Our Story

Teresa Ulrich’s love of chocolate began when she was a little girl. She recalls being transfixed in the candy aisle, scanning the different kinds of chocolate and envisioning new flavors, long after her friends had grabbed their selections and paid — and tired of waiting, left her in the candy isle. Even then, she knew she had an unusual fixation and wanted chocolate to somehow figure into a job when she grew up.

After several years in sous-chef positions at various California, South Bay Area restaurants and another 10 years in digital design, in 2005, Teresa completed the Patisserie Program at Western Culinary Institute of Portland, Oregon.

Immediately following Patisserie School, Teresa moved to Napa, California, to work for The French Laundry, with a focus on chocolate. During her spare time in the Napa Valley, she discovered similarities between the flavor notes in wine and their unique terroirs to those found in the cacao grown in different regions of the world. After returning to Portland, she began making truffles and created a line of specialty chocolates to pair with Portland’s local wine vintages.

In 2007, Teresa became the lead pastry chef at Pearl Bakery, dedicating herself to all-natural baking and creative exploration of Oregon’s local seasonal flavors. Meanwhile, her chocolate passion continued to expand and after a visit to a cacao farm in Fiji, she became inspired to put chocolate at the center of her career path. In 2011, she completed the Ecole Chocolat ‘Chocolate Making from the Bean course’ followed by the ‘Professional Chocolatier Program’. From 2011-2014 she returned to Fiji to teach cacao farmers how to make chocolate and improve their cacao bean fermentation practices.  In this time she also built and ran Pearl Bakery’s chocolate division ‘Pearl Chocolate’. In 2015, her love for the craft of bean-to-bar Chocolate Making lead her to ‘Pitch Dark Chocolate’ as the head production manager.

Today Teresa works with ancient heirloom cacao from Guatemala, Belize, and Ecuador which contain powerfully unique heart opening compounds that lead to transformative healing feelings of ‘falling in love’.  She brings the energy of the plant into her truffles, bars, and drinking chocolate to engage chocolate lovers with new taste experiences. She hopes to expand awareness of the true healing power cacao has to offer through tastings, chocolate classes, and tales of Mayan myths and legends spawned by the sacred Theobroma Cacao Tree.