AhHome Chocolate: Evergreen Love

It all began with the Chocolate Team. A love cultivated since childhood…

AhHome Chocolate is the brand founded by Evergreen Love, built on that early devotion and shaped by years of persistence. Today, that vision lives inside a chocolate factory and chocolate lounge in Trinity County, California, where Evergreen crafts superfood chocolate from scratch and creates a space designed to uplift her community.

From kitchen experiments to a fully realized gathering place, her journey reflects steady determination, creative problem solving, and a belief that chocolate can nourish connection as much as it satisfies appetite.

Listen to her story in the latest episode of The Chocolate Pod. 🍫🎙️🎧

Discover more at www.TheChocolatePodcast.com

Transcript

Welcome to the Chocolate Pod, a show about founders and innovators in the craft chocolate industry and the stories behind the chocolate they create. I'm Zack Gallinger-Long and today we're catching up with Evergreen Love of AhHome Chocolate, based in Trinity County, California. From a young age, Evergreen has been passionate about chocolate. When she was just three years old, she started the Chocolate Team, an exclusive club for chocolate enthusiasts of the highest order, which included her father and grandmother to begin with. Today, now in her 20s, she's the creator and chocolatier behind AhHome Chocolate, where she crafts superfood chocolates from organic ingredients, fair trade cacao, and sweetens it all with maple crystals. As you'll hear in today's episode, Evergreen is an impressively driven young entrepreneur who is making a name for herself in the craft chocolate industry, living proof that you really can mix it all with love and make the world taste good. All that and more coming up in this week's episode of the Chocolate Pod.

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About 50 miles west of Redding, California, the road narrows, the trees grow taller, and the pace slows. You've found your way to the small town of Weaverville, population just over 3,000. Continue along Main Street to 1260, and you'll come across a cozy lounge and a working chocolate factory built from the imagination of Evergreen Love. Come with me as we step inside this whimsical world and unwrap the story of AhHome Chocolate.

Hi Evergreen, welcome to The Chocolate Pod. As we get started, was hoping you could tell us what first got you interested in chocolate. 

So I started the chocolate team when I was three years old. Real exciting time, I loved chocolate and fell in love with the darker, darker the better, with my dad and my grandma who were the four members of the chocolate team. My mom was not allowed, she liked white chocolate. And since then I have converted her. It's pretty exciting. I do make a variety of white chocolate with cashew butter. I shared some with her and she said, honey, I think I like your dark chocolate better now. But now I just share chocolate with the world. 

So between the chocolate team at age three and where you are today, when did you start making chocolate on your own? 

Eight years ago in Indiana, all experimental batches. My friend couldn't have refined sugars and I could not afford my chocolate habit. So of course, I merged those two issues and I find a solution. I start making chocolate with honey and maple syrup. So that was the core of it. Always the fair trade cacao, organic ingredients, real simple. Cacao powder, cacao butter, maple syrup, honey, and salt. Started adding all sorts of interesting inclusions like essential oils, herbs, and berries and flavors that we don't usually get to see that people often use in herbal medicine like schisandra berry. It's a tart exotic berry. It comes from the eastern side of the world. It's been used for centuries for its adaptogenic properties, but it has flavors that most people have never tasted before. So, it's something pretty fun to share and introduce people to not only chocolate, but chocolate being able to be a vessel. I started making chocolate in 2018. I came up with the name AhHome and then launched the business in 2022. It's just grown since then. People really appreciated the quality craftsmanship, the ingredients, it's this desire for wholesome foods and the craft chocolate. And a lot of people are familiar with it. A lot of people aren't. Once they open their eyes and taste buds to it, we're hooked. 

Can you help us as consumers understand some of the costs that are involved with making craft chocolate?

From what I understand about 5 % of the cacao on the market is Fair Trade cacao. So that already fetches a higher price. And if we're going for quality standards, so you want good flavors or quality product or ingredient, organic is often a great way to go. 

Sometimes we meet with craft chocolatiers who are bean to bar, and we're thinking of making an episode about that topic. But could you tell us how things are at AhHome Chocolate? Are you bean to bar?

I'm moving into the bean to bar industry, but right now it's nib to bar. So, I use the nibs, I grind those down in my melangers, I add maple crystals. So that's what I've moved into ever since starting that original recipe. I mix those ingredients, temper it, pour those chocolate molds, design the packaging, but a lot of crap chocolate makers will go bean to bar. So roasting the beans, winnowing, melanging, tempering, and then packaging. 

And just to make sure people are familiar, can you describe what a cacao nib is? 

So a cacao nib comes from the cacao beans. And cacao beans are the seeds inside of the cocoa pod. Lots of people don't realize that chocolate comes from a fruit. It's totally amazing. It tastes delicious! When it's raw, it's so much different than the roasted final product. So I like to use a comparison of peanuts and the peanut butter. You've got this peanut and it's hard. You can grind it into the smooth consistency and you could add sugars and flavors if you'd like but chocolate is very similar. You have your cocoa bean that grows inside of the pod, which is fermented with its fruit. Delicious, sweet tart fruit fermented with the beans. The beans are then dried and then beans once dried are roasted, usually, shelled, which is called winnowing. And then we have the nibs. We have our crunchy 100 % cacao. 

So how does someone get started in making chocolate and then learn to scale from there?

For me, a lot of it started with budget, more of a grassroots movement that I started with this chocolate business, bringing chocolate to people one chocolate bar at a time. Started with a double boiler mixing half a pound of chocolate and adding ingredients and buying tools as I could. So I've been building up since then. didn't start with a $2,000 chocolate factory. I started with maybe $50 worth of tools. 

Evergreen just shared something that I don't want to overlook. She didn't start with a business plan. She didn't start with funding. She didn't start with a commercial kitchen, a brand, or even the idea that she was going to start a chocolate company. She started with one very specific issue, a friend who couldn't have refined sugar. And instead of waiting for the perfect setup, she asked a simple question. What can I do with what I have right now? This is where so many of us get stuck. We think we need everything mapped out before we begin. The logo, the website, the strategy, the five-year plan. And while all those things absolutely matter, they don't have to come first. Evergreen's story is a reminder that momentum doesn't come from having more. It comes from being willing to start with what's in front of you. We can't wait for all the traffic lights of life to be green before we decide to go. Progress begins when we work with the tools we have available and the time we've been allotted. AhHome Chocolate didn't begin as a business. It began with Evergreen standing over a double boiler, making individual chocolate bars for one person who had a need. And the commitment to making those bars, learning, adjusting, improving with each batch is what eventually enabled her to take on the challenge of opening that chocolate factory. It wasn't the factory that enabled her to start. It was because she started that she was eventually able to have a factory. When we come back in just a moment, Evergreen tells us what it took to make that step in her business. Stay with us, I'm Zack Gallinger Long and you're listening to The Chocolate Pod.

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Welcome back to The Chocolate Pod. I'm Zack Gallinger Long. So just a few years ago, Evergreen had the opportunity to make the leap from a friend's commercial kitchen to owning her own chocolate factory. As we'll hear, it took some determination and a good amount of support from her community. But as always, Evergreen figured it out. 

Where do you find yourself today? How has the business grown?

So we've grown from our friends' commercial kitchen to another local commissary kitchen. And the mission has been to provide a space for folks to gather around chocolate and music, art, and a wholesome space that's safe for all ages. There was this bakery that had closed down, it had been about 50 years old and I saw an opportunity to remodel it and open up the space for folks to gather, make chocolate because we were expanding.

share that with the people. So we're in Trinity County, was an actual factory and a chocolate lounge. 

So, what are some of the challenges that have come up along the way as you've built your craft chocolate business? 

Some challenges have been certainly the cocoa prices increasing, that was shocking. There was a time in March from 2023 to May of 2024 that prices quadrupled. And so, yeah, shocking. Not a fun hurdle. So what I did was I made the chocolate bars a little bit smaller, so it still affordable price, but kept my prices the same, just accessible at that point. My biggest hurdles though personally was the remodel of that whole building. While maintaining the chocolate business, selling it, making the chocolate, bringing it to the people, but then also learning skills that I had never used before, such as construction and complete remodel. So that was tough maintaining both at the same time.

I bet it was. So when you eventually got to the point that you could open the chocolate lounge and factory, I understand you took a community approach. Can you tell us more about what your grand opening was like?

So we had a grand opening of the chocolate lounge and to help raise funds for the bands, which has been a long time touring band of the town and to help generate more funds. We created this real fun community based t-shirts. On the front, there's our people gathering around a fire, sharing cacao in the wilderness, work mountains and some hidden little creatures, animals that you might be able to find, look closely. And on the back are about 40 different names of businesses or families who have paid to be a sponsor on the t-shirt. So this paid for the shirts and we've got them printed locally at one of our shirt printers called Creative Prints by Hannah. So she printed all of our t-shirts, the hoodies for us, people that represent them, bands wore them. So it's another way to bring folks together. It's a small town where we're at. So lots of folks are able to pick out, hey, I know those folks or wow, they supported this business is another way of bringing us all together. Really the purpose is to find sovereignty in ourselves and an identity and a purpose in our community and to find our own purpose and maybe explore our own passion. So that's what chocolate does. It helps ignite my passions and motivates me and gets me excited and feeling good if I'm feeling down or feeling better. I'm already feeling pretty decent. This is one of the reasons I love chocolate. It has helped make some of my dreams come true. So, I'm really hoping that this space, this chocolate lounge, people seeing me follow what I love doing might inspire them to do something that they love or start pursuing that. 

Listen to what Evergreen is doing. The t-shirts with 40 local names on the back. Partnering with a local print shop for her shirts and stickers. Bringing in local bands for the grand opening. Turning a 50-year old bakery into a place for people to gather. None of this is accidental. She's being very intentional about how others are included in the journey. And that's the lesson. When people can see their fingerprints in the finished work, they don't feel like customers…because they're participants. This isn't Evergreen's chocolate business in Weaverville. This is the town's chocolate factory and chocolate lounge. Along the way, Evergreen looked for ways to let people around her take part in what she was building. And that is what makes the success feel so shared because it was. And this applies far beyond craft chocolate. Whether you're building a business, a project, a team, or an idea, when you bring people into the process, when you give them a way to contribute, their commitment runs deeper than simple support. They won't just cheer for what you're building. They'll know that they helped build it.

Earlier you mentioned that you're currently nib to bar, but looking to move into bean to bar. Can you tell us more about that? 

Well, this is a really exciting opportunity. So we have some friends who presented themselves with cacao beans. One is a brother of a family who lives in Uganda. And they're here in our local area and looking for chocolate makers to be purchasing these beans. And they found me and are consulting AhHome Chocolate about some of the next steps, what we all want to do together. So this is organic and would be direct trade. There's fair trade has often businesses buying the cacao from the farms and then distributing it to chocolate makers. Whereas direct trade, these chocolate makers are working directly with the farms. So, they're receiving more profits for the cacao that they're producing. And we receive good prices because there's not a middleman in between. So it's a win-win but still above what large commercial chocolate companies are paying for cocoa that is not fair trade. So, I have a roaster now. We're working on creating a winnower so that will shell all the cacao beans for us and then create this phenomenal flavored chocolate that I can refine to the flavor notes that I want, depending on the roast, of course, and share that with the people and tell the story. So that's the exciting part. So many people don't know where chocolate comes from, that people grew it, how it was made, the many steps that are involved. Pushing that education is the exciting part of, you're supporting a family. And where I'm living, our community is incredibly family oriented, small business supporting, and interested in preserving the land and nurturing it. So, this aligns with the community values, is greatly supported and people get stoked about it, just like I do. 

Real quick, how does one go about building a winnower?

Yeah, great question. I had to do some research. So I'm using a few PVC pipes and creating this cool DIY machine. And then I'll be adding these cracked roasted cacao beans into these tubes that then have an airflow vacuum that separates the shell that is very light from the nib, which is heavy. So the nib will drop, the shell will get pulled away and then distributed into their respective buckets.

So just to make sure I'm tracking, in addition to building a winnower, remodeling and opening a chocolate lounge and factory, weathering increasing cacao prices and remaining focused on making amazing chocolate, you also make your own packaging? 

That's something that I've created and designed, digitally designed everything. The paper labels around the chocolate bars, I print those myself, all of the stickers, the sticker labels, creative prints by hand, she prints those for me. So, keeping the money circulating in our town as much as possible and then supporting small businesses elsewhere if we need to take that out of county. 

To have started the chocolate business in 2022 in your early 20s, growing a business to a point that you can now operate a physical location, that's remarkable for someone your age to have accomplished so much. 

It is a big learning curve. I'm a fan of trying to problem solve so I think it's something that I love doing. Might be why I like making chocolate. It's alchemy, you know, I have to hit all the temperatures right for the tempering process to get that nice snap and shine of chocolate. It's almost like the game of life, something fun to play and has been very challenging and I've had a lot of support. 

Speaking of support, where can we find your chocolates? 

A few locations in Trinity County. Mountain Marketplace. The Moon House Cafe carries a lot of our cafe ingredients. There's also the Junction City store, the Straw House, which is an organic coffee roaster in Junction City. There is The Xocolatl Garden in Carmel by the Sea, and North Town Coffee in Arcata. 

And can they order online as well? 

Yes, we have a website. Come visit our website. We have our events posted and chocolate bars and a little bit about the mission. 

That was Evergreen Love of AhHome Chocolate. To visit the AhHome Chocolate Lounge and Factory, head to Weaverville, California and be sure to let Evergreen know that you heard her on the chocolate pod. In addition to the local businesses Evergreen mentioned, you can purchase AhHome Chocolate at Orchard Nutrition Center and online at AhHomeChocolate.com. That's A-H-H-O-M-E chocolate dot com. Thanks so much for listening to the show this week, please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss an episode of the show. And if you're interested in joining us for an upcoming chocolate event, be sure to visit thechocolatepodcast.com to see where we're headed next. From facilitating chocolate sessions to collaborating with chocolatiers, we love connecting with chocolate fans around the world, and we hope to see you soon. I'm Zack Gallinger-Long, and you've been listening to The Chocolate Pod.