Kristen Hard
Kristen Hard is a chocolate maker, systems thinker, and founder dedicated to reshaping how the world experiences cacao. She is the Founder and CEO of Cacao Atlanta Chocolate Co., one of the earliest bean-to-bar chocolate makers in the United States, and a Cofounder of the creative agency Fuhked Agency.
For over two decades, she has worked directly with cacao communities across Central and South America, the Caribbean, and West Africa, focusing on quality, farmer economics, regenerative agriculture, and transparency in the commodity supply chain.
Kristen founded Cacao Atlanta in 2004, initially selling handmade chocolate at farmers’ markets and street fairs before opening her first physical location in Atlanta’s Inman Park neighborhood in 2008. Largely self-taught, she built the company into a bean-to-bar operation that controls the full production process — sourcing cacao directly from farms, then roasting, winnowing, grinding, refining, conching, tempering, and molding to produce a darker, more complex chocolate than mass-market confections.
Read Cacao’s Kristen Hard and An Interview With Kristen Hard, Owner of Cacao Atlanta. Her chocolate has drawn national recognition from outlets including Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, and Oprah. Read Around Town: A local chocolate-maker’s mission.
Kristen describes herself as one of the first female bean-to-bar chocolate makers in the United States. Her pioneering direct-sourcing model centers farmer relationships and quality at origin.
She has traveled extensively to build supplier relationships in Central and South America — at one point owning her own farm in Peru — and has increasingly turned her attention to West Africa, seeking out rare heirloom cacao varieties that represent a small fraction of the world’s cacao and that she argues are threatened by decades of breeding for yield and disease resistance over flavor. Read Spotlight Series ~ Kristen Hard and Meet Kristen Hard of CACAO.
Currently based in Barcelona, Spain, Kristen advises on cacao quality, farmer education, regenerative agriculture, and sovereign supply models across diverse cacao-growing regions as a freelance consultant and advocate, work she has pursued since 2010. She has been developing a next-generation certification and pricing system for heritage cacao — designed to relate price transparently to genetics and processing so that farmers and buyers share control of supply and demand.
In November 2024, she served on the international jury for the African Chocolate of Excellence (ACE) competition, held during the second annual World Chocolate Initiative conference in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, alongside chocolatiers Albertus Eskes of Brazil and Tanya Maldonado of Ecuador. Read African Chocolate of Excellence 2024 and World Chocolate Initiative 2024. Her earlier 2023 residency in Côte d’Ivoire, undertaken to help redefine the country’s cacao industry, was covered by Abidjan.net.
Since 2024, Kristen has been a Cofounder of Fuhked Agency, a creative agency for entrepreneurs and purpose-driven brands, developing brands, campaigns, and systems at the intersection of commerce, sustainability, and design.
She has also worked as a speaker and thought leader since 2008, presenting on the future of cacao, decolonizing chocolate, regenerative agriculture, blockchain and transparency in ethical supply chains, and conscious leadership. She publishes a weekly newsletter, God Save The Chocolate, chronicling her journey from Atlanta to Barcelona.
Kristen’s advocacy has long extended beyond her own company. In 2010, she volunteered with USAID in the Dominican Republic, working with a thirty-person cooperative of women to develop a sellable chocolate product as part of micro-financing efforts, training the group in product development, budget assessment, record keeping, quality control, and packaging design.
Between 2011 and 2015, she served as a Partner and judge with Cocoa of Excellence in Paris, France, facilitating the International Cocoa Awards and evaluating over 200 samples. In 2014, she worked with Lutheran World Relief to help run a national competition selecting cocoa beans for entry into the Cocoa of Excellence program, training cooperative heads on quality control and judges on sample calibration.
She later volunteered twice with Partners of the Americas through its Farmer-to-Farmer program — in Jamaica in 2019, teaching farmers about disease resistance and control protocols, and in Colombia in 2021, developing recipes to incorporate local herbal traditions into chocolate.
Cacao Atlanta earned dozens of honors during Kristen’s tenure, including recognition from Food & Wine as Best Chocolate in America, multiple awards from the San Francisco International Chocolate Salon — including Best Dark Chocolate, Best Truffle, and Top Artisan Chocolatier — Gold and Silver packaging honors from the Academy of Chocolate in London, and repeated Best of Atlanta recognition from Atlanta magazine and Creative Loafing.
Her work has also been featured by Southern Living, Condé Nast Traveler, and Bon Appétit, and her Salame di Cioccolato was featured on the Cooking Channel. She holds U.S. trademarks including Chocolat Thérapie and Haus of Cacao.
A native of Dunwoody, Georgia, Kristen grew up drawn to both science and invention, an interest that shaped her scientific, chemistry-forward approach to chocolate making. She discovered cacao in her twenties while working as a private chef aboard a yacht, when a stop in the Caribbean revealed to her that chocolate originates from the seeds of a tropical fruit rather than a factory — an epiphany that redirected her from a pre-law path toward chocolate.
She earned her Bachelor’s degree from the University of South Carolina in 2003. She speaks Italian.
Visit her LinkedIn profile and Cacao Atlanta Chocolate Co. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.