For this blog post I wanted to write about my experience at Meatless Monday! I had never been to to Marty’s place and didn’t know what to expect. They had set up a presentation in the corner of the corner of the eating area with Bethany Nunn, chocolatier as the main speaker. Before she spoke a couple guest speakers spoke of upcoming events and sustainability opportunities. I chose this presentation to go to because I have honestly loved chocolate and candy all my life and always have had interest in the process of making good, real ingredient sweets. When Bethany stood to speak I became even more excited, she was a tall, beautiful young women who also loved sweets and creativity just like me. Originally I imagined a women in her 60’s coming to talk about chocolate in possibly a boring way but in reality it was a women very relatable to me. She first started out talking about what drove her towards chocolatier and how it evolved into actually making the chocolate herself in house. Bethany went on to tell the story of how chocolate is made step by step from receiving the cocoa bean from sustainable farms and then roasting them, de shelling them, and then grinding down the cacao down to then be able to add ingredients to make it a decadent chocolate. Being a chocolatier means just adding the ingredients to the cacao to make unique chocolate. She took it a step further by processing the raw ingredients herself. She spoke of how someday she hope to be able to grow the cocoa locally to become totally self sustaining. The weather conditions just aren’t right to be successful at the moment. Green houses may be her solution to that problem.

Something else that Bethany does different than other chocolate makers is she creates a no waste zone with her work. When making chocolate you don’t use the whole bean but just a small amount, so to be innovative she used the sort of shell or husk to produce and sell her own tea. I thought this was a wonderful idea, not only is she using eco friendly methods but she is also making pure profit off of this new invention using the “unwanted” part of the cocoa bean.

Throughout the presentation She passed out things to try including the roasted cacao beans (which were pretty disgusting) as well as pure, no sugar added chocolate (also pretty gross) and then a couple of flavors of her chocolate. She explained how sensitive chocolates are to their surroundings and how a piece of lavender chocolate that I just ate was only flavored by sitting in a room next to the lavender flower for a certain amount of time. That was so interesting to me because it was so full of flavor. I was really glad I went to this talk for it ended up being much more exciting and interesting than I had thought. She showed that with not much extra effort one can really make a business sustainable and friendly to our planet, we need more business owners like Bethany.