Alex Whitmore: Founder & CEO of Taza

Episode 795

On today’s episode, we welcome Alex Whitmore, Founder & CEO of Taza Chocolate — the pioneering craft chocolate brand known for its bold, stone-ground texture and radical transparency in sourcing.
Alex’s journey began with a single cup of traditional stone-ground chocolate in Oaxaca, Mexico — an experience that completely reshaped how he thought about food, sourcing, and business. When he returned to Boston, he and his wife Kathleen Fulton began making chocolate using the traditional methods he learned there, and Taza was born.
In this episode, Alex shares how Taza grew into one of the most values-driven chocolate companies in the U.S., why it became the first to implement third-party-certified Direct Trade cacao, and what it really means to publish exactly what farmers are paid. We also discuss how the chocolate industry has changed over the past 20 years, what’s happening behind the scenes with rising cocoa prices and supply chain pressure, and where Alex sees the future of ethical food heading next. This conversation is packed with insight for founders, operators, and anyone interested in building principled brands that challenge the status quo.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be, we just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show today. I’m super excited to be joined by Alex Whitmore, who is the founder, well, co founder and CEO of Taza chocolate, also known as Taza, but the bold stone ground chocolate brand that has spent the last two decades started in a the magic year of 2005 the same year that hint started challenging how chocolate is made, sourced and talked about in the US and Alex’s journey began with a single cup of traditional stone Ground chocolate in Mexico and an experience that completely changed how we thought about food and sourcing and business. And that moment sparked the creation of what he and his wife, Kathleen, back in 2005 that really started what we have today started, I should say so. Since then, Alex has become one of the most quietly radical voices in chocolate. Tazza was the first US chocolate company to implement third party certified direct trade cacao and the first to publicly disclose exactly what it pays cacao farmers as well cannot even wait to dig in more to that, and I’m really excited to hear how he’s built a values driven brand in a super challenging category, and exactly what’s happening right now in his world of chocolate, too. So Alex, welcome to the show. So super excited to finally meet you and have you here. Likewise.

Alex Whitmore 2:25
Thanks so much for having me, Kara. I appreciate it, and I love your work. So thank you for having me. I’m honored.

Kara Goldin 2:33
Thank you so much. Okay, so in 30 to 62nd give or take for listeners just discovering Taza. How do you describe the brand and what makes it fundamentally different from most chocolate on shelves today?

Alex Whitmore 2:49
Yeah, sure. So I’m sure you’re familiar with the massive wall of chocolate bars that you might encounter when you go into your local grocery store. We are. We compete in that category, chocolate candy, and we are what we call chocolate makers. We were manufactured. We’re a manufacturing company that’s been around. Is our 20th year now, and we make a really unique style of stone ground organic chocolate. And what makes us different from so many of those other brands that you see on that on the shelves in the grocery store is that we actually make chocolate from scratch, from the raw agricultural ingredients, the cacao beans, the cane sugar, any of the other ingredients we might use to make a product, almonds, hazelnuts, that kind of thing. And we actually roast the cocoa, we winnow the cocoa, and we grind it right here in our factory in the Boston area, in Somerville. So that is an incredible difference, and it’s something we’re really proud of, because it allows us to completely control the flavor. We source the best quality, organic certified cacao beans directly from from farmers and export operators, and we, and we use that cacao to grind a truly unique, intense cacao flavor chocolate products. So that’s something that we’ve been doing for 20 years, and we do it here in our factory with a with a team of about 35 people. And we couldn’t be more proud to come to work every day,

Kara Goldin 4:20
very, very cool. So were you a huge chocolate lover? And prior to having this experience in Mexico, yeah.

Alex Whitmore 4:30
So when we first began the company, I was really inspired to start my own business. I didn’t know what I wanted to do at the time, but I was really into food and slow food and and where food came from, and food culinary traditions. And I wanted to celebrate something and bring it and share it with with people that I knew, and also people from my hometown, from Boston and all around the. Country, and that’s what we ended up doing. We found this amazing culinary tradition from where cacao is indigenous to originally, which is the Mesoamerican, Central American region, and they’ve been making chocolate, chocolate products to drink for 1000s of years. And we saw this incredible tradition and like, we gotta, we gotta share this. And that’s and that’s exactly what we did with Tazza chocolate.

Kara Goldin 5:28
So you and your wife started this company together in 2005 What were you doing before?

Alex Whitmore 5:36
Yeah, so I was working for a self service on demand, car rental company called Zip Car. It’s basically like you could rent a car and just by going online, and then you could access the car all over anywhere in the city, kind of thing. It’s cars parked all over the city. I was working for that company, for this amazing founder, another amazing founder, Robin Chase, and she was honestly an inspiration to me, personally, that you could start kind of a crazy i with a crazy idea and actually make it work. And that’s what that’s exactly what she did with with Zip Car, and it really inspired me to start my own business. And so after working Zip Car for several years, I decided to go out on my own and and start Taza.

Kara Goldin 6:23
Very cool. So you came back from that trip to Mexico and started experimenting. Did you think that you were actually building a company at that point, or was it just kind of playing in the kitchen? You’re satisfying your curiosity. What was, what was kind of going through your head at that moment.

Alex Whitmore 6:42
Yeah, well, the original business idea was actually for a cafe. I wanted to start a chocolate Cafe, and I couldn’t really, I could raise some money from friends and family. This was before all the crazy private equity getting into the food business that happened in that, you know, I think after that time period and and I couldn’t really raise it enough money like I would have had to spend the $250,000 in capital that I was able to raise entirely on, like building out some landlords, cafe environment. And then I was like that, if it doesn’t work. I just lose all of that money, and I lose my chance at my dream. So I just, I couldn’t see myself doing that. And then furthermore, Kathleen encouraged me to get a job working at a coffee shop, just so I get a sense of what it’s like running a cafe. And I really did not like the idea of doing so we actually started, we pivoted. I really knew I wanted to start a business. I kind of raised the money, and we pivoted to actually manufacturing a chocolate bar, chocolate products, which at the time, the only company really doing that was actually in your neck of the woods in San Francisco, scharffen Berger chocolate, and that was started by two guys that that were incredibly, you know, focused on really high quality food and the and the whole food, slow food movement that was really bubbling out in the bay area at the time because of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse and all that farm to table stuff that was going on, and so that was really the only company we had to look look up to when we were starting and and the rest is history.

Kara Goldin 8:30
So it takes a lot of courage to start a company, but also, you know, you hadn’t been in the food industry, so there’s, there’s a lot of unknown. What did you do first when you were you were looking around, it sounds like at kind of the overall category in industry, and I guess what gave you the courage to think, I can go and start this company? And you know, what was, what was that moment all about?

Alex Whitmore 8:59
Well, I think it was more naive Tay than courage. But I think, you know, at the time, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a it’s, it’s, well, it’s easy to look back now and see what was going on, but at the time, you know, we really didn’t know what we were doing. We just were like, Okay, there’s a bunch of specialty shops. We’ll make a product. We’ll go to the specialty shop, we’ll ask them to sell it, and if they do, we’ll maybe they’ll pay us. And we were, you know, I was in my 20s, and we didn’t know, we didn’t have a whole lot of obligations besides putting food on our own plates, and we basically started making chocolate and bringing it around to different retail stores and got people to take it and it’s, it’s hard to remember what the world was like back in 2005 but there were, you know, the the organic lettuce in the grocery store was the really sad, wilty lettuce that only the hippies bought. I. Know, it was a different time, and farmers markets were really just getting started. It was like the beginning of that, that era. And so we actually started selling chocolate bars at farmers markets. We would have, you know, we had this bicycle trailer that we would pedal to the from the factory to the farmers market, and we would sell chocolate bars to people buying their their local produce.

Kara Goldin 10:24
I love that. I You just reminded me of the early days of hint, where we had a bike and we were handing out bottles of hint from from the bike. It was, yeah, good times for sure. So stone ground chocolate has a very distinct texture and flavor. Why was it important for you not to smooth or modernize it for mass appeal?

Alex Whitmore 10:49
Yeah, well, when we first started, we started making really traditional Mexican style drinking chocolate, and then we made a bar that was kind of my own creation, that was really like a cracked chocolate bar, but it was still kind of gritty. And it was partly that way because we didn’t have the money for the machines to make it smooth, but it was also partly that way because I was really inspired and loved that really rustic, minimally processed flavor experience that you got from the Mexican style chocolate. So by taking a really high quality ingredient, and very minimally processing it and kind of, kind of molding it into exactly the flavor that I wanted people to have that was at the time, like really, really gelled with what was going on in the food movement, where people were really trying to simply prepare foods that were really high quality to begin with, with grilling or with just just very simple vegetable preparations. That was what was going on in the slow food movement at the time, and that was really kind of also an inspiration to me, beyond the really rustic Mexican tradition of drinking chocolate. So those were the kind of the things that that drove me there to begin with. But furthermore, because chocolate is such a competitive category, there’s so many brands and products out there, there’s so many ways that people consume chocolate, I really wanted to make sure we had something unique, and we weren’t competing with just a bunch of other mass market products. And we needed to be differentiated. We needed to have something that was niche, that was our niche, that we could really own, and that was texture.

Kara Goldin 12:26
And how many SKUs Did you launch with initially?

Alex Whitmore 12:30
Well, it’s funny. I mean, launch, I don’t know. I mean, we didn’t really have, like a big go to market plan. We’re not really marketers. So it was, like, some weeks, we had like, five products that we would bring to the farmers market, and other weeks we would have three or seven. So it wasn’t, there wasn’t like a moment where we were, like, launch, here we go. It was really a much more slow build. And, you know, early on, SKUs came in and went, you know, depending on what we were, what packaging we were able to print that week, kind of thing. So, but originally we had a, we had our traditional Mexican style cinnamon chocolate disc. We had a 70% or 75% dark chocolate bar. And then we would, we just kind of slowly added to that. And so we, we made an 80% and we made a 60% and we made and we made ones with different cacao origins. And that was something that was also really inspiring to me, was the cocoa like how we sourced all the cacao beans that we used in our products became a fascination for me and an adventure, and we, I ended up going real deep there, and that was really the genesis of our direct trade program.

Kara Goldin 13:47
So Taza was the first US company on the heels of you mentioning that to publish a transparency report. But can you talk a little bit about that and kind of the process, and what made you decide that it was time to, I guess, really, not just push yourselves, but push the industry to do better?

Alex Whitmore 14:10
Yeah, so we always had a desire to just be really proud of go to work every day, and really proud of what we were building. And so I we wanted to do everything right. And from the beginning, we decided to be a certified organic company. And that wasn’t always easy at the time. You know, you could either have really high quality or you could have organic. There were it was very difficult to get both in the same cacao bean. And, you know, all the really high quality cacao beans at the time we’re going to Europe, and the organic cacao beans were going to the US and the UK. And basically it, it. That was really the reason why I started trying, like, trying to go to. Origin and find producers that were organic, and then maybe work with them on their post harvest process and on improving the quality, or finding producers that already had really great quality, and encouraging them, and sometimes even paying them to go organic and get certified. And that and that drove us to going down those long dirt roads deep in cacao country where cacao is being farmed, and developing relationships with these people that were making these amazing growing and processing, these amazing cacao beans, and so that that was kind of the inspiration behind the whole thing. And then ultimately we realized, wow, what we’re doing here. We’re paying really high prices for really high quality certified organic cacao. Let’s tell people about that. And we were really inspired at the time with by the by the fair trade movement and what they were accomplishing in certain ways. But we also were really turned off by the marketing and the money was kind of going to the wrong places. We didn’t want the money going to a certifier and paying for some certifier to stay in some fancy hotel in Santo Domingo. We really just want all the money to go to the farmers for the product. And we figured we tell our story, and we get really high quality cacao beans, and we we published the prices we’re paying. Like, how can anyone, like, say boo about it? And that’s what we ended up doing.

Kara Goldin 16:30
So what was the reaction from like, retailers and competitors, even advisors, when you decided to share that story?

Alex Whitmore 16:40
Well, they loved it. I mean, yeah, who doesn’t love such an authentic and, and, like, real story about about relationships between farmers and food producers. And to this day, we’re still well known in the industry for really pushing, pushing cacao, in general, the supply chain, and cacao is was one of the most opaque supply chains in all of food. It was very secretive no one. There was no traceability. It was very difficult to understand where the cacao is actually coming from. And we really opened that up. We were like, No, you can actually publish exactly what you’re paying to whom and where it’s coming from, who these people are, and you can, you can really show the relationships and how valuable they are to the world and have it work. And a lot of people thought, oh, you know, you can’t do that. People are just going to steal your suppliers, they’re going to take your supply, they’re going to whatever. And it just that just that just hasn’t happened. We’ve been doing this for 20 years now, and people really just end up valuing what we’ve done, and the relationships that we’ve developed with the farmers are are are amazing. I mean, they’ve helped us out when we’ve been in dire straits, we’ve helped them out vice versa. So it’s really been wonderful.

Kara Goldin 18:00
What’s been the biggest challenge? I always hesitate when I ask that question, because I know it’s all challenging, right? And there’s so many aspects of building a company that can be really challenging. But if you had to think back on the last 20 years and some of the biggest challenges you’ve had? What would you say?

Alex Whitmore 18:25
Oh, man. I mean, we’ve we’ve made so many mistakes. It’s not even funny, you know? I think the the thing to look back on is that every time we made a mistake, we did our best to learn from it, even though it was oftentimes very painful, either emotionally or financially. And we just kept putting one foot in front of the other, and we stuck to our kind of, our core values. And by doing so, we were able to avoid a lot of, I think, heartache. And well, there was a lot of heartache, but avoid even more heartache and survive honestly. That’s what allowed us to survive, always staying organic, always being really transparent about what we were doing, both internally with our staff, but also just with the world and with our vendors and our customers, and really just making sure that every decision we make leads us to be proud, to go to work every day. So I think sticking to that, and then sticking to our core differentiation in our category, that stone ground style has really been what’s allowed us to survive and sometimes even thrive,

Kara Goldin 19:42
definitely, definitely. So how many SKUs do you have today?

Alex Whitmore 19:47
Oh, gosh, I would say close to 30 SKUs. And in different formats, we have our chocolate bars, our number one SKU according. US. The brand is our 95% wicked dark bar. It’s really a pure expression of Dominican cacao, and it’s delicious to eat, even though it has so little sugar, and it’s something that we’re really proud of. It’s our number one item. We have a lot of other chocolate bars in that format. And then our chocolate discs were very well known for our eight different traditional Mexican style chocolate disks. They’re kind of a calling card for us out in the marketplace, because they’re so distinct and unique compared to all the other chocolate products on the shelf. They’re wrapped in a nice pleated paper round circle disc shape. And then we have a bunch of chocolate covered items. We do chocolate panning here in the factory. And if you ever are in the Boston area, we actually in line with our Trent, our value of transparency. We give chocolate factory tours. You can book a tour online and and come check out the plant and see what we do and how we make our chocolate. And we give out tons of free samples.

Kara Goldin 21:02
I love it. Any fun stories of, maybe it wasn’t fun at the time, but you thought this just Tazza is just not going to work out, like we need to shut the doors. We need to, you know, abandon ship, however you thought about it, that were really scary times, but obviously you got through those and thrived. But anything that you can share that, that now that you’re past those hefty challenges, you look back on those and and say, Wow, we made it,

Alex Whitmore 21:42
yeah, well, I mean, the big one early on, which almost put us under, was, there was this massive mid summer rainstorm, and something happened with the the water, you know, Flood control management system in the in the watershed here, and it backed up, basically all the sewer, all the all the water backed up in the entire square where we are operating here, and the police station got flooded. The, I mean, tons of buildings got flooded. You know, 18 inches of water and basically on groundwater, just running through the streets, kind of thing. And that shut us down. And it shut us down, and we had to, we lost a lot of inventory, and we weren’t able to operate, you know, obviously the FDA came and closed our doors, kind of thing. And we had to completely remove all the, all the drywall, all the, all the walls. Had to come down and get completely replaced. We had to clean everything out, sanitize everything and then rebuild. And we almost, we almost went out of business, but it was because of our relationship locally in the community here in Somerville, we were able to raise money locally by selling Tazza dollars that could be used later, when we were back up and running to our many local supporters and fans. A lot of a lot of retailers put on big tiles at chocolate sales for the with the remaining inventory that we did have to try to raise money and and we were supported by the city, and it was really just a big community support. And then, of course, insurance eventually came through, and we were able to get through it. But, you know, there were so many things like that that happened, though, that was like the first big one, and now we’re in a cocoa crisis. I don’t know if you know about it, but prices had spiked

Kara Goldin 23:38
well, and that was my next question. What’s what is happening behind the scenes that most consumers don’t see around the cacao pricing?

Alex Whitmore 23:49
Yeah, so basically, starting in late 2023 kind of a long brewing, some long brewing issues in the cacao sector really came to a head, and inventories got depleted. There was a bad crop year for a couple of years straight, and then there was another one coming. And basically it was a classic supply demand crunch. There was all of a sudden not enough cacao, and there was too much demand, and prices spiked, and this was because of years of under investment and prices that were probably too low, that was being corrected. And, and, and we’re still paying for it. Cacao prices went from what they were kind of around 2800 to $3,000 a ton. They spiked all the way up to about $12,500 a ton. So massive price inflation. And then right when that happens, we got hit by the tariffs. So the tariffs hit when the cocoa prices were right, like $12,000 A ton. So any, any cocoa that was getting imported at $12,000 a ton got 10% hit on top of it that we are still paying.

Kara Goldin 25:09
And so how do you plan? How do you plan for that? I mean, how do you like? It’s tough,

Alex Whitmore 25:16
yeah, well, you don’t and you’re like, as you probably know, with your experience at hints, there’s always something, and this is that something that happened to us and and it happens, there’s always something in it. You know, five years ago it was, it was covid, you know, no one could have planned for that, right? And so there’s always something that you have to handle as a business, as a as a business owner, as an operator, as a manufacturer, and and, and right now it’s, it’s the cacao crisis. Five years ago, it was covid 19, and who knows what it’s going to be next year.

Kara Goldin 25:56
So what excites you most about where Taza is going next. You have, you know, 20 years in this company, you’ve really made your mark. Set the bar very, very high for the industry. And when, when you look at all that you’ve done, I mean, there has to be even more to be excited about, because you built this really, really solid company. But what are you most excited about as Tazza heads into 2026

Alex Whitmore 26:32
Yeah, well, I mean, the changes in the industry are have been immense because of the cocoa crisis, but, but also because, you know, the world’s changing very quickly. That being said, food is food, you know, and, and I think when you have a food business, it’s really your responsibility to just keep making really great, high quality food, and if you do, you get rewarded for it. So I think there’s, there’s always trends in the industry. And right now, Dubai chocolates all the rage. Everyone wants the pistachio, you know, the pistachio flavor and their chocolate. We tend to not chase those. We really just stick with our our core focus, which is just really celebrating the flavor of amazing quality cacao in our chocolate products. So for me, it’s about sourcing great quality beans and doing so in a really challenging supply chain environment, but also being able to launch fun and new flavors. So we’re constantly innovating, and in such a competitive category, you really have to keep innovating to survive. And so, you know, last year we, we, we really started selling a lot of the the oat milk chocolate that we make. We our entire plant is dairy free and vegan. And so we, we’ve been asked for years by our customers to have like, a milk style chocolate. So we were able to launch that. And, and, yeah, I mean, really, it’s just about continuing to make chocolate we’re really proud of every day and just being really proud to come to work. So that’s, that’s what we’re hoping to achieve. It sounds very modest, but, but that’s what you know. That’s what I believe food manufacturing and food production should be. And I think that you know, in a lot of ways, you have people, you know, companies that really Chase super high growth. It’s not necessarily very, very sustainable, especially in food, which I think is supposed to be slower. So that’s what really we’re really focused on.

Kara Goldin 28:46
Alex, thank you so much for sharing all of this today. Your journey from building a an incredible company out of just that little moment in Mexico where you had this idea, and you just decided to bring it back to Boston and start trying. It’s, it’s super, super inspiring. So for everyone listening, be sure to check out Tazza chocolate and follow Taza to hear a lot more about what they’re up to and all the new SKUs that are they’re coming out with as well. So thank you again. Alex, really appreciate it.

Alex Whitmore 29:27
Likewise, Kara, it’s been a pleasure, and I it’s been great to meet you and and learn more about hint, and I’m grateful for you having me on the program.

Kara Goldin 29:38
Thank you so much, and thanks everyone for listening until next time on the Kara Goldin show. Thank you. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Do. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and good bye for now.

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