Changing the World with Chocolate: One Mormon Man’s Story
This article was originally written by Jake Healy for LDS Living. The following is an excerpt.
Who can travel to remote corners of the world, run an award-winning, internationally recognized business, and still make plenty of time for his wife and kids?
The candy man can.
He’s a far cry from Gene Wilder’s eccentric character in the 1971 classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but chocolate-maker and Latter-day Saint Art Pollard definitely makes the world taste good. A self-described “foodie,” Pollard found his initial inspiration in a chocolate shop he visited on his honeymoon. Upon tasting the store’s product, he says, “I realized there was a whole level of chocolate that I had never been exposed to.”
This realization, fueled by some old-fashioned entrepreneurial know-how, blazed a trail that would lead Pollard to create Amano Artisan Chocolate—one of the most successful confection companies in the world, winning 150 first-place awards in national and international competitions.
But to Pollard, the accolades don’t mean much compared to the relationships he’s developed as a chocolatier. “[What] I’m most proud of is getting to take the finished chocolate back to the farmers who grew the cocoa,” says Pollard, who often travels to third-world countries to harvest his ingredients. “The pride I feel when the farmers taste chocolate made with their own beans is transformative. I see it change the lives of these humble farmers as they realize that, despite their meager surroundings, their work is being appreciated by the finest connoisseurs.”
From Coding Computers to Creating Chocolate
After serving a mission in South Carolina and graduating from Brigham Young University, Pollard and his business partner, Clark Goble, found success in the world of technology. But even while Pollard and Goble were writing the type of computer code that has made Google billions of dollars, Pollard’s dream of being a confectioner was evident.
Read the full story at LDSliving.com.