After the first bite of Marie & Frères chocolate, it hits you: This could be love.

It begins with the intense dark chocolate itself. Tucked in simple packaging, it lacks all the usual pomp of a foiled bar or a heart-shaped truffle box. The taste is rich yet natural. Indulgent yet earthy.

Owner Marie-Françoise Barnhart then explains that this particular chocolate once grew as a beautiful yellow cacao pod in a dense South American rainforest. A local farmer picked it by hand and carted it out of the forest with the help of a donkey.

The cacao beans were fermented and dried on rooftops under the Brazilian sun, then sent to Salvador, where they are touched only by organic ingredients. The minimally processed chocolate that resulted still had the delicate flavor of the original beans.

“It’s a labor of love,” Barnhart says of her chocolate.

Barnhart has been selling chocolate in South Lake Union since the fall of 2009, but back then she carried the Claudio Corallo brand. In late 2010, she began to look for a new type of product that was organic, single-sourced and beyond fair trade. She wanted to find chocolate with a story.

She identified a type of cacao bean in Brazil’s rapidly disappearing Mata Atlantica rainforest that was rich in antioxidants and bold in flavor. She began partnering with a fifth-generation cacao farmer near Salvador whose harvesting techniques help preserve the forest canopy and the rich biodiversity within it.

“The result is wonderful,” she says, pointing to the displays of chocolate squares and truffles in her shop. “But what comes before that it is so important.”

Barnhart, a French native who has a background in both marketing and education, is a passionate foodie who loves great chocolate. It has been that way as long as she can remember.

When other children ate gobs of Cadbury eggs or Hershey’s bars for Easter, her parents would give her a single chocolate egg from the local artisan chocolatier. When Barnhart moved to the U.S. years later, she would satisfy her craving for quality chocolate by driving a half hour to a chef’s supply store, where she would buy bricks of pastry chocolate.

Now Barnhart is tapping into customers’ growing desire to connect to their food sources with her plant-to-bar philosophy. Barnhart likens the process to a wine maker whose involvement starts with planting grapes on a vineyard.

“More and more people want to know what they are buying. They want to know, ‘where does it come from?’” she says.

As Valentine’s Day nears, Barnhart fills her store with divine edibles for every budget. Her passion-fruit truffles are a vibrant mix of tart and sweet, and her rave-inducing chocolate macarons are light as air on the outside and filled with a devilishly decadent ganache. Her mini bars, which come plain or studded with fresh coconut or organic candied orange peel, are a perfect gift for someone special.

“Chocolate reminds people of fond memories,” she says. “It is also something that is very pretty and very sexy.”

Although the chocolate will make you swoon, Marie & Frères is about more than just selling treats – it’s about connecting people to the source of their food and celebrating the results.

“There is a great story here,” Barnhart says.

Posted by DiscoverSLU on Feb. 8
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