By Sonja Heyck-Merlin

Opening a Bixby Chocolate bar reveals an intricate work of art — an octopus stretching out each of its long undulating arms in search of a book. A replica of Bixby owner Kate McAleer’s great-great-grandparents’ Victorian-era etched book plate, the image is a metaphor for McAleer, who is likewise reaching in all directions. One minute Candy Queen Kate (her self-given nickname) is researching climate change’s impact on global cacao prices, and the next she’s puzzling out a way to source beer for peanut brittle without the inconvenience of hundreds of glass bottles. No matter the task, McAleer’s mission is clear: to make chocolate confections that are clean and natural, with a conscience.
“A little side note about gritty persistence, the mold company told me this was too complicated and too nuanced, and I should just say the word Bixby,” said McAleer at the Central Maine Growth Council 2023 speakers’ series. People now frequently compliment her on the unique design.
Bixby Chocolate, named after the same great-great-grandparents who inked the octopus design into their personal books, was founded with McAleer’s mother, Donna, in 2011 when McAleer was 23. McAleer’s obsession with chocolate — from deserts savored with her parents during childhood travels and a year abroad in France, to her disappointment in trying to find a post-golf snack (she was a competitive golfer at New York University) not loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, and a litany of unreadable ingredients — sparked her entrepreneurship. Before long, she was hand-wrapping her first products, called Bixby Bars, which are still a top seller. Bixby Bars are an amalgamation of fruity, nutty, crunchy, and chewy in combinations like blueberry sea salt cashew, chipotle cherry peanut, and strawberry cinnamon almond. Every Bixby Bar, of course, is enrobed in a thick layer of melt-in-your-mouth chocolate.
If not for a group of very small flies called biting midges, the chocolate that is the centerpiece of most of Bixby’s products would not exist. The midges pollinate the small cacao (Theobroma cacao) flowers growing directly out of the trunk and larger limbs of these tropical trees. In Greek, Theobroma translates to “food of the gods,” and cacao is the Spanish adaptation of the word “kakaw,” which was the Mayan name for the tree.
Cacao originated millions of years ago to the east of the Andes in what is now South America. According to the International Cocoa Organization, recent archaeological evidence found in southern Ecuador indicates that cacao beans were used more than 5,300 years ago by native populations, which is 1,500 years prior to the domestication of the tree. Several pre-Columbian civilizations cultivated cacao, including the Maya, the Incas, and the Aztecs. In these equatorial cultures, cacao beans were used as an ingredient in a beverage made of ground cacao mixed with corn flour and spices but also as a currency for trade and for ceremonial purposes.
Enter colonialism. Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés, leader of an expedition to the Aztec empire, returned to Spain in 1528 bearing the Aztec recipe for a chocolate drink called “xocoatl” — the origin of the modern word “chocolate.”
The drink didn’t prove popular until sugar was added, and it eventually became a sought-after drink for the wealthy of Spain and beyond. In order to meet the growing demand by Europeans, cacao cultivation was slowly expanded, through colonization, into other equatorial regions including Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. So, too, the demand for sugar grew; the labor needs of cacao and sugar were met by millions of enslaved peoples from Africa.
McAleer alluded to the dirty business of chocolate and sugar — past and present — in her presentation at Central Maine Growth Councils. The nonprofit Food Empowerment Project reports that in the past few decades a handful of organizations and journalists have exposed the widespread use of child labor, and in some cases slavery, on cacao farms in Western Africa where the majority of the world’s cacao is currently grown. Evidence has also surfaced of child labor and slavery on cacao farms in Brazil. Most of this cacao ends up in mass-produced chocolate: brands with their iconic colorful packages lining the candy aisles and children’s trick-or-treat buckets.
However, not all supply chains are created equally. Bixby Chocolate sources its certified organic cacao beans from Colorado-based Uncommon Cacao. As a specialty cacao trader, rather than a player in the commodity chocolate market, Uncommon Cacao sources from over 10,000 smallholder producers across more than 15 countries, supplying cacao to hundreds of chocolate makers globally. Bixby’s espresso dark chocolate bar originates from Guatemalan cacao blended with single-origin Guatemalan coffee. The beans in Bixby’s 2023 sofi Gold Award Winner Haitian dark chocolate bar come from a collective of Haitian small-scale cacao growers.
It takes five to six months for cacao farmers to nurture a tiny cacao flower into mature pods. Rather than growing in a monoculture created by deforestation, the organic cacao grows under a canopy of indigenous trees and other marketable crops, like pineapple and avocado, that support biodiversity and soil health. Hacking open a football-shaped cacao pod — its colors ranging from yellow and green to red and purple — reveals a fibrous white pulp enveloping up to 50 tightly packed beans. The seeds must then be fermented, dried, bagged, and exported.
McAleer has traveled to Guatemala and Haiti to meet with Uncommon Cacao growers. About Guatemala she said, “You have to imagine sort of an ‘Avatar’ landscape. It’s very cliffy and up and down windy roads. The farmers had their own little fermentation outlets in their own villages because the transport would have been more challenging.” In Haiti, however, there is less infrastructure and fewer geographical constraints, so there is a central fermentation house.
Eventually the raw beans arrive on pallets at 1 Sea Street Place in the working waterfront of Rockland, Maine. Bixby’s 10,000-square-foot facility, a former ice manufacturer, houses a retail store and manufacturing facility. Neighbors include the U.S. Coast Guard, a large carrageenan processing plant, and a marina. Cruise ship passengers, tourists, and locals flock to the store to buy Maine-themed gifts, like one-pound molded-chocolate lobsters and lobster claws, and boxed bonbons in flavors such as Maine blueberry jam and maple vanilla.
It takes a lot of specialized equipment to alchemize cacao beans into the velvety chocolate prominent in McAleer’s confections. Unlike coffee beans that need to be merely roasted, cacao must be roasted, winnowed, and then processed. “Chocolate is really a modern concept. It’s really the development of machinery with the industrial revolution that allowed for further processing of cacao. We should probably separate the word cacao and chocolate,” said McAleer. It really wasn’t until this industrialization that chocolate shifted from being a novelty of the wealthy to a treat for the masses.
In the business’s early years, McAleer didn’t make her own chocolate. Eager to get as close to the raw ingredients as possible and to learn more about the nuances of chocolate creation, McAleer obtained a diploma from the Institute of Culinary Education where she took their bean-to-bar class. She also completed some training at the Ecole Chocolat Professional School of Chocolate Arts.
While the size of chocolate-making equipment changes with scale, the premise does not. Bixby has gone through several iterations of equipment (in part funded by some competitive grants, such as Gorham Savings Bank’s LaunchPad event and a Maine Technology Institute grant) in order to meet the needs of major accounts including Whole Foods, Renys, Hannaford, and, most recently, Costco.
First, the cacao is roasted in a drum roaster. It then makes its way to a winnowing machine that separates the husks from the beans. From there, the beans enter a cracker and finally become a product that the discerning chocolate lover may recognize: cacao nibs.
The machine used in the next step of chocolate production is where the magic really begins to happen as the nibs are transformed into chocolate liquor (basically liquid chocolate) in a process that’s akin to grinding nut butter. There’s a difference in particle size, however. The ideal size for chocolate particles is under 20 microns, the size of a dust mite.
For this process, Bixby uses two machines: a melangeur and a ball mill. The main components of a melangeur are a drum, rotating stones, and a granite grinding surface. As the nibs are crushed, the cocoa particles become suspended in the cocoa butter. It can take days to produce a smooth and rich chocolate; whereas with a ball mill this process can be completed in a few hours. A ball mill is a water-jacketed machine heated from the bottom. Inside the machine are 80,000 very hard little round balls that get heated up. An agitator causes the balls to powerfully tumble through the nibs. As the nibs are processed into cocoa liquor, the liquid falls to the bottom of the machine where it’s pumped up through a pipe and dropped back down onto the top. This repeats over and over again.
Whether using a melangeur or a ball mill, sugar is added to the cocoa liquor during this mixing process. McAleer is as equally fussy about her sugar as she is her cacao beans, sourcing from the Natíve Green Cane Project. The project farms about 50,000 acres of certified organic cane fields in Brazil. They pioneered the process of harvesting green sugarcane rather than using the destructive practice of burning cane fields. McAleer said in her 2023 presentation, “It’s got to be amazing cane sugar because you’re buying amazing cacao, and you’re not just gonna put some gross cane sugar in there with your amazing cacao.”
When the sweetened chocolate is ready, some of it is molded into bars on another line of specialized equipment. One bar is a collaboration with Maine Grains: a vegan bar made with oat milk rather than dairy milk. Another bar, the Split Rock Bourbon bar, is a collaboration with Maine’s only certified organic distillery. The chocolate is also mixed with rice crisps, peanut butter, whole milk powder, and sea salt in a line of protein-rich nuggets of goodness called Bixby Bites.
McAleer and her team are constantly trying to bring innovation to the confection industry. One example is white chocolate, which McAleer said is often looked down upon for not being “real chocolate.” McAleer makes her own by placing cocoa liquor into a hydraulic press that separates the cocoa butter from the cocoa liquor, similar to pressing oil from olives. The white chocolate isn’t so much white as it is yellowish. With it, she created the Crème Brûlée bar, a luscious white chocolate with shattered crispy cooked sugar, that is a two-time winner at the International Chocolate Awards. She also makes a line of smoothie bars with white chocolate in flavors like raspberry crunch and wild blueberry.
All these products find their way into three revenue streams: Bixby’s Rockland retail store, their e-commerce site, and their wholesale accounts. About 15% of Bixby’s gross sales come from 100% certified organic products. Organic ingredients are peppered throughout other Bixby products that do not bear the MOFGA-certified organic label. Because Bixby is known as a parallel operation in the organic world — processing organic products and conventional products in the same facility — all equipment must be cleaned using approved cleaners and sanitizers before an organic production run. McAleer must also prove, at her yearly organic inspection, that her purchase of organic ingredients matches her product output in a process called mass balancing.
By being an independent chocolate maker, and one with a commitment to sourcing organic ingredients, McAleer is swimming against the tides. Many organic chocolate brands frequently found at grocery stores and natural food stores are owned by global players in the chocolate space: Dagoba by Hersey’s, HU and Green & Black by Mondolēz International, Alter Eco by U.S. investment group Trek One Capital, and Justin’s by Hormel. Organic bean-to-bar small businesses are rare, especially ones owned by women.
“When I started the business, I wanted to be entirely organic. Honestly, the market isn’t totally there yet. I wish it were higher,” said McAleer. Ultimately, it is consumer demand that can help grow the organic industry. Bixby Chocolate is doing their small part to grow the organic supply chain through their purchasing of organic ingredients. McAleer said, “It’s kind of like wine. We’re trying to elevate the experience by saying chocolate can be like fancy wine. Like a good bottle of wine at $50, our handcrafted tablet bars need to go for $10 or higher to cover the rising costs of cacao beans.”
About the author: Sonja Heyck-Merlin is a regular feature writer for The MOF&G. She and her family own and operate an organic farm in Charleston, Maine.
This article originally appeared in the winter 2024-2025 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.