Northwest Chocolate Festival 2017

Grow your chocolate library! Four industry leaders – a journalist, a scholar, a marketer, and a sourcerer – bring you four new, must-read books on chocolate this year. Based on her blog, Chocolate Noise, food writer and chocolate eater Megan Giller takes you on a fun romp through the world of craft chocolate, from profiles of the best makers in the United States to chocolate pairings to mouthwatering recipes, in Bean-to-Bar Chocolate: America's Craft Chocolate Revolution (Storey). With fifteen years of research, teaching, and scholarship on cocoa and chocolate, Dr. Kristy Leissle, sometimes known as Dr. Chocolate, has published Cocoa, on the geopolitics of this global industry (Polity). San Francisco's Dandelion Chocolate tells all on topics ranging from sourcing to roasting to baking: Greg D’Alesandre, Dandelion's Chocolate Sourcerer, talks about Making Chocolate (Clarkson-Potter). Lastly, Lawren Askinosie, Chief Marketing Officer of Askinosie Chocolate, shares a guide to purposeful, vocational business through the lens of direct trade chocolate making with Meaningful Work: A Quest To Do Great Business, Find Your Calling, and Feed Your Soul (Penguin Random House). With first-time readings from each book and lively discussion with the authors, this panel will bring your industry knowledge up to date with the most current and wide-ranging writing on chocolate.