Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Lauren Blanco
Sweet product, sweet mission
When Lauren Blanco told her parents she had decided on cultural anthropology as her major during her sophomore year at the University of Arkansas, they were perplexed, and, perhaps, a little bit concerned. It wasn’t the first time their daughter had raised their eyebrows with her educational choices:
She had left her hometown of Shreveport — in fact, left her home state of Louisiana — to attend school six hours away in Fayetteville, where she had tenuous connections, at best, with only one or two people.
“While I loved my high school experience, I wanted something new and different,” explains Blanco, who was a focused student and competitive soccer player in high school. “I kind of wanted to get out on my own and not be tied to the same history.”
And once at the UA, Blanco surprised her parents by signing up for Swahili her first semester.
“I just really enjoy language,” she says. “And I saw this ‘SWA’ on the schedule, and I said, ‘Is that Swahili?’ And the person that was helping me enroll in classes said, ‘Yes!’ and then just raved and raved about it. It was a six hour course! I said, ‘Yeah, sign me up for that!’
“I came out, and my parents were waiting for me and said, ‘OK, what did you sign up for?’ and when they heard, they were like, ‘What? We’re not paying for that!’ I said, ‘OK, guys, just let me take it one semester, and then I’ll drop it and do whatever you want.’ So I dropped it at the end of the semester. And then a year later, I picked it back up again because I loved it so much.”
Blanco says it didn’t help that she couldn’t tell her parents exactly what she planned on doing with a major in cultural anthropology. Her parents, as most do, wanted her to have a clear idea of where she was headed.
“At that age, I still didn’t know,” she says. “I just wanted to do
“Am I surprised [Lauren] has been successful? Absolutely not. She puts her whole self into what she is doing. And because she’s a lifelong learner, she’s not afraid to risk and try new things.” — Ashley Goad, friend and colleague
something I loved. At that point, I was sort of pushing back on my parents a lot. I felt like in high school, I was doing what I was told, and then in college, it was, ‘OK, figure out who you are.’ So I thought to myself, ‘I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know that this is going to be worth it.’ They said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to study business?’”
Blanco pauses to laugh at the irony. Today, this young woman is a co-founder and CEO of Hello Cocoa (re-branding soon as Markham & Fitz), a smallbatch, handmade chocolate company located in Fayetteville that sources its cacao beans in an ethical and sustainable manner through direct trade with farmers from far-flung locales like Uganda, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic.
She somehow managed to find a career that blended her interests with her parents’ wishes for her.
A CALL TO ACTION
Blanco felt the tug to do something meaningful with her life early on: The granddaughter of a Methodist minister, Blanco says religion played a big role in her life growing up. She worked closely with the Methodist church in her hometown, volunteering to work with youth groups. When she visited Haiti twice on mission trips with her church — once before the 2010 earthquake that devastated the country and again six months afterward — she says she started to see a little bit of the world that existed beyond Shreveport. And she wanted to do something to help.
“My high school life was very sheltered, almost in a bubble,” she says. “My kind of white suburban life as a child. It wasn’t until college that I felt like the bubble kind of burst a little bit. I hadn’t been anywhere internationally before that.
“I was just kind of naturally drawn to other cultures. And I just had this natural bent towards social change.”
A semester abroad her junior year would cement her desire to see and understand more of the world. Blanco received a scholarship to complete her international studies.
“My parents cried when I told them I was studying abroad,” she says. “At first, I told them I wanted to go to Senegal, and they said, ‘You’re never going all the way to Africa.’ So I said, ‘All right, France.’ And then they still cried. I said, ‘Guys, I really tried hard for this!’” Blanco laughs. “But it was right after the movie Taken came out, so …”
France turned out to be a phenomenal experience for Blanco, who was completely without reins for the first time in her life.
“I felt like I was coming into my own,” she says.
“I mean, the whole wide world was at my fingertips. I was so independent.
That’s so formative for a
20-year old.”
By the time she finished college, Blanco was married to her college sweetheart,
Mark, and the two relocated to Tulsa, Okla., for Mark’s job.
“I wanted to get into the nonprofit world, but I didn’t know what that looked like,” says Blanco. “I didn’t know what it would take. I didn’t know if I needed to get a regular job and then volunteer my way in.” In fact, she did just that when she volunteered for a nonprofit called ForgottenSong.
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Blanco. “I got involved with it right after I married, and, five weeks later, I took a two-week trip to Uganda. It was my first time in Africa.
I had spent a lot of time studying sub-Saharan Africa, so it was something that
I always wanted to do.”
Blanco was taken by everything she experienced on the trip: the people she met, the country she visited and the mission of the organization she was helping to represent.
crazy,”was was “It a also was greatshea wonderfulvery remembers. experience. spiritual and “It It experience.different communityWe met with leaders. They were all pastors, and they had these schools in orphanages. They were really wonderful people.
We had raised funds for a trip to help start the first
[ForgottenSong] project. So we got to witness the birthing of this poultry farm, which was supposed to be a self-sustainable model for these children’s schools and living situations, integrated into part of their education.
“In one of the meetings that was kind of like a vision casting meeting, we were learning a lot about our partners’ vision for their country as a whole, and it was just like these sparks started flying. I thought, ‘This is what I’ve always wanted.’ These are the conversations that I wanted to hear to understand cross-cultural the dynamics.depth of And I said, ‘What do you need from me?’ I turned to Charles who is the founder and director of Forgotten Song, and I said, ‘OK, so can I work for you?’ Because at that point I was still a volunteer. He said, ‘I was always hoping you would say that.’”
CHIEF OF CHOCOLATE
Blanco would work for Forgotten Song for four years, first as its director of international affairs and later as its associate director. Its founder, Charles Davidson, was the one who originally had the idea for the chocolate company, she says.
“He started a business with someone else, back in the day,” she says. “Then they went their separate ways, and [Davidson] was looking for partners. And by that time, I had seen it and thought, ‘Wow, this is actually a cool project.’ I saw it as an opportunity for me to express what I was learning there. ‘We’re teaching people how to be financially self-sustainable through small business, and I’ve never run a small business. I need to practice what I’m preaching.’ I wanted to learn more about business so that I could give that knowledge to others in a more constructive way.”
Preston Stewart is also a co-founder and now serves as the company’s “Chief Chocolate Officer,” in charge of creating new — and finessing classic — recipes for the company. Originally a biochemistry major who spent some time in a bio tech lab, he says he realized that he wanted a more creative, people-oriented career and was intrigued by the idea of creating innovative, delicious chocolate concoctions.
“Initially, my passion for getting involved was seeing people’s faces light up when they try our chocolate,” says Stewart. “The ‘wow’ factor and celebrating the goodness of chocolate. But as I got to know Lauren and as we’ve gotten to travel together and I’ve done a deep dive into the industry, it’s cool to know that, even on a small scale, we’re impacting the cacao supply chain. There are dozens of small makers like us, and our cacao purchasing power together is influencing the local market [in other countries]. “
Blanco describes a process that started out almost as an experimental lark, a casual project that slowly got more serious as its potential became more obvious.
“I would have never started my own business by myself,” she says. “It wouldn’t happen. But there were a bunch of us together who were going to do this. ‘Let’s put our passion together and let’s sell chocolate.’ It was very hodgepodge: ‘Let’s do this thing. This is a fun project. What can we make of it?’ And that’s how it started.
“We had met some cacao farmers in Uganda and saw that side of the process. We saw how it was part of their livelihoods and that it was a real means of economic development. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is awesome. Let’s do direct trade, go and meet people and create lasting relationships that are meaningful to all of us.’”
The team aspect of the project was fun, says Blanco, but it meant that no one was in charge. No salaries were being paid, and the team members worked on the project on a catch-as-catch-can basis, in between hours at their regular jobs. Blanco reached a fork in the road when she realized that she needed to get serious about the business or accept that it was a hobby project, destined to go no further. After Davidson and his wife moved to Washington, D.C., Blanco and her husband moved from Springfield, Mo., back to Fayetteville so she could take on the company full time.
“We moved back to Fayetteville because we wanted to see what we could do with the company,” she says. “We chose to move because we saw potential here. My ambition was coming out, and I kind of said, ‘Look, guys, we’re not going to be able to accomplish anything if no one is leading. And I would like to do that.’”
“We decided we actually needed to have a leader,” says Stewart. “We were kind of doing these things on a whim, without a plan. So when we met as a team last December, it was kind of a very obvious decision for her to be the leader for a couple of different reasons. When we would have meetings, she was the most opinionated and had a vision for the direction in which we wanted to head.”
Both Stewart and Blanco say that the first thing to change after formalizing an organizational structure was that they both put more time and effort into gaining national exposure for their product.
“We developed almost a devotion to retail,” says Blanco. “And we found retail to be a strength of ours. We went to craft shows and farmers markets and things like that. Before, we had kind of refused, because it was a hobby, and people were basically like, ‘I don’t want to work on a Saturday.’ But I thought, ‘Well, you know, this is the only way we’re going to get some brand recognition.’ My goal was, ‘How do I push this as hard as I can?’ I traveled to different cities to sell wholesale, and we did retail shows and other events.”
“I think we thrive at events, where we’re having face-to-face interactions with customers,” says Stewart. “Especially in this area, craft chocolate still requires a good bit of education to help the consumer understand why it’s six to eight dollars. Once they taste the product, they can tell the difference. That’s my favorite part: doing tours and educating the customers on the science of production, tasting chocolate and the whole sensory experience.”
BRICKS AND MORTAR
And the company seems to be full steam ahead. Under the new name of Markham & Fitz (two names that Blanco says hold personal meaning to the partners) the duo will be opening a dessert and wine bar at 8th Street Market, the multi-vendor food market that is adjacent to the Brightwater culinary school in Bentonville. The target date for opening is
December 2017.
“I swear, the day I was envisioning Hello Cocoa, I was also imagining a space like this,” says Blanco excitedly. “I remember sitting in my apartment and being on Pinterest and thinking, ‘What if we could make this space, and it feels like this, and it looks like this?’ At that time, there was no feasible way for us to do something like that, but it’s been in my mind for three years now. So it’s really cool that we have this opportunity at the 8th Street Market. It’s a super collaborative project, which is so amazing and appealing to me. It’s just an incredible opportunity to work with some amazing chefs and entrepreneurs.”
Blanco says the vision of this new project is a blend of chocolate factory and chocolate bar, with chocolate used in a variety of new and unexpected ways.
“Chocolate is not just candy bar,” she says. “It’s a drink, hot or cold. It’s a dessert, it’s a pastry, it’s a confection, it’s a super food.”
And Blanco has bigger plans. Perhaps expanding the chocolate bar concept to other parts of Northwest Arkansas; almost definitely casting a wider net and seeking out more international partners from whom to source Markham & Fitz’s cacao supply; hopefully expanding national and international distribution.
But, above all, always striving for excellence.
“We want to be one of the top quality chocolate makers in the United States,” says Blanco firmly. “I say top, I mean 20 percent. Maybe 10 percent. There is no true grading for that, but there are people that are recognized, and we want to be among them. So we’re working on improving quality. I am quite a perfectionist, and I feel like sometimes I’m hard on the team, but I’m just always trying to push us to make something as amazing as we can.”
One thing is absolutely for certain: There’s no longer a need for Lauren Blanco’s parents to be concerned about her. She has officially found her calling.