Page 34 - the NOISE February 2015

BUSINESSNEWS
A NOURISHING CHOCOLATE
HANDCRAFTED IN SEDONA, LULU’S SETS THE BAR
FROM LEFT: At Lulu’s Chocoloate Lounge in Sedona; Ms. Sharpe with a sampling of delectibles; behind the scenes at the tidy hands-on factory.
STORY BY CLAIR ANNA ROSE
PHOTOS BY
RENE R. RIVAS
Walking into Lulu’s Chocolate Lounge is any choc- olate lover’s dream come true. When asked to visit with Lulu’s Chocolate creator, Louise Sharpe, I mis-
takenly thought I’d be walking into a chocolate shop full of temptations that I would, as a gluten-free, dairy-free, health conscious person, have to resist.
That was until Ms. Sharpe told me everything in Lulu’s Chocolate Lounge is gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, soy-free, raw, organic, and made with low-glycemic co- conut sugar. Knowing I could safely eat anything on the menu is a luxury I rarely get to indulge, and at first I was in disbelief.
“We’ve created this 100% vegan, organic, low-glyce- mic, gluten-free place and people can walk in and rest assured every single thing here follows those standards,” Ms. Sharpe tells me. “People who have dietary restric- tions don’t have restrictions in here. You can get things you wouldn’t expect from a place like this — like a milk- shake, but we call them Bliss shakes. That’s something that makes me very happy. I’m really specific about what I’ll put in my body, so I get to offer people what I think is great. The vegan milk shakes are probably our number one drink hit, made with Coconut Bliss ice cream and coconut milk.”
“There’s not really a place in Sedona where I feel you can go and get super healthy alternative stuff that tastes naughty but feels really nice, so I wanted to create that,” she tells me. “I really love herbal combinations, so to have a couple tonics I’m really excited about. We have two herbal combinations; one is the Aphrodite, it’s got heart-opening rose, pine pollen and maca in it. We have a libido tonic for men and one for women made locally at Herbal Vitality. It’s full of really good herbs that sup- port hormones, sex drive and balance. So, depending on who orders a drink we put in a male or female libido tonic. The Apollo has a vanilla cream soda flavor, and it has chaga, which is a master mushroom for the immune system. So these are overall grounding, immune sys- tem support, adrenal support, sexual system supportive drinks. Pine pollen helps with seasonal allergies but also is good for male and female hormonal balance.”
Another “bar” Lulu’s has set above other chocolate bars on the market is the ingredients found within ev- ery gold wrapper — cacao, coconut sugar, vanilla bean & sea salt are the base for all the creations — with abso- lutely no fillers or additives.
While most of the chocolate bars on the market, in- cluding many organic and raw bars, contain soy lecithin, Lulu’s does not. “Lots of people have issues with soy and
that can cause problems. It’s an unneeded additive. It’s just for giving the chocolate a smoother texture, but if you grind your chocolate and temper it well, you don’t need it. As far as cheap chocolate goes, you’re legally able to put X amount of vegetable wax in place of cacao butter, which saves tons of money, but you don’t have to list it as long as it’s under a percentage. It’s just another additive that shouldn’t be there.”
After I grow accustomed to the idea that I can eat the entire inventory if I choose, Ms. Sharpe and I move away from dis- cussing the health benefits of her chocolates and I ask how she came to be a chocolatier.
Originally from Tennessee, Ms. Sharpe was living in Portland, Oregon when she first began making chocolate. “I started making chocolate in 2006 after a trip to Hawaii,” she tells me.
“I was on a cleanse and I wasn’t eating sugar. My friend had a cacao tree, so I got to pick a cacao pod and eat cacao straight from the source. I just felt ecstatic and thought, This is it. It was my first clue that eating chocolate didn’t mean you had to be eating dairy and sugar and fillers. But, on the market there wasn’t a really clean chocolate. So I started making my own chocolate for myself — I never planned to start a business. I was teaching yoga and bartending and happy doing that.”
Ms. Sharpe began to make chocolate in her home and her friends loved it. “I went to Burning Man and made chocolate for the whole camp every day,” she recalls. “Then Christmas came and 30 people called me in one night ... and they or- dered chocolate. I just started making chocolate and cut my other jobs. I made more and more chocolate until all of a sud- den I was running a chocolate business.”
Her friendship with the ChocolàTree and the offer to rent their equipment is what brought Ms. Sharpe to Sedona. With the move to the ChocolàTree, Lulu’s Chocolate could go from producing 200 chocolate bars in an 8-hour day to 1200. “I moved here to use his equipment in 2010 and to make my business bigger,” she says. “For the first four years, I pushed a cart around at a festival. I did the whole West Coast festival circuit selling chocolate out of a cart and I sold to local stores. Now we’re in about 400 stores. I have Lulu’s Chocolate Lounge for the first time ever now, and a website for direct sales.”
When Lulu’s Chocolate moved to their new kitchen space in December 2013, the front room seemed like the perfect spot to use as a retail space and Lulu’s Chocolate Lounge opened August 2014. “All of a sudden I got really excited about the idea, because when you make something for mar- ket you have to order all the packaging — 10,000 minimum of this, 20,000 of that,” Ms. Sharpe says. “So what started out as me being very creative and making up chocolate flavors turned into a production line. Now I can make a chocolate I’m in the mood to make. The other day I made a cherry truffle.
I’m not going to market it, and I’m not going to create all the packaging, but I can sell it in here. This gives me a venue to be creative again and get back in the kitchen and make up flavors. I can rotate flavors through Lulu’s Chocolate Lounge. I can test flavors and see what peo- ple like and how they respond without the commitment of doing a full, wholesale production.”
In addition to Love Truffles, Maca Butter cups, and a variety of packaged bars Lulu’s creates for wholesale, the lounge has a case with small batches of Ms. Sharpe’s most recent creations: body butter, sipping chocolate, chocolate coins, lemon chocolate bites, peppermint, and a habañero caramel truffle, which tastes sweet, but has a delayed kick of spice that makes the ears tingle.
Lulu’s has six employees in the kitchen, three in the of- fice and two in the lounge. “Being able to employ really awesome people is probably my favorite thing about running my own business,” Ms. Sharpe tells me. “I really love my whole crew, I call them the dream team instead of my employees. They’re awesome.”
Lulu’s makes bars and truffles from raw, sun-dried ca- cao. “We get our cacao in, melt it, and put our recipes in a granite stone grinder and everything is ground at low temperatures. This is raw chocolate, so we have to keep it all under 113 degrees,” Ms. Sharpe explains. “We do a slow grind and once the cacao is totally smooth and all the flavors are in, we dump it into our chocolate temper- ing machine, which brings the chocolate to the perfect temperature for that nice shine and snap. We pour it into our chocolate molds, then it’s chilled and sealed in Nature Flex wrappers, which is a compostable, gold wrapper.
“We heat seal them to keep the oxygen out and keep them super fresh. Then we’re ready to put the paper wrapper on the bar ... And all of our packaging is recycled, soy ink and it’s all done by hand. If we’re topping a bar
— say our sprouted almond bar — we get the almonds, we sprout them, dehydrate them, chop all the almonds and hand top every single bar. It’s truly hand-crafted, we don’t have any machines that package our chocolate.”
On Valentine’s Day, Lulu’s Chocolate Lounge will host live music by Zirque Michael Bonner from 6PM to 9PM and all day, customers will receive a free love truffle & 10% off purchases 11AM to 10PM. In addition to tasting new, limited chocolate flavors & truffles at the lounge on West 89A, Lulu’s Chocolate can be found in many fine establish- ments throughout Arizona. luluschocolatelove.com
| Miss Rose does not have any more chocolates in her pockets already! business@thenoise.us
34 • FEBRUARY 2015 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us