Local Flavour

When looking for the inspiration for this week’s blog, we didn’t have to look very far! In fact, we just had to look across the river to Wakefield and we were able to spy Olivia Chocolat, Canada’s newest, most innovative and exciting small-batch chocolatier. Started in December 2008, on the birth of a new year, Olivia Chocolat is owned and operated by the head chocolatier, David, and named for his daughter, also as old (or rather as young!) as the company herself!

Olivia Chocolat focuses exclusively on making dark chocolate bars using a bean to bar process. “Bean to bar” is the term given to any chocolate manufacturer who takes the raw cocoa beans and works with them all the way through to the final product you see displayed on our shelves. Surprisingly, this is rare in the chocolate world, but it has many distinct advantages, such as being able to know your chocolate intimately, having smelled, tasted and felt it from the start to the end. Olivia Chocolat, for this reason, is able to exact more control and skill in working with their recipes, perfecting a dark chocolate nearly devoid of any of the bitter qualities often associated with high cocoa, zero milk solids chocolate. In their 50g and 100g bars of 76%, 85%, Almond, Touch of Maple and Maple Flakes, the care and love is evident.

This care doesn’t just stop with the products they produce. Olivia Chocolat is fair trade, holds EcoCert organic certification and puts sustainability at the top of its priority list, taking their five questions into consideration with each decision (see the Sustainable Living section on their website for those five questions!).

If you’re not already excited about learning more about Olivia Chocolat, produced with Criollo and Trinitario beans from the Caribbean and made in Ottawa’s back yard, then this might help: David and Olivia Chocolat will be at The Candy Store this upcoming Saturday, June 20th doing an in-store tasting of their amazing chocolate! That’s right, from 1:00PM until about 4:00PM you’ll be able to drop in and have a taste and chat with these fine people while learning all about their chocolate….and maybe even pick up a bar or two (don’t forget about Dad – Father’s Day is Sunday!).

posted by The Candy Store @ 1:24 PM