I am Californian- born in Los Angeles, raised on a peach/plum/chicken farm in Central California and attended university in Berkeley where Alice Waters and ScharffenBerger Chocolate were my distractions from homework. Berkeley was the birth of the bean to bar craft chocolate movement and locavore movement and it happened at the same time I was studying Business and Latin American Literature. All of this influenced the type of human I would become. My first job was in marketing at the Le Cordon Bleu culinary school where I was exposed to the the world of gastronomy. I learned my chocolatier skills with Ewald Notter, Andrew Shotts, and Shawn Williams. In Los Angeles I was a chef instructor at the Summer Cooking Academy, and in 2005 I founded a confection workshop which featured flavors of Latin America made with Guittard Chocolate. I moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area and in 2011 established my retail location in Berkeley which was immediately featured as one of the best sweet shops in the world by Travel and Leisure Magazine. Later, I was named “Most Gifted Chocolatier” by the San Francisco International Chocolate Salon in 2013. I sold the retail location in 2013 to pursue a more intimate relationship with cacao growers, to become a chocolate maker with the amazing bean to bar artisans at Dandelion Chocolate, and to move to Brazil. -- Arcelia Gallardo
Brazil (Bahia)
bean-to-bar
bean-to-bar 
