Ritual Chocolate is a food and drink brand headquartered in Heber City, Utah. It was founded in Boulder, Colorado, in 2010.
For every pound of chocolate Ritual sells, Robbie Stout told Visit Utah, "we lift it 25 times." At the Heber City factory, each batch spends three days in a massive white conche built in Switzerland around 1915. The dark bars contain only cacao beans and cane sugar, so the machines get most of the credit.
Stout and Anna Davies started Ritual in Boulder, Colorado, in 2010, with more ambition than cash. They winnowed shells with PVC pipe rigged in the backyard and roasted beans in a converted countertop chicken rotisserie oven. Then Steve DeVries, a Denver chocolate maker, leased them his lab, and they learned on century-old machinery. In 2015 they moved to Park City, won over by small business grant money and trail access.
Every batch also runs twice through a three-roll refiner built in Brooklyn in the 1950s, which grinds the particles down to 10 to 15 microns. Ritual is still owned by its two founders, and because it began in Colorado, Utah's claim is the factory rather than the founding. Its 2016 Good Food Award went to the Mid Mountain bar, named for a Park City trail. Trails were half the reason they moved.
Every Ritual package is stamped with the harvest year of the cacao inside, along with its batch number.
New from Ritual Chocolate
Ritual drops the folding box
Ritual Chocolate said on September 21 that the folding box is going. That box had gotten expensive to put together, especially around the holidays.
