He LeApt From Finance to The World Of Artisanal Raw Chocolate
Daniel Sklaar, the founder of Fine & Raw Chocolate outside his Bushwick, Brooklyn, chocolate plant. Photo: Nina Roberts
Published in Forbes on April 27, 2017
Daniel Sklaar immigrated to New York City from South Africa to pursue a career in finance; he became an artisanal raw chocolate entrepreneur in Brooklyn instead. His company, Fine and Raw Chocolate, was launched in 2008, two years after he walked—more like sprinted—away from the financial industry.
Fine and Raw’s factory is in the formerly gritty, now gentrifying Bushwick neighborhood and smells of earthy roasted cacao beans. The renovated industrial space has a storefront shop, despite minimal foot traffic. It’s dotted with pallets piled with huge burlap sacks filled with cacao beans from Nicaragua, Uganda and other cacao producing countries. They sell artisanal chocolate bars, truffles and spreads in a variety of both unique and familiar flavors like mesquite, lucuma and vanilla, espresso and sea salt.
In the factory’s rear, under a hanging disco ball (used for special events) workers wearing industrial-chic jumpsuits make the chocolate. From hand-sorting trays of cacao beans, to topping truffles covered in a fresh layer of chocolate with hazelnuts as they cruise along a narrow conveyor belt.
Fine & Raw chocolates. Photo: Nina Roberts
Sklaar sits in the factory’s central, elevated open office, atop a glassed-in room. Underneath, several stainless steel vats of swirling chocolate are in the process of being stone-ground. Sporting a shirt with a thumbs up pattern in red and a pair of weathered skinny jeans, Sklaar explains why he turned his back on a career in finance. It was the reason he initially immigrated to New York City in 2004, made significantly easier with the green card he won in a lottery as a teenager.
“I’m a very creative person,” says Sklaar, “I’m a maker. That’s what I was born to do.” After two years of working as a financial analyst at a boutique firm, Sklaar realized, “Finance does not feed that soul urge at all.”
“I have a very adventurous spirit,” Sklaar adds, “I will not be satisfied unless I’m exploring—I’d rather die!” he laughs. But fleeing a career in finance has paid off for Sklaar. Fine and Raw Chocolate processes approximately 25 tons of chocolate a year. Companies like Ralph Lauren, Nordstrom, Rag and Bone and Made Hotels collaborate with Fine and Raw to create special edition chocolates. The company is a team of 12 people, sometimes 25, depending on the season.
Whole Foods carries Fine and Raw Chocolate bars, selling for $5 to $9, including the collection Sklaar has nicknamed “Sassy Ladies.” Each flavor, packaged in white with a line drawing in black, features a different pulpy 1950s style pin-up, cowgirl or female Zorro-type with a contemporary Brooklyn twist. Sklaar considers the collection, officially called “Brooklyn Bonnie,” an homage to the stylish women he sees on the Williamsburg and Bushwick streets.
Due to the success of Fine and Raw Chocolate, especially given the super saturated market of artisanal chocolate that have cropped up in Brooklyn, such as Mast Brothers and Raaka Chocolate, one might assume Sklaar, now in his mid-30s, must have been secretly planning and plotting this chocolate business while an analyst, if not earlier as a child growing up in Johannesburg. But he hadn’t.
When Sklaar left the boutique firm, he had no idea what he wanted professionally, only that it wasn’t finance. “There were passions and desires I knew were in me,” recounts Sklaar, “and I wanted to explore them.”
Slightly alarming his family and friends, he commenced to travel the globe for what turned out to be a year and a half, subsidized in part by subletting his loft. He finally landed in the Arizona desert, two miles outside an 800-person town, working as a chef at a raw food restaurant. “What I really was learning, is how to follow my passion,” says Sklaar, “the things that excite me.”
Raw food was a relatively new movement and his exposure to it planted the seed for Fine and Raw’s specialization in raw chocolate. Raw chocolate isn’t roasted above a certain temperature, which according to Sklaar, makes it a superfood with a “bajillion, million” antioxidants.
When Sklaar returned to New York City in 2006 entertaining thoughts of a raw food business, he’d simultaneously transitioned from merely chocolate-obsessed, to “deeply, deeply, deeply,” in love with chocolate.
“At that time, there was no ‘bean to bar,’” notes Sklaar, the term for chocolate makers who craft their chocolate from cacao beans, rather than buy and melt chocolate made elsewhere, “there was no raw chocolate, organic was hardly heard of.” Sklaar felt this niche was his to fill and began his entrepreneurial endeavor. He read voraciously and posed questions to, as Sklaar puts it, “anyone who would have me as an audience.”
Sklaar has fond memories of the nascent Fine and Raw, which included throwing experimental chocolate making parties in his loft, roommates and friends pitching in. “Wild times,” he reminisces, almost wistfully. However, he also recalls being scared beyond anything he’d ever imagined. Entrepreneurs don’t exactly have downtime, but when Sklaar’s mind momentarily wandered, he found himself panicking over his business model, to near existential crisis. Sklaar believes being an immigrant helps quell the fears, “That is such a big leap of faith in itself,” says Sklaar about the process of immigrating, “you’re in that mentality.”
Fine and Raw Chocolate officially launched in April 2008. The kick-off party took place in a fashion boutique in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a co-opening with his artist friends. The ruckus celebration had to eventually by shut down by the police, which Sklaar seems particularly proud of, “It was perfect.”
Although the factory itself is not certified, Fine and Raw uses USDA certified organic cacao beans, but chooses not to buy Fair Trade cacao. “We have access to the farmers,” explains Sklaar, “we don’t hear anything positive from the benefits they receive from these programs.” Sklaar applauds Fair Trade concepts, but not the execution.
Fine and Raw has scaled-up to keep up with demand, which has typically come through word of mouth rather than any serious marketing campaigns. “I have so much passion and love for what I do,” says Sklaar “I think people respond to that.”
People who want to follow their passions and start their own businesses often approach Sklaar with questions; he offers these tips:
1. Speak to a lot of people; ask a lot of questions. Find mentors, whether it’s cafeteria-style or a traditional mentor/mentee relationship. Make sure you have people around you that don’t mind telling you the truth.
2. Do an internal analysis and see exactly what you want. Do you want to do this? Are you really that person?
3. Launching a business is emotional; it’s essential to have emotional support from your inner circle.
4. Be a cowboy. You’ll be scared beyond what you can imagine, but at some point, you have to take a leap of faith.