By Rachael Maddux

Kristen Hard wears a lab coat to work and spends some days hunched over test-tubes, refining combinations of potentially explosive ingredients. But she's no mad scientist—she's an artisan chocolatier. The Atlanta native founded Cacao, her flagship “laboratoire du chocolat,” in the city's blossoming Inman Park neighborhood in 2009, and has since become known as not just the premiere purveyor of bean-to-bar chocolates in the Southeast, but one of few of the US's female bean-to-bar maker and one of the foremost pioneers in artisanal ingredient-sourcing. Meanwhile, her storefront sells smart, delicately crafted truffles in flavors like “Sweet Afternoon” (fig, vanilla, and balsamic reduction) and “Protect” (cardamom and rosemary), plus chocolate barks, gourmet marshmallows, hot chocolate, and other confections.

Occupation: Founder/Chocolate Maker of Cacao Atlanta Chocolate Co.
Location: Atlanta, GA
Age: 32
First Job: I worked in as a barista at age 15
Best Job: Private Chef on a 73 CNB Yacht in the Mediterranean and Caribbean
Greatest Professional Challenge: Taking the risk to start my own business
Salary During Your 20s: It ranged, really—depended on the job.

RM: How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
Kristen Hard: It was the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life, and at the same time the easiest. I love every part of what I do. I spent years working 14-plus hours a day because it is what I love to do and failure is not an option. Work is what I want to do in my free time and work is what I do when I am working.

Do you remember when you first fell in love with chocolate? At what point did you decide to make a career out of it?
I do remember very clearly the moment I fell in love with chocolate. I was working on the yacht and had been collecting batons of local cacao and decided to work with it and try to make truffles. I had to grind it with a mortar and pestle, sieve it, roll it with a rolling pin to get some finer texture, and during this process I felt something come over me. It was clear in that moment that I had fallen in love. Chocolate became an obsession. I wanted to know every detail about it: the history, the nutrition, the mystical stories, how it reached the world, and so on. I decided against law school, moved to and from Italy, declined a job running a chocolate company in Connecticut, and started my own company.

Wait, tell me about working on the yacht—how did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
You are correct indeed, this was a f*&%ing amazing job. I was offered the job by a captain who was friends with the first captain of the first yacht I worked on. We were an amazing team. Working on a yacht as a chef is a dream come true as well as some of the hardest work I have had to do. Imagine waking up each day to the crystal clear blue water and drinking a coffee just before diving in for a morning swim. Being at sea, there is a feeling that nothing in the world can touch you. I always had a sense of peace with everything and always tried to keep a great relationship with mother nature--as when she gets upset, you can really feel it when you are on a boat. One moment you have peace and sunshine and another you have a dark storm that could sink you at any moment. I was lucky to have such an amazing owner and captain because I was allotted the freedom financially and creatively to soar with my inner ambition to manifest dreams with food. There is nothing quite like life on a sailboat.

What did you study in school? 
I studied Philosophy/Pre Law. I love philosophy, I love science, I love the arts, I loved being a leader in school.

How did you balance that interest with your other studies?
Food was what made me happy and brought me away from stress. I worked in restaurants and loved the challenge. The difficulty I had was discovering the true thing that was strong enough to capture all of me. This was and is chocolate.

You started your own business at a really young age. Did you have any mentors along the way?
You know, I really did not have any mentors early on for the business side. I did, however, have a spiritual guide that mentored me in that realm which I saw as very important when in business.

Can you talk more about that? How is your spirituality tied to your work?
I often keep my spirituality quiet in the public eye, but in the factory we are all very much in tune; spirituality is the foundation of the business. I run my business with a balance of heart and mind, and when the difficult questions come up, I rely on my heart to tell me what is right. We approach business with faith and try to shut out fear each day.

What compelled you to take such an active role in sourcing your ingredients?
All along the way, I have felt like I could not completely express myself, having the limited availability of sources for what I was looking for. Cacao beans were nonexistent in the United States in small quantities and of any quality. When I realized the true difficulty in this, I set out to source on my own and now here I am looking at developing my own farm.

Tell me about an especially memorable trip you've taken in the name of chocolate.
I am on a trip now, as I write, that is memorable. I am working with everyone from the Cocoa and Coffee Board to the University Research Center, the local farmers, driving into a jungle 40 minutes deep to harvest one bag of pods equaling 15 pounds of cacao and getting my jeep stuck on a cliff on the way out, having to charter a private plane in the rain because I can't get on standby on the local airline back to my hotel on the other island. All of these trips are memorable in their own way.

What is the most surprising thing you've learned about chocolate so far?
The most surprising thing about chocolate is that people are so disconnected from where it actually comes from, how it is harvested, how it gets to us, the people involved in the farming, and what quality chocolate tastes like.

When you tell people what you do for a living, what's the most common response?
People usually think that I have a little chocolate shop where we make fun truffles from couverture just as all chocolatiers do. When I say that we make chocolate from the bean, usually I get a perplexed look.

What exactly is involved in making chocolate from the bean? Can you give the Cliffs Notes version?
For us, making chocolate from the bean starts on the farm, building relationships and attending to the farmers' desire to help us maintain the maximum quality derived from the genetic makeup of the cocoa bean. From there, we organize over several months to receive a shipment of beans by boat from the place of origin. After making it through customs and FDA, the beans are shipped to our door on pallets in burlap sacks. Once inspected, we begin sorting and roasting, which is a crucial step in the bean flavor. After roasting the beans we send them through a cracker/winnower which separates the husk from the nib (the husk is the bitter shell of the bean). Once the beans are winnowed, we add them to the melangeur with only sugar and grind them until they reach the perfect size for a beautiful feel on the tongue. After the melange is finished, we age the chocolate for up to a week to mellow out the flavor.

Has your work with Cacao changed the way you think about sweets and other food in general? Has immersing yourself in chocolate (not literally of course, but I'm sure you end up covered in it quite often) as a profession altered your enjoyment of it as an eater?
I have been on the chocolate journey for many years now, and each day I learn something new and enjoy chocolate in a new way. I love chocolate just as much as the first day. It is a very special and magical thing to work with and I never lose that appreciation or take it for granted.

What are your dream goals for Cacao? What will you have done for chocolate in five or ten years?
I would like to continue to educate consumers about the world of chocolate at it's most connoisseur level, and at the same time help create some sort of certification process so that the consumer has traceability and authenticity guarantees, while working to help the farmers reap the benefits of producing a quality crop. We will work closely with research teams to help fund and unfold the secrets of cacao.

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