Philly’s Little-Known Chocolate Alchemist
A Q&A with Robert Campbell, who’s promoting the health benefits of his kind of chocolate
Robert Campbell is an underground chocolate renegade in Philadelphia, on a one-man quest to redefine craft chocolate as a health food from his wife’s Venezuelan restaurant, Sazon.
Campbell is responsible for nearly all the chocolate production himself, with a little help from his wife, Judy, a cook and a server. He’s truly microbatch, making just 32 pounds of chocolate at a time in his four little CocoaTown machines, pumping out just shy of 2,000 pounds of chocolate a year.
For years, customers at Sazon would bring Campbell cacao from their families’ plantations in Venezuela, and occasionally they’ll still drop off a small package of cacao. Today, he works with Naked Cacao, sourcing entirely organic and a mix of direct trade and fair trade cacao. There’s no glamorous packaging, but this stuff is worth seeking out.
I sat down with Campbell to talk about his philosophy, methods, and ingredients for concocting chocolate.
