What do these craft chocolate bars have in common? They are the beautiful and delicious bars in a special set I’m assembling to celebrate my birthday on December 10!
Be among the first to purchase the set, and I’ll invite you to join a Google Meet birthday party with me that weekend, to talk about the chocolate bars and more! (Party hats optional!)
The sets will ship the week of my birthday, and you can shop now, for yourself or for gifts, by sending $51 (why that number? Haha! : ) to me via PayPal at chocolateuplift@gmail.com or paypal.me/chocolateuplift. The price includes US shipping. Please let me know where to send the chocolate.
For my birthday set, I’ve selected four bars that I love and that have special meaning for me:
@crowandmosschocolate Bolivian Rose Salt chocolate bar, made from Colombian cacao plus cane sugar, with a gentle sprinkling of Bolivian pink salt. This fruit-forward bar reminds me of childhood visits to Michigan, where my mom spent part of her childhood on a small family farm!
@dandelionchocolate Costa Esmeraldas, Ecuador 70%, made in San Francisco from just 2 ingredients — cacao and sugar, all you need! — and with a precision-focus on flavor. Ecuador is the first place I visited cacao farms, and I also love that the bars are wrapped in upcycled Indian cotton!
@dicktaylorchocolate Brazil, made in Eureka, California, is sophisticated and rich, and reminds me of the years I lived in Europe, where the idea to create the world’s first chocolate tours came to me, as a chocolate-obsessed exchange student in Paris in 1989!
@xocolatlchocolate Kissed Mermaids, made in Atlanta, is light, bright, and topped with cacao nibs, and you know how excited I get about cacao nibs, and about blue and white! A cheerful bar! Plus, this is the first batch on Uganda cacao (instead of Costa Rica), grown by the Semuliki Forest collective of around 1,000 family farmers, and I love the rich notes of warm spice on a core note of straight-ahead chocolate!
What else do these bars have in common? They are all vegan, US-made, created by incredibly kind people I’m honored to call friends and clients, and of course they meet my 5 Ss of first-class craft chocolate:
slavery-free
soy-free
sustainable
small-batch
scrumptious!
For every set sold, I’ll donate a meal to CREER, a rescue center in Cote d’Ivoire for formerly trafficked kids including those trafficked onto cacao farms that supply Big Chocolate brands that rely on forced labor.
If you choose my birthday set, thank you! Let’s have some fun! Onward and upward!
Please click to watch my 3-minute “sizzle reel” video montage of TV segments, click here for my speaker’s one-sheet, and see below for my short and long bios. Thank you!
ABOUT
Chocolate expert and Harvard grad Valerie Beck is a chocolate industry entrepreneur, pioneer, and activist. Creator of the original chocolate tours — which she expanded to cities across the US while building a team of 50, creating first Chicago Chocolate Tours, then Philadelphia Chocolate Tours and Boston Chocolate Walking Tours, and more — she is also a chocolate consultant, broker, and speaker, as well as a cheerful and engaging media personality.
She founded Chocolate Uplift to provide chocolate services to the trade, to the public, and to cacao growing nations, such as wholesale distribution of bean-to-bar chocolate, consulting to craft chocolate makers, and speaking engagements for groups and organizations of all kinds.
Chocolate expert Valerie Beck is a pioneering entrepreneur in chocolate and hospitality.
Valerie created the original Chicago Chocolate Tours, which she expanded to 4 cities across the US, opening Philadelphia Chocolate Tours, Boston Chocolate Walking Tours, and Beverly Hills Bakery Tours. She grew the business to 50 employees and ran it for 10 years; she and her team educated and entertained tens of thousands of people about the history, health benefits, production, and selection of first-class chocolate.
Valerie’s business Chocolate Uplift currently provides delicious speaking engagements plus chocolate tastings, also brokers bean-to-bar chocolate made by craft artisan chocolate makers, and provides consulting services to cacao growers and chocolate makers, always with a focus on ethical chocolate and sustainability. In fact, her 5 Ss of first-class craft chocolate are: slavery-free, soy-free and industrial additive-free, sustainable, small-batch, and scrumptious!
A Chicago native, Valerie graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. After practicing law in Europe and the US, she founded the chocolate tours and Chocolate Uplift, and is a popular speaker, writer, chocolate show judge, and media personality.
She started the Chocolate Freedom Project to end child slave labor on the cacao farms that produce cocoa beans for big chocolate brands, and supports formerly trafficked kids at a West African rescue center. She has also taught as an adjunct professor at Kendall College in Chicago and UCLA Extension in Los Angeles, spreading chocolate knowledge to new generations, and continues to work with students through her virtual tutoring business ProfessorValerieBeck.com.
Valerie’s mission is Uplift Through Chocolate, because chocolate can improve our mood and the world!
Longer bio
Valerie Beck, founder of Chocolate Uplift bean-to-bar chocolate tastings, brokering, and consulting, and of the original Chicago Chocolate Tours, Philadelphia Chocolate Tours, and more, later known as Valerie’s Original Chocolate Tours, is a cheerful chocolate expert on TV and radio and in print. Valerie has been profiled in multiple media outlets such as NBC, ABC, WGN TV, WGN Radio, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, Crain’s Chicago Business, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
She is an upbeat and engaging speaker and blogger on all things chocolate. She speaks frequently on topics such as the history and health benefits of chocolate, such as in her presentation “What’s in Your Chocolate: Making Conscious Chocolate Choices,” where she teaches how to interpret labels to discern what’s really in your chocolate bar, and discusses her 5 Ss of first-class craft chocolate, which are: slavery-free, soy-free and industrial additive-free, sustainable, small-batch, and scrumptious! She also speaks on business and motivational topics, with a chocolate twist, such as in her presentation on “The ABCs of Sweet Success: Attitude, Belief, Commitment.”
Her chocolate consulting work ranges from helping brands create and launch new chocolate bars, to helping cacao growing nations promote their products.
Valerie is also a popular judge at chocolate competitions such as the annual World of Chocolate event in Chicago, and at business plan and innovation competitions.
Valerie is a pioneer in the business of chocolate tourism and other chocolate services to the public, to the trade, and to cocoa growing nations. Chocolate Uplift is the umbrella for all of these offerings. Chocolate Uplift provides entertaining and educational services to the public including trips to chocolate festivals around the world, and chocolate wellness seminars. Chocolate Uplift also provides valuable services to the chocolate industry, such as consulting to chocolate brands particularly in the small-batch and fine chocolate categories, brokering bean-to-bar chocolate for distribution from makers to retailers, importing fair trade cocoa beans and chocolate baking discs directly from ethical sources, and arranging origin trips to cocoa farms for bean-to-bar chocolate makers and others. In addition, Valerie consults for cocoa growing nations such as Ecuador, to promote their ethical cacao and chocolate.
A Chicago native, Valerie created the first chocolate tours when she founded Chicago Chocolate Tours in 2005, to introduce chocolate lovers to small-batch chocolate shops and bakeries. With her team of “Choc Stars” she grew the business to become a well-known and award-winning tour company serving tens of thousands of chocolate lovers, with 50 employees, which opened in Philadelphia and Boston in 2009, and developed footprints in additional cities such as Los Angeles by opening Beverly Hills Bakery Tours, and Washington DC by offering Chocolate and Cherry Blossom events. In 2016, Valerie relaunched the business as Valerie’s Original Chocolate Tours, with renewed focus on sustainable cacao and artisan chocolate.
Valerie invented the concept of the chocolate tour years earlier, when she was a 19-year-old Harvard College senior studying abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris. She had been focused on chocolate since announcing at age 4 that she would drink milk only if it contained chocolate. In Paris she fell in love with fine artisanal chocolate, and started taking her friends on informal excursions she developed to her favorite chocolate and pastry locations there and in Belgium.
Later, after graduating from Harvard Law School, Valerie practiced law in Chicago and Europe, and took the opportunity during her years in Europe to deepen her knowledge of chocolate and pastry.
Her awards include Influential Woman in Business from the Daily Herald Business Ledger, and Top 100 Woman Owned Businesses from the Philadelphia Business Journal. She has mentored many other entrepreneurs through Women’s Innovation Network – WIN, the Chicago City Treasurer’s small business program, and through private consulting.
Valerie has always believed that good chocolate can do good. Her philanthropy of choice for the chocolate tours was CARE, which helps women and families around the world exit poverty through entrepreneurship. She started the Chocolate Freedom Project to end child slave labor on the cacao farms that produce cocoa beans for big chocolate brands, and supports formerly trafficked kids at a West African rescue center. She has also taught as an adjunct professor at Kendall College in Chicago and UCLA Extension in Los Angeles, spreading chocolate knowledge to new generations. Valerie continues to work with students through her virtual tutoring business ProfessorValerieBeck.com.
Valerie’s mission is Uplift Through Chocolate, because chocolate can change everything from our mood, to the world!
Hello! Happy solstice, a day to mark planetary shifts!
Below are a couple of my social media posts on two other big days in June — Loving Day, and Juneteenth — plus chocolate to go with them!
Enjoy!
Valerie Beck is in Chicago, Illinois. June 11 at 2:19 PM ·
Happy Loving Day tomorrow, June 12!
No, it’s not another Valentine’s Day, though it could be! Loving Day celebrates interracial marriage, by marking the anniversary of the unanimous US Supreme Court decision in 1967 in the case of Loving v Virginia, which said no state can make interracial marriage illegal, and that blacks and whites and anybody else can legally marry each other or anyone of any background. This recognition of freedom to marry who you choose also underpins the later 2015 US decision recognizing same-sex marriage, so happy Pride Month too!
It always seemed like common sense or basic human rights to me, to live as you choose and love whom you choose, without interference from government, oligarchs, vigilantes, or anyone else. Maybe that’s in part because as you may know, I come from a mixed race and mixed religion family! In case you’re curious, this post in another one of my blogs, Diary of My Disastrous Law Career, gives you a bit of background on my family, plus fun vintage photos!
So, I’ve gathered here today some delicious craft chocolate that explicitly represents love — Chocolatasm‘s Hawaii salt chocolate hearts, the Xocolatl Small Batch Chocolate Love & Happiness raspberry orange olive oil chocolate bar, and the Violet Sky Onward & Upward Love rose and pistachio chocolate bar on which I collaborated, plus Love-themed snacking cacao by Good King Cacao — to say happy Loving Day, and here’s to our human birthright of love, liberty, and unity! May we deepen and expand these elements in our hearts and in our world, for the Golden Age of empathy and equality!
#lovingday
Valerie Beck is in Chicago, Illinois. Yesterday at 1:10 PM ·
Hello! Happy #Juneteenth!
This date [June 19] marks the ending of (1st-wave) slavery in the United States. President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, during the Civil War over slavery, yet enslaved people achieved liberation over an elongated period of time, culminating on June 19, 1865, in Texas.
But wait, you or people of the future may ask: aren’t all people born free, as expressions of the One Great Soul, and isn’t it true that no political or social (or tech-med) structure shall violate the fundamental principles that people are to care for people (e.g. love thy neighbor) and exercise their own liberty and free will while respecting that of others?
Of course!
To celebrate eternal inviolable liberty, how about a delicious liberation brunch of Crow & Moss Chocolate of Michigan, and Xocolatl Chocolate cacao nibs, on cinnamon toast with berries, all organic?
But wait, you may ask: what makes this a liberation brunch? Here comes one of my it’s-all-connected stories : )
My mother often made cinnamon toast for us kids when we were growing up, so I always think of her when I make it! She spent part of her childhood in Michigan, on a small family farm in a township that had been illegally racially integrated since its founding in the 1860s. That’s not a typo: racial mixing was illegal in the US, mixing of the One Human Family, in the North too. But people in Mom’s area did it anyway because it was ethical and practical, sending their black children and their white children to the same school for example. When my mother spent a summer with relatives in the South as a little girl in the 1950s (the time of 2nd-wave slavery: brutal “Jim Crow” apartheid), she was horrified by the abuses against black people. Now the laws have changed, and segregation is illegal, yet it happens in many ways including incarceration where prisoners work for the state or corporations for little or no pay (part of 3rd-wave slavery), or consider West Africa where over 2 million black kids work in hazardous or slavery conditions on cacao farms so corporations can sell cheap chocolate.
Mom never bought Aunt Jemima “slavery syrup,” and doesn’t buy slavery chocolate. Voilà! @ Chicago, Illinois
Your friend in chocolate,
Valerie
Valerie Beck
Founder/CEO Chocolate Uplift
Craft Chocolate Activism, Brokering, Consulting, Distribution
Chocolate Uplift 