What do we actually know about the US specialty chocolate consumer? Estelle Tracy, Barb Genuario, and Geneviève Leloup, colleagues who work daily at the intersection of chocolate makers and the people who enjoy their bars, join our hosts to dig into the findings of the recently published 2026 US Specialty Chocolate Consumer Survey and Market Study from the Institute for Cacao and Chocolate Research. Together they test the numbers against their own experience in the field, ask which results ring true and which surprise, and chart the next steps for an ambitious research agenda shaped by what chocolate makers across the country most want to know. Along the way, they celebrate makers and products that have recently delighted them, including Kessho, Castronovo, ChocoMotions, Bonnat, Guittard, Tony’s Chocolonely, Mount Pleasant, Blue Spruce, Maüa, Orinoco , and Standout. Read the full report: https://www.chocolateinstitute.org/u-s-specialty-chocolate-consumer-survey

Our three guests bring the survey's findings face-to-face with the people who live these questions every day.

Barb Genuario is a chocolate writer and educator, co-founder of the DC Chocolate Society, and one of the organizers of the Midwest Craft Chocolate Festival in Rushville, Indiana (midwestcraftchocolatefestival.com); follow her chocolate adventures at @chocochaser.

Estelle Tracy is a chocolate sommelier and the founder of 37 Chocolates and the Chocolate Educator Workshop, where she hosts tastings designed for connection and forms others to do the same —find her at 37chocolates.com and on Instagram at @37chocolates.

Geneviève Leloup is a chocolate sommelier and the founder of ChocoMotions (chocomotions.com), pioneering confections made with cacao pulp—she's on Instagram at @chocomotions, and she also moonlights as manager at Diamond Custom Machines (DCM), so if you have interesting questions about chocolate-making machinery, she's your person.

What can a potsherd tell us about a chocolate bar? Three leading archaeologists that have focused part of their work in cacao—Patricia L. Crown, PhD, whose discovery of cacao residues in Chaco Canyon pottery rewrote the story of chocolate in North America; Cameron McNeil, PhD, an archaeobotanist whose work traces cacao through ancient Mesoamerica; and Kathryn Sampeck, PhD, a historical archaeologist of chocolate and colonialism—join our hosts to excavate the deep past hiding in every chocolate bar, from ritual drinking vessels to colonial marketplaces.

Canonical books in cacao — dig deeper with our guests' essential works:

Patricia L. Crown (ed.), The House of the Cylinder Jars: Room 28 in Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon (University of New Mexico Press, 2020) -- documenting the re-excavation of the room that held Chaco's famed cylinder jars, in which Crown and Jeffrey Hurst identified the first evidence of chocolate north of the US–Mexico border (https://muse.jhu.edu/book/78107)

Cameron L. McNeil (ed.), Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao (University Press of Florida, 2006) -- bringing together archaeologists, historians, art historians, linguists, botanists, and anthropologists to explore the domestication, preparation, and significance of cacao in ancient and modern communities of the Americas (https://floridapress.org/9780813033822/chocolate-in-mesoamerica/ Project MUSE)

Stacey Schwartzkopf & Kathryn E. Sampeck (eds.), Substance and Seduction: Ingested Commodities in Early Modern Mesoamerica (University of Texas Press, 2017) -- tracing how chocolate, sugar, alcohol, tobacco, and other seductive substances became a nexus of desire for pleasure and profit in Mesoamerica since colonial times (https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477313879/)

What happens to chocolate when it no longer begins with the cacao bean? Ahrum Pak, founder of Win-Win, acompany to bring cocoa-free chocolate to market using fermented ingredients like barley and carob, and Luciano Bueno, founder and CEO of GALY, a Boston-based biotech growing cotton and cacao directly from plant cells, join our hosts to discuss the promise and growing pains of a nascent alternatives industry— Would the industry endorse this work? Would the consumer celebrate, fear, or overlook these solutions? Hear their side of the story here.

Learn more about Win Win: https://www.eatwinwin.com/

Learn more about GALY.CO: https://galy.co/