Cam Loyet Archives - DC FlavrReport

DC gets inspired by ‘Chocolate Epiphany’ Honeymoon Chocolate Wants to Help you

By Joe Winger — 2 years ago

Ever Get so Inspired you had a ‘Chocolate Epiphany? Honeymoon Chocolate Wants to Help you

Have you ever felt better after a good meal? The flavors that linger. The euphoria that captures your attention. You’re inspired. You can’t help but smile.

Today we’re talking with Honeymoon Chocolates’ Cam Loyet.

You use the phrase ‘Chocolate Epiphany’. What does it mean to you?

So up in Bloomington, Illinois, where Hayley and I met there’s a restaurant called the Epiphany Farms it’s farm to table. It’s expensive because you’re getting the highest quality meal. We were only college students. So we really couldn’t afford it, except for once a year. Every meal I had there, I had what seemed like this Epiphany with food where everything tasted better than any meal I’d had in the last 4 weeks. It was just incredible and we hope that you know our chocolate can do that for our customers.

It’s this experience where only a single bite can tide you over or a little bit goes a long way, because not only was the flavor so incredible, but it lasts 5 or 10 minutes, the flavor in your mouth just lingers.

That’s where “Chocolate Epiphany“ comes from being sweetened with honey. It doesn’t have to be sweetened with cane sugar.

Honey is as local as it gets and it’s as unrefined as it gets with the sweetener completely untouched, raw unfiltered honey.

A lot of our competitors use coconut, sugar, monk fruit or stevia, and those are all processed ingredients, one way or another. Even cane sugar is processed.

So we’re doing our best to create this experience through chocolate and communicate with our customers; and hopefully it becomes an epiphany in the process.

Honeymoon chocolate is a love story, a health story, a delicious flavor, story and an environmental story. What else can we add to that?

It’s definitely a love story, my girlfriend at the time, now my wife; we met at Illinois Wesleyan University, and started this crazy business of sweetening chocolate with local honey. Yes, we need chocolate with local honey. And it’s a bittersweet journey. We instantly found out all of the trials and tribulations of owning our own business.

Also the cocoa supply chain. It’s a lot like the diamond industry where there’s a lot of slave labor and a lot of issues with those who really do all the hard work and effort. There’s a lot of effect we can have as we scale.

Yeah, a love story. It;’ sweet. It’s romantic. That’s one of the main reasons why we named it Honeymoon Chocolates because it always has its place at romantic events.

We do our best to attract those who want to gift our product. A lot of our customers do gift our chocolate.

It’s environmental as well. It’s all compostable packaging. We have a goal of using only clean energy in the future, but again, it continues to be bitter sweet because chocolate is a very power hungry industry. It takes a lot of effort and energy to manufacture chocolate. It takes a lot of effort and energy just to get the cocoa here.

There’s a lot of effort in our industry to be transparent on the energy that is being used in the emissions and our goals to be a bit more transparent on that as well. But we do our best.

I never want our Honeymoon Chocolates wrapper to be out on the streets blowing in the wind without the ability to biodegrade or compost. So we go a little bit more a little bit above and beyond.

Visits Honeymoon Chocolates at: https://hmchocolates.com

On Instagram, at: www.instagram.com/honeymoonchocolates

On Facebook, at: https://www.facebook.com/honeymoonchocolates

DC Chocolate loves ‘Bean to Bar’ But do you understand it? Honeymoon Chocolates Cam Loyet explains it

By Joe Winger — 2 years ago

Chocolate fans, Do You Understand ‘Bean to Bar’ ? Honeymoon Chocolates Cam Loyet explains it

Honeymoon Chocolates was founded in a dorm room back in 2016 making bean-to-bar craft chocolate sweetened solely with raw honey.

Years later, bean to bar is only getting more popular. But what does it actually mean? Do you know where to go? What to look for or ask for?

So we asked Cam Loyet from Honeymoon Chocolates

What does “Bean to Bar” Craft chocolate mean? Is it as simple as a one sentence answer? Or Is it more complicated?

It’s far more complicated. In itself, it’s a little bit selfish in my opinion. There’s a lot of benefit employing those who work in origin to also manufacture the chocolate. That’s something that we’d be interested in down the road. We just can’t afford it so right now we take all the effort, all the energy and time to do it here in St. Louis.

It’s a really fun process. But you do end up taking a lot of the credit where the credit isn’t necessarily due. A lot of the credits due for the fine cocoa farmers at origin.

Can you walk me through the basic concept?

So in our industry it’s wherever you receive the dry, unfermented cocoa beans. and you roast them. What you’re doing is crafting this flavor and you’re manufacturing a product that otherwise wouldn’t wouldn’t necessarily exist.

If you have the ability to roast [in-house] and you start [you’re own manufacturing process] ]there, you’re ‘bean to bar’.

It just gives a little bit more local sense to chocolate. Whenever you open up a bar, and you don’t know where it’s manufactured and how it’s manufactured, you lose a bit of that local sense. It becomes more of a global or nationwide feel.

l got it. So the beans come from somewhere else, they arrive under your roof and the manufacturing process happens under your roof. So beans come in and a bar comes out, but it all happens under the same roof.

Yes. And it’s traceable. That’s also very important.

So when I’m at a Whole Foods, or any high-end retail groceries, there are many craft chocolate bars. What am I looking for to know the difference?

I love the idea of when a consumer looks at a list of 9 bars, they instantly go ‘is it a dark, milk or or white. If it’s dark, what percentage do I like?’

It starts with, what percentage do they like? And then from there you go into this dialogue with the consumer when they try your product.

But it really does start with what the consumer likes. You can’t necessarily force an 85% bar onto a consumer that enjoys white chocolate.

But you look at the ingredients on them. There are some good makers that use Lecithin just because it makes the product easier to work with, but it does make it less of a clean label product. So you look at the clean label from nutrition.

You are gonna look and see if it’s single origin to check to see where the cocoa comes from. Just because it does highlight the farmers’ work a little bit more. There’s some big makers that combine origins because they have more of a fruity flavor versus a more chocolate-forward cocoa bean. So then they combine them. But I do find that it kind of does take away from the efforts that do happen earlier on in the supply chain.

Thank you, Cam.

Visits Honeymoon Chocolates at: https://hmchocolates.com

On Instagram, at: www.instagram.com/honeymoonchocolates

On Facebook, at: https://www.facebook.com/honeymoonchocolates