YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY
Springfield, MO
YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY
Springfield, MO
Askinosie’s Dark Chocolate & Red Raspberry Collabaration Bar has been a fan favorite for nearly a decade. Handcrafted with Ecuadorian cocoa beans, turbinado sugar and raspberries from American Spoon, the bar’s global appeal has earned it multiple awards including the Good Food Award in 2020.
SBJ: How did your Dark Chocolate & Red Raspberry Collabaration Bar come to be?
Lawren Askinosie: This bar is a collaboration with a very similarly minded business. They’re a family business out of Michigan, jam makers, and they have won Good Food awards like our company. We’re really lucky doing what we do, and we get to become friends with a lot of other small-batch food makers around the country. American Spoon is one of those. We wanted to do something together for a long time, and this bar came to be from that shared desire. We had been wanting to release a fruit bar, and this was our first one.
SBJ: What has been the public response to this bar?
Askinosie: We released the bar in 2015, but it has remained one of our top-selling bars to date. We had a lot of trouble keeping it in stock, and that has remained a challenge almost 10 years later. We have won several awards for this chocolate bar: an Academy of Chocolate Award, an International Chocolate Award and, in 2020, a Good Food Award, which is like an Oscar in our industry. We love being able to reach new craft chocolate consumers with this bar – and aficionados. It’s one of those chocolates that really appeals to everyone.
SBJ: What makes the bar so delicious?
Askinosie: It’s very simple. The ingredients are cocoa beans, organic cane sugar and these really wonderful organic raspberries. We mix that all together in our universal refiner, and the result is this really fruit-forward, bright, jammy, but pretty bold chocolate bar. We’re still amazed at how wide-reaching its popularity has been.
SBJ: The bar is kosher, vegan and gluten free, making it accessible to a variety of consumers. Why is that important?
Askinosie: From the first cocoa bar we made in 2007, we felt strongly about making a product that tasted amazing and was as clean as possible. When you’re sourcing beans the way that we are directly from farmers, rare coca beans, you want those to shine through. So, the fewer ingredients you can add the better. With that comes the opportunity to make your bars accessible to people with dietary restrictions.
SBJ: Outreach is also core to your mission.
Askinosie: From day one, our factory has been engaged with kids in our neighborhood in the Springfield community. From the very first tour we ever offered of our chocolate factory, we were funding our chocolate university program, which, 15 years later, has become this hallmark of our company. I can see now how full-circle it is that some of those students are now sitting on the board of the nonprofit arm of our business and are going to be traveling with us now, shepherding the new class of high-school students. It’s really meaningful to us. It’s this idea that small businesses can be a force for good in the world, and it’s our hope that we can inspire students that they can be a force for good in the world.
Taking shape on 3.5 acres just east of State Highway H/Glenstone Avenue in the area of Valley Water Mill Park are the Fulbright Heights Apartments – three 23,000-square-foot buildings with 24 units each for a total of 72 one- and two-bedroom apartments.
