About Ruth Kennison

I’m a chocolatier, a chocolate educator, a chocolate consultant, a professional chocolate taster and a judge at international chocolate events. Seeing a pattern here? I also teach bean-to-bar chocolate making at The Gourmandise School in Santa Monica, California, where I founded The Santa Monica Chocolate Society.

My love for chocolate began in Boston, working in high school at a candy shop called Sweet Stuff, where I could eat unlimited amounts of chocolate. After college at Northwestern and several careers—television production, tour guiding, professional organizing—I found my way back to my first love. My chocolate journey took off at the French Pastry School at the Callebaut Chocolate Academy in Chicago, where I trained to make bonbons and chocolate bars. But it took a mind-blowing trip to Paris with my travel-writer husband and our son, and meeting chocolate expert Chloé Doutre-Roussel, to make chocolate my life. She talked about the farmer and the cacao bean and “the cacao belt” around the equator where chocolate is born.

It was a revelation. I knew about chocolate but did I know about chocolate? That led to trips to origin in places like Chiapas and Tabasco, Mexico, and to Ecuador and Brazil, to see where our chocolate comes from, and to meet the passionate, hard-working people harvesting cacao. Witnessing the process from bean-to-bar opened my eyes to the story of chocolate-making—its complicated history and legacy, the human rights concerns we all should be aware of, and the important ingredients that separate industrial chocolate from fine-flavored craft chocolate.

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