
This story originally appeared on Chocolate Noise, where food writer and chocolate expert Megan Giller explores the world of American bean-to-bar chocolate. Subscribe to the series here, and preorder Megan’s book, Bean-to-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution, coming out in September 2017.
Denise Castronovo is the quiet champion of bean-to-bar chocolate. You may not have ever seen her demure bars or even heard of her tiny operation, Castronovo Chocolate, out of Stuart, Florida, and Denise certainly doesn’t announce herself when she walks in a room of chocolate makers: The blonde fortysomething is somehow camouflaged by her modesty. Yet she has won a spate of awards for her exquisite chocolate made with heirloom cacao, and Castronovo is actually the only woman-owned bean-to-bar company in the United States to have won an award from the International Chocolate Awards.
Denise comes to chocolate from quite a different background than most makers: She wasn’t an engineer or a DIYer but an ecologist and preservationist. After studying environmental science, ecology and economics in undergraduate and graduate school, Denise started her own company, called Mapping Sustainability, which “used mapping technology to look at ecological health and satellite imagery” for big clients like FEMA. Her most “prized project,” though, was working with the Boston Parks department to map the urban tree canopy cover in Boston “to both mitigate climate change and also make the streets look better.”
Eventually Denise presented her work to the city, and Wangari Maathai, an environmental political activist and the first woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize, was in the audience. Maathai was known reforesting areas of Kenya, and when she saw the technology that Denise and her team were using to document progress, she stood up and took notice. Maathai consulted with Denise and eventually implemented a similar system in her own organization.
Around 2008, though, as the economy slowed down, so did Denise’s consulting business. Then serendipity hit. She bought some cocoa nibs from Whole Foods and realized for the first time where chocolate comes from. “I started researching chocolate and found out that it had all these different flavor notes,” she says. “Single-origin chocolate was starting to be a trend and I was like, ‘Wow, this is incredible.’” Of course, it was all theoretical to Denise: In small-town Florida, she didn’t have access to any of this type of chocolate, and she didn’t even try any other bean-to-bar chocolate until six months after she started making her own, in 2013.
“Thank goodness our first batch was good,” she laughs. “Because I don’t know if I would’ve continued otherwise.”