“Wait,” Parson says before the woman reaches the door. “Let me tell you about this.”

Parson, the founding co-owner, chocolatier and chocolate maker at Escazu Artisan Chocolates, wants his customers to know that each hand-crafted truffle and chocolate bar has a pedigree.

“I put a lot of work into it,” says Parson, a former chef at world-class restaurants in Dallas, New York and Aspen, Col. “It is a special thing. I don’t want anyone to eat it like it’s a Hershey bar.

“I just want people to think about it when they eat it. Education is a big part of this whole thing.”

This whole thing, headquartered in Raleigh’s trendy Glenwood South district but started four years ago in Beaufort, is Parson’s attempt to raise the chocolate bar, so to speak. He starts with the finest Latin American ingredients and puts them through a labor-intensive process, hand-wrapping each and every bar.

So, besides that, here’s what makes Parson’s product different: Practically all the chocolate available for sale throughout the U.S. is purchased by chocolatiers in bulk and then turned into bars, truffles or other treats. Parson, a 38-year-old New Bern native, is one of a handful of people in the country making chocolate entirely from raw ingredients.

Escazu, whose main shop opened in Raleigh early this year after it outgrew its Beaufort origins, makes a line of chocolate bars with varyingly high percentages of pure dark chocolate. All the chocolate for the bars is carefully selected from cocoa farms in Latin America, mainly in Venezuela and Colombia.

The bars come in seven exotic varieties, including one with ground coffee beans, one with chipotle chili and one with pumpkin seed and guajillo chili. The most popular—by a 2 to 1 margin, Parson says—is the Beaufort Bar, a blissful union of 67 percent dark chocolate and sea salt. The sea salt doesn’t dissolve in the chocolate, but rather in the mouth, leaving two distinct, complementary flavors on the palate with each bite. It is wildly popular.

“There are certain people that really—I don’t want to use the term addicted, but they come back for it all the time, which is great,” Parson says.

Escazu bars, which are made without palm oil, coconut oil or preservatives, are still available at Beaufort’s Cru Wine Shop, downstairs from the space where Parson began his chocolate project. In addition to the Raleigh shop, the bars can be purchased at several locations throughout the Crystal Coast. Sales have expanded to 110 locations in 18 states and Canada, including Whole Foods stores throughout North Carolina and the Atlanta area.

In his Raleigh shop, Parson manufactures and sells his latest chocolate objet d’art. His 2-ounce Ezca bars start as pure cocoa beans sent from Venezuela, the source of what Parson believes is Latin America’s finest cocoa.

Each Ezca bar, which takes Parson two days to make, is dated, hand-numbered and labeled with the region of origin of the cocoa. It’s what has Parson stopping customers on their way out the door.

“They’re shocked that all the chocolate is not made that way, and nobody makes it that way,” he says. “People just really don’t know. They don’t know how chocolate is made or where it’s made. So part of what I have to do—and it’s really important—is to educate people, to explain it.”

First, though, he had to educate himself.

THE BIRTH OF A BAR
Parson, who was born in New Bern, moved to the Dallas area as a teen but returned to North Carolina before graduating high school in Apex. He was in college and working in Dallas when he decided he liked working better than college.

In an act that serves as an early sign of Parson’s guile and initiative, he sent out unsolicited letters to the 10 best restaurants in Dallas, looking for work. (“I was completely unqualified to work in a high-end restaurant,” he recalls with a laugh, “but I begged them for a job and told them I’d work for free.”)

He got two responses. One led to a job working for renowned chef Stephan Pyles, and his career began. Parson considered culinary school but found he was learning quickly—and less expensively—with a hands-on approach.

From Dallas, Parson went to work at a restaurant in Aspen. He returned to Dallas, then went to New York before a second stint in Aspen. There, he was executive chef at The Artisan, which is in a hotel right off the slopes of Snowmass, the biggest of Aspen Resort’s four mountains.

All told, Parson spent 11 years as a chef before returning to North Carolina to be closer to family and the water. He went to work for his current partners at a now-defunct restaurant in Beaufort. The partners, both retired Duke science professors, sold the restaurant but wanted to do another project with Parson.

Originally, Parson kicked around the idea of artisan cheese-making. He even went to California to take some classes before he realized that cheese-makers don’t buy their dairy; they farm it. “I wasn’t going to be out there milking any goats,” Parson says with a laugh.

The partners happened to have a property in Costa Rica, and on a trip there in 2004, the trio discovered a small chocolate shop in Escazu, near San Jose. Parson later toured a cocoa farm with a Costa Rican friend, Diego Fallas, and got the idea to make a chocolate bar.

He returned to Beaufort, where he was running the wine shop and making bars on the side. It was a lengthy process of experimenting and tweaking, and he’d get feedback from the store’s customers.

“The flavor combinations were pretty easy for me, but the most difficult part, without a doubt, was packaging, design, labeling,” says Parson. “I basically was just learning it as I went.”

For a year, he tinkered with the packaging until he had three bars ready to go. Around Christmas of 2005, he sold his first bars. When the Tall Ship festival came to Beaufort in 2006, he made the Beaufort Bar to sell to tourists and was amazed at the response. Its label includes an artist’s rendering of Parson’s sailboat, which he sold to help finance the chocolate business.

“It’s like the mainstay of the line,” he says of the Beaufort Bar. “We can never get rid of that. It definitely has a unique tie to Beaufort.”

Eventually, as he continued to operate the wine store, Parson took his bars to other businesses around the state for wholesale. He got what he calls his “first big success” when A Southern Season, in Chapel Hill, agreed to carry his bars.

His biggest break to date came this past spring, when he landed the Whole Foods account. There was a problem, though, and it was way out of Parson’s hands.

AN INTERNATIONAL SNAFU
When Whole Foods agreed to put Escazu bars in its North Carolina and Atlanta-area stores—there are more around Atlanta than there are in the Old North State, by the way—Parson began to get much busier. Since chocolate for the bars comes in 1,000-pound shipments, he realized the upstairs Beaufort shop wasn’t conducive to higher production.

He started looking for retail space in Raleigh in the fall of last year. “I was struck by how people really gravitated toward something that was local,” says Parson, who speaks quickly and passionately about his chocolate. “So I thought, well, if we move it to Raleigh and we become a local product there, there’s so many more people.”

Filling orders for Whole Foods became problematic when a shipment of chocolate from Venezuela got held up in port by that country’s fickle government. Parson had to scour the U.S., buying whatever fine chocolate he could find in small quantities and at greater expense.
Recently his shipment came through, and he expects to receive a Venezuelan supply each quarter—if President Hugo Chavez doesn’t decide to nationalize the chocolate industry, as he did with oil. Parson says he is conscientious about dealing with farms in Venezuela, where laborers are paid higher wages than the requirements of Fair Trade Certified products.

“You really have to educate yourself,” Parson says.

“I have to make sure, basically, that I’m not buying some chocolate that’s fueling rebels in Colombia. It’s amazing the politics that are wrapped up in this thing, and I didn’t even realize it myself until my supply was cut off.”

Parson has visited many countries in Latin America, including Venezuela, where each time he’s had what he describes as a “near-death experience.” He says that once they discover that some of his chocolate is Venezuelan, some customers go out of their way to either buy it or not buy it in support of or disdain for Chavez. “Neither are true,” Parson says. “This is a private company, and these are farmers. They’re outside of that political spectrum.”

A LONG PROCESS
In the back room of his Raleigh shop, Parson reaches into the pocket of his purple coat and pulls out a silver whistle. As he blows it, seven tiny men with green hair and white suspenders scurry into the room.

The men burst into song, do a delightful dance and then stand by for orders, doing all the heavy lifting as Parson resumes a tour of his vast, edible factory.

OK, so this never happened. Parson makes chocolate, but that’s where the similarities between him and Willy Wonka end. The work is laborious, and Parson has a staff of one—human, not Oompah-Loompah. (“Wouldn’t that be nice?” he says.) The only music a visitor might hear will come from Parson’s DVD player as he goes through the long, tedious process of hand-wrapping each and every gourmet bar.
In 2007, Parson began experimenting with making chocolate entirely from the raw ingredients, a process he calls “bean to bar.” Since most chocolate makers are large corporations, he’s had to adapt equipment meant for other purposes throughout the process.
In short, Parson selects beans from specific Latin American regions, most of which he has visited to observe the process. He imports the beans—which are about the size of the end of your thumb—and roasts them, a stage in the process at which he can adjust the flavor with the length of the roast.

Then, with adapted equipment used for cracking hops and malt in beer-making, he grinds the beans, leaving the nib, which is the meat of the bean. Using an adapted drum sieve with a blower, he separates the husks from the nibs and scoops them out by hand.

The nib is about 60 percent fat and it starts to turn into a paste just above body temperature. Parson heats the nibs slightly above their melting point and slowly grinds them, adding cocoa butter, a measure of sugar and vanilla beans. The grinding takes about a day and a half, sometimes longer, as it makes the particles finer and finer.

The substance is aged for at least a month while the flavors mellow and the bitterness is driven off, and then it can be molded into bars. “It’s a maturing process, kind of like cheese,” Parson says.

Fallas, Parson’s Costa Rican friend who’s been in the U.S. recently to help market Escazu’s new line of gourmet Costa Rican coffee, says the long process pays off in the end. “I believe there is a trend, and somehow we are all getting into that trend, of running away from mass production—being more individualist (and) asking for something that is made for me, something that I like that is not there in the supermarkets,” Fallas says in his thick accent.

“Getting products that are higher quality and hand-made or made on a small scale is something that appeals to people,” he continues. “But you have to have both components, which are small production and high quality.”

Eventually, Parson hopes to produce enough bean-to-bar chocolate to send his chocolate to other chocolatiers for them to fashion into their own confections. He calls the Ezca bars, which sell for $6, a “pilot project,” and he hopes to attract investors who want to help him. “But at the very least,” he says, “it tremendously excites me, and it’s just a blast to be able to take it all the way back to the beginning and have complete influence over every nuance of the chocolate.”

Parson believes he’s one of less than a dozen people in the U.S. blazing this bean-to-bar trail, though it probably won’t remain that way. “It’s like wine and home brewing in its infancy, right when it was just beginning,” the chocolatier/chocolate maker says. “I think three years, four years from now, there will probably be three times as many of us doing it.”

In the meantime, Parson will have to explain to customers what makes his chocolate different from all the other chocolate in the world, even if he has to force them to listen.