In 2010, husband and wife David and Corey Menkes were on vacation in St. Lucia when they stopped for lunch at a place on the side of the road. There, they spotted strange looking trees with pods on them.
“We asked one of the locals, ‘What is that?’” said David.
They identified it as a chocolate tree.
“They took out a machete and cracked open one of the pods,” said David. “We tasted the seeds and we’re like, ‘That doesn’t taste like chocolate.’ They said it has to be fermented.”
When Corey and David returned home to Los Angeles, they started exploring the idea of creating a bean-to-bar chocolate business. At the time, there were only a handful of companies in the country doing this.
“Bean-to-bar chocolate is basically where you import cocoa beans from a specific farm, region [and] country, and you highlight the differences between each of those regions,” said David. “It’s exactly like wine or coffee. Each region has its own unique flavor profile.”
The couple started their business, LetterPress Chocolate, out of their apartment in 2014 before moving to a commercial space on South Robertson Boulevard in 2016. They sell handcrafted, small-batch bean-to-bar chocolate with kosher certification from KosherLA. The dark chocolate bars, chocolate nibs, cacao juice and beverages are parve, while the white, milk and dark milk chocolate bars are certified kosher dairy.
“We’re doing it because we are trying to make a difference in these farmers’ lives [and] highlight the work that these farmers do.”
The chocolate is high-end — prices range from $10 to $18 per bar — but it’s also specialized and pure.
“A lot of our bars are just two or three ingredients,” David said. “In a Hershey bar, the amount of cocoa in the chocolate is around 11%. Our bars start at 70%.”
In June 2019, the same year LetterPress received kosher certification, they started giving tours. Even though they stopped the tours for a while due to the pandemic, they are back and held in groups of six. Now, David and Corey are looking to move and expand again.
The fact that they are kosher and the only company in L.A. doing the entire bean-to-bar process aren’t the only things that make LetterPress unique. It’s also their love of making chocolate with purpose.
“My wife is an ecologist by training,” David said. “The whole reason we started this company … was really centered around the idea that we wanted to make sure the farmers are being paid a fair wage for their work.”
David said they love that their customers can “geek out” about chocolate. For example, someone may want dark chocolate with sea salt in it and another wants a mint chocolate bar; they make both of those. Someone else may want to discover the differences between Northern Peru and Southern Peru cacao, and they can provide that information.
“The most important thing is unlike chocolatiers, we are chocolate makers,” said David. “Chocolate makers manufacture their own chocolate.”
David said it’s the difference between a distillery and a bartender. Whereas a distillery actually manufactures the alcoholic beverage, a bartender takes those different types of alcohols, blends them together and makes all sorts of concoctions.
“What we’re doing is so specific and different, it’s kind of its own thing,” David said. “We’re not just doing it for profitability. We’re doing it because we are trying to make a difference in these farmers’ lives [and] highlight the work that these farmers do.” n
