, and how we make our chocolate. This page is here to help you better understand what goes into our chocolate, and how our factory operates, so you can make informed decisions about whether our chocolate is a good fit for yourself or your family.

Key Points

• We do not use dairy, tree nuts, peanuts, or gluten as ingredients in our chocolate.
• Everything we sell is made at our small factory in Bozeman, Montana.
• We do not produce chocolate on shared equipment, and we do not rent our facility or equipment to other makers to use.
• We are not a certified allergen-free facility, so we cannot guarantee zero cross-contact risk.

The rest of this blog post explains why that is and shares how our supply chain and chocolate factory works. If you ever have questions, we’re always happy to help – feel free to reach out to us directly here and we will get right back to you.

Our Ingredients

We make two-ingredient chocolate from just cacao and organic sugar.

About 75% of the cacao we buy is certified organic. If you see “organic cacao” on our label, that means the product only contains certified organic cacao. If you just see “cacao” on the label, the bar uses cacao that is not certified organic. All of our sugar, both cane sugar and maple sugar, is certified organic.

We sometimes add ingredients to this two-ingredient chocolate base. These additions are called “inclusions.” We use lots of different kinds of inclusions — coffee, chai, marigold petals, smoked salt, and more — but we do not use dairy, tree nuts, peanuts, or gluten as inclusions. Our strong preference is to use organic inclusions, and we do this when it is possible and practical. If you see an inclusion noted as "organic" on our label, it means the inclusion is certified organic.

Our Factory

Everything we sell is made at our small factory in Bozeman, Montana.

We do not produce chocolate on shared equipment at a co-manufacturer, and we do not rent our equipment or production facility to other companies or makers.

What We Cannot Guarantee

We take this topic seriously and spend time thinking about the details of our supply chain and how our factory works. And because of that, we cannot guarantee zero cross-contact with allergens. This is for a few important reasons:

• The ingredients that we purchase may be produced in facilities that also process allergens. For example, we buy cacao from Guatemala and we cannot guarantee that the cacao we buy has never been exposed to macadamia nuts (a nut grown commercially in Guatemala) in a warehouse, on a truck, or on a boat to the United States. We work with very high-quality providers who, like us, are passionate about quality, so this cross-contact risk is low but it is not zero.
• We occasionally purchase used equipment for the factory. Some of this equipment may have previously been used to process dairy, tree nuts, peanuts, gluten, or other allergens. Before any used equipment enters production in our kitchen, we run it through a cleaning process that includes scraping, washing, rinsing, sanitizing, and running a purge batch before our production begins. We take this process seriously, but like the example above, the cross-contact risk to allergens from this process is low but not zero.
• We are not a certified allergen-free facility. It is expensive to maintain these kinds of third-party certifications, both in dollars and in time. While we are not certified allergen-free, we do invest time and money into doing the processes detailed above to a high standard that allows lots of people to enjoy our chocolate. But our chocolate is not the right fit for everyone.

The key takeaway is this: Because of everything listed above, we are probably not the right fit for people with severe or life-threatening food allergies. But everyone has their own risk tolerance, and we wanted to share this information so that you can determine whether our process and supply chain is a good fit for you or a family member.

We are committed to transparency, thoughtful sourcing, and making chocolate with integrity, so if there’s anything you’re wondering about please don’t hesitate to reach out! We’re always happy to answer questions and help however we can.