Xocolatl · Atlanta, Georgia
A small square.
A much
larger world.
Elaine Read and Matt Weyandt went to Costa Rica looking for a different pace of life. The chocolate company they brought home carries the relationships they found there.
After the children were asleep
Some beginnings
are small enough
to share.
The detail I love in Xocolatl’s founding story is how slowly the chocolate was eaten.
Elaine Read and Matt Weyandt describe buying a bar at a local farmers market in Costa Rica, then sharing a small square in the evenings after their young children were asleep. The purchase stretched their budget. The pleasure stretched across the week.
That is a very different beginning from sitting down to invent a product. They were making room for something they enjoyed. They were paying enough attention to become curious.
I think most of us know that kind of small ritual. The day has asked a lot of you. You finally sit down with another person and share something that belongs to the two of you for a few minutes. It need not be elaborate to become one of the things you remember.
In this case, the pleasure opened a door. The couple began to wonder whether they could learn to make the chocolate they had come to love and introduce it to Atlanta.
What interests me is the scale of the original feeling. Before Xocolatl became an Atlanta chocolate maker, before there was a factory or a team, there were two people wanting to understand a good thing they had found.
Learning from a place
The people already knew
what the visitors had just discovered.
In a 2023 interview with The Chocolate Professor, Elaine credited two local chocolate makers with generously teaching them. The lessons included developing a roast profile and understanding drying times.
I am glad that detail is in the record. It changes the shape of the origin story.
Costa Rica was a place where people were already growing cacao, making chocolate, and understanding the work. Elaine and Matt arrived as curious learners. Someone chose to help them become capable.
That generosity deserves a place beside the founders’ initiative. A new business often contains knowledge somebody else was willing to share. We tend to remember the moment the new company opened. The earlier act of teaching can be just as consequential.
The couple’s eventual return to Atlanta therefore carried more than an idea. It carried the beginning of a craft learned through relationships. Xocolatl opened its Krog Street Market micro-factory and shop in late 2014, after the founders had spent time developing their recipes and technique.
There is something appealing about allowing yourself to be a beginner after you have already had a professional life. It asks for a particular kind of humility. You have to let another person show you what you do not yet understand.
In the story of Xocolatl, that willingness becomes part of the business’s character. The founders’ curiosity did not end with enjoying the result. They wanted to understand the work that made it possible.
A change of work
The questions
came with them.
A new occupation can carry an older sense of purpose.
Before chocolate, Elaine worked in international relief and nonprofit organizations, including the Peace Corps. Matt worked in politics, including as a campaign manager for John Lewis. In their conversation with Slow Food Atlanta, they connect the company to longstanding concerns about the environment, producers’ livelihoods, and the world their children would inherit.
That continuity makes the career change more interesting to me. A person can change what they do each morning without leaving behind everything they cared about before.
Chocolate gave Elaine and Matt a material to work with and a network of people to consider. Someone grows the cacao. Someone prepares it for shipment. Someone makes the chocolate. Someone buys it. Choices made at one point can have consequences at another.
I find that a useful way to understand the ambition here. A small company can be a place to practice paying attention to those connections. Its size does not eliminate the questions. It may make some of the relationships close enough to know by name.
It also keeps the story from becoming a simple escape narrative. They went looking for a different way to live. They returned to work with a new set of responsibilities, informed by much of what had mattered to them all along.
The people before the chocolate
A country name is
only the beginning.
Xocolatl’s origins page gives its sourcing relationships names. It describes Gifford Laube and Cacao Bisiesto in Nicaragua, the CAC Pangoa cooperative in Peru, Kokoa Kamili in Tanzania, and Latitude Trade Company in Uganda.
One detail is especially useful. The page explains that Cacao Bisiesto purchases wet cacao from neighboring farmers and handles further fermentation and drying. Kokoa Kamili also takes on centralized post-harvest work. Those descriptions let a reader see that the route from farm to maker includes distinct kinds of expertise.
I appreciate that willingness to introduce the people and organizations between a landscape and a finished bar. A place name can easily become a mood. A relationship asks us to consider actual work.
There is also a difference between saying an ingredient comes from somewhere and explaining how you came to know the people there. Xocolatl describes introductions through other makers and continuing contact with its partners. The company’s world becomes visible as a set of human connections.
To me, that is where the story acquires depth. The founders’ discovery in Costa Rica was the beginning of their own learning. It led them toward other people with histories, abilities, and ambitions of their own.
The chocolate is the point where those contributions become something a person in Atlanta, or elsewhere, can hold. Giving the earlier work a name allows a little more of the story to travel with it.
A former chocolate maker helps ask a new question.
There is another relationship in Xocolatl’s account that I find revealing. On its sustainability page, the company says it commissioned a life-cycle analysis in 2021 from a former Xocolatl chocolate maker who was completing graduate study at Georgia Tech.
The person had known the work from inside the business. Further study gave them another way to look at it.
That is an appealing kind of continuity. Someone can leave one role and return with knowledge that helps former colleagues see their own operation differently. The relationship is allowed to develop along with the person.
The company describes gathering information across its production process, from transport to packaging and its own energy use. I am interested in the decision to ask a more exact question. Concern becomes more useful when people are willing to investigate what their work actually involves.
In the Slow Food interview, the founders use a short phrase for their approach: “There is no finish line.” I read that as a commitment to remain teachable.
A business founded through somebody else’s generous instruction has good reason to keep learning. The questions get more complicated as the company grows. Being curious enough to ask them remains a strength.
What I admire
The world gets larger
when you pay attention.
I keep returning to that small square shared in the evening.
It is an ordinary enough pleasure. Yet following it attentively led Elaine and Matt toward teachers, farmers, cooperatives, a neighborhood market, employees, and a company with a life beyond the two people who started it.
That is the part of Xocolatl’s story that stays with me. A personal pleasure became a reason to take more interest in other people’s work.
The best founder stories leave those other people visible. They give credit to the person who taught the unfamiliar process, the farmer whose crop made the work possible, the colleague who returned with a new skill. A company has a name, but it rarely has only two authors.
For Elaine and Matt, the original curiosity became something practical. They learned to make chocolate. They built a business. They kept introducing the people behind it.
A small square can be enough to start paying attention. What happens after that depends on how far you are willing to follow the story.
Rob Urban
The story in context
About Xocolatl.
Who founded Xocolatl Chocolate?
Elaine Read and Matt Weyandt founded Xocolatl in Atlanta after learning about craft chocolate during a family stay in Costa Rica.
When did Xocolatl open in Atlanta?
Xocolatl opened its micro-factory and retail shop at Krog Street Market in late 2014, following a period of learning and recipe development.
What does bean-to-bar mean in Xocolatl’s story?
It describes a chocolate maker working from cacao beans to finished chocolate. For Xocolatl, learning that craft also meant getting to know the people growing and preparing its cacao.
Why are sourcing relationships part of this article?
Xocolatl names its cacao partners and explains their roles. Those relationships help reveal the people and knowledge behind the finished chocolate.