Words by Andrea Goto
Photography by Chia Chong
I have a girl crush on Kristen Hard, founder/chocolate maker of Cacao Atlanta (pronounced ka-KOW! if you’re as excitable as I am). It was inevitable. Along with air, wine and “E! News,” I can’t live without chocolate.
And I don’t mean that tasteless waxy stuff that takes you back to the time you ate Crayons in kindergarten. I mean real, 75%-plus cacao that Hard makes from the beans inside the pods she plucks from a tree in Venezuela. “Bean-to-bar” they call it in the chocolate world, not to be mistaken for what a chocolatier does. A chocolatier buys chocolate and turns it into confectionery, whereas Hard buys cacao beans from small farms around the world, grinds them and adds some sugar. The end result: chocolate with an expiration date that doesn’t extend into the next millennium—a good thing if you care about what you put in your body.
Hard is a little mysterious about how she came into the business of making chocolate. As she tells it, she was a chef on a boat sailing in the Caribbean Islands when she saw some local women harvesting cacao pods. It’s a big leap from the Caribbean to opening one’s own business, but Hard resists filling in the blanks even when pressed. How she got here seems to matter a lot less to her than what she’s going to do next, which is embark on a journey to Peru with scientists to try to discover some wild species of cacao growing in the Andes Mountains.
It’s difficult for me to imagine the petite, sometimes blonde/sometimes brunette heading solo into countries where drug running and kidnapping are commonplace, but it endears me to her even more. Clearly her badassery has served her well. She frequently goes on jungle expeditions in search of the genetically gifted bean she knows exists—the same beans that certain governments discourage farmers to produce because it costs too much, and big companies aren’t interested in paying more. Tired of the hastily fermented product that Hard believes has “a flavor profile that is very boring,” she wants to find and preserve the rare heirloom variety of trees that are dying out and pay farmers a premium for the extra care these richer beans will require. But she doesn’t have the currency or buying power that the major chocolate corporations do. Nor does she seem to care about such roadblocks; she makes a point of blowing by them. Hard has already survived bullying by large corporations, a South American plane crash, and perhaps most impressive, opening her business in 2004 because the voice in her head told her to. She talks a lot about the voices in her head—not in a whackadoodle way, but in an I-know-what-I-want kind of way.
The voice in her head also tells her that the chocolate world is going to be turned upside down in the next 5 to 10 years, and she’s going to be the one flipping the spatula. She predicts that it will become like more like wine industry where consumers understand and care more about flavor profiles and fermentation processes. It would be easy to dismiss Hard’s ambition based on her stature and her age, but she’s already proven herself to be a savvy businesswoman. She operates a 3,000 square foot chocolate laboratoire, and has three successful boutiques in the Atlanta area. Her employees appear happy to be there even when Hard’s not in the room. It’s palpable. When I walk into the modern, Frenchy-chic chocolate factory, I’m overcome by two things: satisfaction and an effuse of decadence. The scent of chocolate is so heavy in the air that I confuse eating with breathing. I sample a truffle the size of my pinky nail. It’s a pear cinnamon concoction and it tastes bigger than a Vegas buffet (better too). I fall head over ballet flats for Hard. Again.
We asked for an hour with Hard, and she gave us her entire morning, a recommendation for lunch, and invitation to return. Then she swiftly departed in her gleaming white BMW Z-series convertible. White lightening. Hot chocolate.
