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What's new in chocolate
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November 16, 2000: 7:32 a.m. ET
Chocolate lovers satisfy their cravings at ChocolatEpicure.com
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - For serious foodies who love luxurious chocolates and will, at least occasionally, indulge the sweet tooth, a simple log or a cluster of peanuts smothered in milk chocolate just won't do anymore.
To help these chocolate connossieurs satisfy their cravings for unusual and  extremely high-quality chocolates, Jo Ousterhout has created ChocolatEpicure.com. Ousterhout's Web site is designed with serious chocolate lovers in mind, those who are looking for only the finest, hand-crafted artisanal confections.
You won't find the average milk chocolate bar on this site. Most of what is available on ChocolatEpicure.com is made of dark chocolate, long favored by Europeans, which is enjoying a surge of popularity among American consumers of chocolates.
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 CNNfn's Rhonda Schaffler chats with Jo Ousterhout, CEO of ChocolatEpicure.com, about her company. |
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You will find rich, dark chocolates infused with unusual flavors of herbs and teas and silkscreened with delicate designs. You can order dark chocolate bars studded with pistachios and sundried cherries. It's one of the few places you can buy razor-thin slices of organic pears, soaked for a week in key lime juice and then dipped in bittersweet chocolate.
Select collection
ChocolatEpicure.com sells a very select list of chocolates that are not only delicious, but also beautiful to look at and exquisitely packaged. In the five years since the company was founded, the list of chocolates has grown slowly from 11 to about 26.
Ousterhout explained that ChocolatEpicure is as picky about what it sells  on its Web site as its customers are about what they eat. Before she'll agree to sell any new products, they must first pass the discriminating palate of ChocolatEpicure's five-member tasting panel.
Like judges of fine wines, ChocolatEpicure's tasters are professionally trained assessors whose sensitive tastebuds are capable of determining the quality of ingredients and the cocoa content of a particular bar. Ousterhout relies on them to determine whose concoctions will be sold by the company.
Ousterhout, a lifelong lover of gourmet treats, said her education in food began at the age of 6 when she first started reading Gourmet magazine. It wasn't, however, her foodie leanings that led her to ChocolatEpicure.com. Rather, after years of working in large financial institutions, she wanted to learn about the Internet.
In changing her career, Ousterhout sort of stumbled into one of the hottest things happening in food – the growing popularity of dark chocolate in the United States.
Cashing in on a trend
While domestic sales of chocolate are relatively flat, Ousterhout said the market for dark chocolate and artisanal chocolates is expanding rapidly. As a result, she said, ChocolatEpicure is one specialty Internet retailer that is actually earning money. The company will turn sweet profits, she said, as long as demand from chocolate connoisseurs continues to grow. (435KB WAV) (435KB AIF)
"This end of the business [dark chocolate and artisanal chocolates] is  growing anywhere from 200 to 500 percent a year," Ousterhout said. "Our numbers are mirroring that growth as well."
It's not just Ousterhout who is pleased with the company's performance. Many of the chocolatiers whose products she sells say that ChocolatEpicure has helped their bottom line.
"ChocolatEpicure highlights the high-end chocolate market and we are glad to be part of it," said Pat Cruz, sales manager for Seattle-based Fran's Chocolates. "The visibility has definitely helped us out."
ChocolatEpicure sells both American and European chocolates. For two reasons, however, Ousterhout said she is increasingly selling chocolates crafted by American artisans.
The first is that a growing number of Americans are creating excellent chocolates, she said. The second reason is that true chocolate connossieurs want fresh products, so it is extremely important to be able to get the chocolates to them as quickly as possible.
"One of the big reasons is the freshness of these kinds of chocolate is so important," said Ousterhout in an appearance on CNNfn's Market Call. "You don't want to have them sitting around in a shop or sent to you by a method that might take several weeks for delivery."
Though ChocolatEpicure is turning a profit on the Internet, Ousterhout said she has not ruled out the possibility that she will open her own retail shop.
"It's probably not something that will happen in 2001, but it may be a project for 2002," she said. 
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ChocolatEpicure
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