K’ul Chocolate is coming to Molly Moon’s!

Head Chef Iris Estell has been recipe testing for months, meticulously experimenting with different brands of chocolate, various percentages, and a collection of flavor profiles to narrow down the perfect chocolate for molly moon’s. The result is conscientiously made in Bellingham by K’ul Chocolate, molly moon’s new chocolate supplier. Making organic chocolate with a unique taste — buttery, delightfully earthy, and somewhat floral — is only one part of K’ul’s mission to create a positive impact.

“Their vision for the work that they’re doing is really based around using chocolate as a means to improve the quality of life in the areas where it’s from,” Estell said. “I really try not to just say cool a lot because it feels like a pun, but it is cool.”

Paul Newman and Ari Lee-Newman, founders of K’ul Chocolate, started researching for their social enterprise business by visiting producers in the Dominican Republic to see how the partnerships could work. There, they fell in love with a small group of passionate women producing chocolate.

“It was just community,” Newman said. “These women were holding their communities together. It was a testament to the strength and resilience, what could happen if women were more empowered in origin.”

The couple postponed the launch of their own business to help the women get organic certification for their business. Since then, sourcing has become the cornerstone of K’ul, and they have direct-trade relationships with 24 certified organic women’s cooperatives.

“Many, many producers are below the poverty line,” Newman said. “You might see a lot of craft chocolate makers making claims that they are making impact. They might have fantastic marketing and great imagery, but really at the end of the day, what generates true economic impact at origin is buying volumes of cocoa at a price high above the living wage.”

During their first year of sourcing cocoa, Newman talked to four producers who all had a fair-trade label. Three producers said they hadn’t seen their fair-trade premiums in over three years.

“What happened is the people that were selling the cocoa, they weren’t distributing those premiums out to the farmers,” Newman said. “The reality is many companies that also use that label, are still buying through an intermediary, so they don’t know who they’re buying from.”

Aside from supporting the communities the beans come from, having those direct-trade partnerships also gives K’ul a lot more control over their products. K’ul imports sacks, cuts the bags, and roasts the beans, all in their Bellingham factory. They use a process involving a grid path, where they take a cocoa bean and roast it at a single temperature for a certain amount of time. Every two minutes, they pull the cocoa bean out and let it cool, revealing a plethora of different flavors.

“We nurture, we’re monitoring and we’re controlling every single step of the process. Whereas, in most instances, chocolate is pre-purchased and then you melt it down,” Newman said.

molly moon’s is switching to K’ul after a 15-year purchasing relationship with Theo Chocolate. What used to be a small, local, chocolate manufacturer was recently purchased by American Licorice Company, which owns Red Vines and SourPunch, among other large candy brands.

“They’re a mega-corporation and they don’t actually do the production of the products that they sell. They own the rights to those products and pay co-packers to do the actual production,” Estell said. “It just didn’t feel like we were confident that they would continue to share the same values that molly moon’s has around sustainability, environmental stewardship, and community building.”

The factory that molly moon’s received Theo chocolate from in Fremont shut down last August, meaning that the chocolate would have to travel greater lengths, causing more shipping time and a larger environmental impact.

Molly Moon Nietzel says there’s no one reason she loves K’ul. Being minimally shipped, the relationships the founders have made with women’s farming cooperatives, their direct trade purchasing process, and the carefully roasted flavors of their chocolate are all parts of a fantastic package deal.

“Theo is an older company now. The amazing founders had a very similar dream to the K’ul owners when they started,” Neitzel said. “For anybody who cares about being in values alignment with the things you put in your body and the way you spend your money, you couldn’t be happier with a chocolate purchase than K’ul.”

In the process of researching K’ul, Neitzel learned that PCC Community Markets uses K’ul chocolate for their branded chocolate bars and chocolate chips, which was a striking and convincing endorsement.

“That was like, deal, we should do this,” Neitzel said. “PCC, we are in such alignment about how they source ingredients, what they will and will not have, they’re very strict. They have a way bigger team than molly moon’s to vet vendors.”

Steve Hall, Central Kitchen Manager at PCC, says it’s not uncommon to be approached by a company and immediately turn down products that don’t meet PCC standards.

“We have a team that handles the ingredient standards because there’s a lot to remember and a number of things that we allow as ingredients that to the untrained eye you would think, oh that’s probably not allowed,” Hall said. “These people are experts in PCC’s quality standards from fair labor to origin and supply chain to ensure honest products.”

Hall has also found that K’ul is accessible and responsive, a practicality Estell has noticed as well.

“They’ve been very accommodating and willing to meet us on a lot of things, and that actually doesn’t happen a ton in the food ingredient world,” Estell said. “They have a lot of options. We can buy a wider variety of different types of chocolate, and they are eager to try new things.”

K’ul has similar enthusiasm towards their involvement with molly moon’s. Newman says the kind of synergy his company and molly moon’s have is not common.

“We live in a world with really big multinational companies. Lots of times with multinational companies, they don’t have everybody’s best interests at heart,” Newman said. “That’s pretty thrilling for us about working with companies like molly moon’s. The possibility of amplification — of impact and change — is so much greater when two passionate powerful companies can get together and really amplify that message.”

A partnership with intentions of changing their respective industries for the better — it’s pretty K’ul stuff!