[MUSIC] Read the following questions, and then listen to the interview. >> My name is Drew Zandonella-Stannard and I am the marketing manager for Theo Chocolate here in Seattle. Theo Chocolate was founded in 2006 and we were the first bean to bar chocolate maker of organic fair trade chocolate in North America. We decide on our flavors of chocolate as a group. We do have a product development team but we all get involved. And throw out ideas and kind of see what sticks after a lot of testing. So, at our Seattle factory store, we offer a lot of really wonderful seasonal items that are favorites of the community. But I would say that nationally, our most popular chocolate flavor is our dark salted almond classic bar, because it has that really nice combination of salty and sweet. So, my personal chocolate flavor would be our dark salted almond cups, which are a little bit like peanut butter cups, but they have almond in them, and they're really good. So, here at Theo, we experiment with a lot of different flavors. Some of them work, some of them don't. Over the past few years, I actually tried a caramel that had some cheese in it that was a little funky. Not so great. It was Roquefort. [LAUGH] Not recommended. We have a Walla Walla onion caramel that's so good, and people don't normally gravitate towards that. But once you try it and its kind of funky and savory. Yeah. But the cheese didn't work. So, our factory is located in an old trolley barn. A big brick factory in the middle of Fremont in Seattle, and we chose to be here because we wanted to do tours and welcome the community into our factory store to eat chocolate and learn about where chocolate comes from. So we chose Fremont because it was a great walking district and got a lot of tourist activity in the summer time, so that we could welcome the most people into our store and teach them about chocolate. We really want to make Theo the all-American chocolate bar. And the way that we'll most impact the lives of farmers where we source from and buy the most fair trade organic cocoa is really if we can get our buyers into national distribution. So we have decided to expand as much as possible into grocery retailers. And so far, we haven't opened another smaller confection shop, but that's always a possibility in the future, we've just really focused on our national growth at this point. We have small direct costumers, like local coffee shops, bakeries, gift stores that will come to us and purchase chocolate from us. We sell a lot of confections for weddings and events, things like that. And then, we also are distributed by national distribution chains. So, we'll work with natural grocery distributors to get our product into stores. So, we sell chocolate online through the Theo Webshop and we do a bit of business that way. It's not as big as it could be, because chocolate tends to melt when you send it through the mail. So, it can get quite expensive to pack chocolate with ice packs in the summertime or send it overnight to certain hot locations. But, yeah, we sell merchandise and chocolate on our web shop. [MUSIC]
