Nearly two decades ago, Alex Whitmore and Kathleen Fulton started Taza Chocolate with a grinder, a big idea, and no real road map. The married couple behind the stone-ground, bean-to-bar chocolate brand built something rare in consumer goods: a company that manufactures its own product, controls its sourcing, and never compromised on its original mission. Today, Taza is sold in more than 5,000 stores and known as a pioneer in the US craft chocolate movement.
Alex and Kathleen reflect on the crises that shaped their growth, how they stabilized their business by diversifying manufacturing, and why sticking to their niche helped them outlast trends.
Staying close to what made the brand unique
When Taza Chocolate launched in 2005, most brands in the chocolate aisle were either outsourcing production or melting down bulk chocolate. Alex wanted to do something different—make chocolate from scratch, using traditional stone mills, minimally processed cacao, and real ingredients. “We actually roast and winnow and grind the cocoa right here at our factory in Somerville, [Massachusetts],” he says. “And that’s really hard. It’s very equipment-intensive. It’s very operationally challenging.”
That difficult path became Taza’s defining edge. Alex and Kathleen started out by testing the gritty, bold texture of their chocolate with customers at farmers markets. “We knew very early on that we were making a very polarizing product,” Kathleen says. “People either loved it or hated it.” The customers who loved it weren’t just casual buyers—they became loyalists, returning again and again for Taza’s most intense bars. Taza’s bestselling product today is the Wicked Dark 95% bar, a nod to the brand’s focus on cacao-forward flavor.
The founders’ commitment to their unique format allowed them to sidestep the crowded middle of the market. Kathleen recalls moments when they tried to expand into more mass-market flavors or compete on price—moves that didn’t pay off. “Anytime we’ve tried to play outside of our wheelhouse, when we’ve tried to be more candy than food, it hasn’t worked out very well,” she says. The takeaway: In crowded markets, brands can’t afford to blend in. Being divisive is sometimes what earns you staying power.
Viewing manufacturing as a strategic advantage
Few food brands choose to own their manufacturing process, and even fewer survive doing so. For Taza, manufacturing became a pain point and a turning point. By 2018, fluctuating brand demand and rising marketing costs brought them to a financial crossroads. “We hit this crisis point,” says Kathleen. “We needed a way to make money without spending marketing dollars.”
The solution was a strategic shift: Lean into what they already had—machinery, space, and expertise—and start manufacturing for others. “We needed to figure out how to just constantly be running our machines,” Alex explains. “You have to utilize your machines, your assets.” That led to three new revenue streams: co-manufacturing for other chocolate brands, private-label production, and industrial supply for companies needing base chocolate.
This approach stabilized staffing, kept their production lines full, and added a financial buffer. It also allowed them to avoid layoffs or deep cuts during COVID-19, when many consumer brands faltered. The decision reframed how they saw themselves: not just as a brand that makes chocolate, but as a manufacturer with a brand. For entrepreneurs building in product-heavy industries, the lesson is to see underutilized capacity as an asset waiting to be optimized.
Leading with purpose and practicing real transparency
From the start, Taza built a system for ethical sourcing. Early in the company’s history, Alex traveled across Latin America and the Caribbean to forge relationships with cacao farmers. “We wanted to get the best cocoa beans and then pay a really premium price,” he says. Unlike most chocolate makers who buy through intermediaries, Taza works directly with exporters and producers. “We’re able to pay a much higher price because we’re not working with an intermediary.”
The couple formalized this approach into one of the first direct-trade cacao programs in the US chocolate industry. They published transparency reports listing exactly how much they paid for beans, how much they bought, and from where. “That kind of set the standard for what was a really opaque and shady industry,” Alex says. The company open-sourced the program so others could follow suit, inspired by models from the specialty coffee world.
Even when trends, like the rise of sugar-free chocolate, tempted them to bend on quality, they held the line. “We never made something that we weren’t really proud of in terms of flavor, so we just never did it,” Alex says about their sugar-free experiments. The consistent throughline in Taza’s decision-making is that every product, partnership, and promise must reflect what it’s actually capable of delivering.
Adjusting the brand over time while keeping the mission intact
For much of Taza’s history, brand building was a scrappy, in-house effort. Kathleen, with a background in studio art, led much of the creative and marketing work in the early years. “We had wrappers and postcards and a very archaic website,” she recalls. “Some of our key buyers didn’t know that we actually made the product. … We were like, ’That’s all we do.’”
Today, she’s brought in external brand and marketing partners to help modernize how the company presents itself. But the core of the brand—the mission and values—has remained unchanged since year one. Their mission is visible on the walls of Taza’s factory: “To make and share stone ground chocolate that is seriously good and fair for all.” The founders also built five core values to serve as guideposts: true grit, seriously bold, teamwork, ingenuity, and wicked high standards.
“The only times we’ve really stumbled is when we’ve strayed,” Alex says. That self-awareness is the product of years of missteps, pivots, and reflection. But it’s also what’s allowed the couple and the company to go the distance. “We’ve learned how to operate in a way that is sustainable in the past two to three years,” Kathleen says. For other entrepreneurs, it’s a reminder that building a brand is about staying true to your core values as you scale versus chasing trends.
Alex and Kathleen built their company around a strong point of view and let that vision drive every decision—from sourcing beans to navigating machinery to building a loyal customer base. Their advice for other founders is to know what makes your product different, invest in the unglamorous parts of the business, and stay rooted in your values, even when it’s inconvenient.
For more insight and lessons for building a brand that can go the distance, check out the full interview on Shopify Masters.
