Chloé
The Mind
Chloé | photo © Dominic Harris
Chloé Doutre-Roussel’s great passion is for chocolate and it is no exaggeration to call this a love affair. Raised in South America and sent to school in France, she taught herself to taste as a teenager, developing detailed notes about each chocolate’s “price to pleasure” ratio. In her 30s, despite the fact that she had no formal training, she beat out 3,500 applicants to become the chocolate buyer at Fortnum & Mason, London’s ultra-high-end department store. While working there she researched and wrote a book called The Chocolate Connoisseur. Now on her own, she is in great demand, not just because of her skill at tasting, but for her brutal honesty.
Chloé’s commitment to making the world “choco-better” begins at the source. She is using her skills and talents to systematically change the way really good chocolate is consumed. For the past couple years, Chloé has worked with a cooperative of cacao farmers in Bolivia called El Ceibo. Her mission is to help this community go beyond fair trade by actually producing their own range of fine bean-to-bar chocolates and figuring out how to export the chocolate to the retailers of the world. After several months of changes and improvements, the Co-Op succeeded in making their first batch of quality chocolate this spring and sales of the chocolate are expected to begin this fall. These chocolates are the first products to be tree-to-retailer from cocoa producers in the world. Her goal is to include information on her work with El Ceibo and the awakening of cacao growing regions around the world in her tasting seminars, so that it may be replicated elsewhere.
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