Geneviève Grandbois, sweet success

Winter and the holiday season often inspire visions of skiing during the day and warming up by a fire at night — with some hot chocolate, of course. While hot chocolate may be the classic winter variety, chocolate itself also has a place in the season. Artisanal chocolatière Geneviève Grandbois said the season often creates a surge of sales for her eponymous company’s four Montreal-area boutiques and online store.

Chocolate works well for many holiday occasions, Grandbois said, as a hostess gift, a token of appreciation from companies to their employees or clients or a gift for someone for the holiday itself.

Grandbois has been living her dream of working with and inventing new chocolates for over a decade. She first fell in love with the sweet when she was 20 —it truly was a “coup de coeur,” she said. A demonstration at a conference piqued her attention. “I thought, ‘I want to do that every day in my life,’” she said.

Through her business, she hopes to “sweeten people’s lives through chocolate,” something that she admitted is a little “philosophical.” Grandbois set out to make chocolate that had a world-class taste and a positive impact on local communities and the world itself. She began working towards this mission by finding organic and fair-trade suppliers, but also bought her own plantation in Costa Rica’s Palmar region in 2007.

She hasn’t harvested enough to use her beans exclusively, but she’s made some products and is hoping her harvest will grow soon. Her relationship with her products has become “like a mother with her children,” she said—perhaps especially now that she shepherds some cacao beans from their very first moments in Costa Rica to the final steps in her company’s Montreal factory.

Every step—from fermentation to roasting, to what has an impact on the quality of the final, delicious product. “It’s difficult to master these steps,” Grandbois said. But she’s spent her career doing just that, as well as experimenting with new ingredients to spice up the basic process, creating new and innovative flavours with spices, herbs and nuts and wrapping up the final products in beautiful, contemporary packaging.

This winter will be an especially busy season for Grandbois. Two new collections will be available in December. They aren’t directly winter-themed, Grandbois said, but the packaging is definitely connected to the joy and festive atmosphere of the season. Her company is also participating in the Grande Tournée du Chocolat Chaud in mid-January 2016, when she’ll be one of several companies striving over a weekend to create the classic feel, smell and taste of a winter wonderland.

How to keep chocolate fresh

It depends on the chocolate itself according to Geneviève Grandbois.

Hard chocolate bar

– can last up to 6 months to a year
– keep it in a low-humidity area

Filled chocolate

– cream or fruit fillings create humidity, so chocolates are much more fragile and will not keep as long
– keep cool, but not too cold
– keep in a low-humidity or hermetic environment