The first thing that hits customers upon entering Turner’s Chocolate in Whistler is the smell. The deeply rich aroma of roasting cacao beans permeates the air, transporting imaginations to childhood fantasies of wandering through the wonderland of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
No Oompa-Loompas are in residence, but there is the constant whirr of the cacao bean grinder. The white noise acts as a backdrop to the airy navy blue and brown interior of the small chocolate shop in Function Junction, 10 minutes south of Whistler Village.
Thirty-year-old chocolatier Avison Turner’s path to purveyor of sweet things in Canada’s largest ski resort community was born from a passion to create something new. He didn’t see anyone making chocolate the way he wanted to — creating handcrafted bars from carefully selected beans — so in 2023 he decided to change that, opening his lovely, minimalist workshop and store.
Turner’s interest in chocolate is relatively recent. The dual Canadian-British citizen grew up in both countries but settled in Metro Vancouver, where a stroll down Robson Street in 2019 changed his life. Perusing the bevy of chocolate boutiques, he realized, disappointingly, that he never saw anyone completing the beans-to-bar process from scratch. “I assumed they were melting it down and working with it, but I was looking for a place actually making it,” he says.
His curiosity piqued, Turner set out to learn everything he could about making chocolate, by way of reading, online videos and “a lot of trial and error.” It took him a year to really understand the entire process of making high-quality chocolate. Using single-origin cacao beans, he ground and refined the nibs into molten chocolate in a small countertop machine in his kitchen.
By 2021, his experiments merited a product deemed worthy of a coveted spot at farmers markets in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley, where he set up a booth and started selling his chocolate bars. As he looked for a way to move to the next level, he saw an opportunity: the busy resort town of Whistler somehow had just a single retail chocolate shop, a location of the national mass-market Rocky Mountain Chocolate chain. “Surely Whistler would be the perfect place to set up,” Turner thought.
The industrial space in Function Junction became available in 2022, and Turner picked up the keys and began the process of transforming the empty space into the cosy, decadently delicious-smelling place it is today. This working factory is an ode to the dual sides of the chocolate universe: the making and the selling of chocolate products.
The art and science of refining roasted cacao beans into molten chocolate and then tempering and moulding the chocolate into bars or slabs begins with sourcing the ideal cacao beans, and Turner works with small producers in Costa Rica, Venezuela and Ecuador to bring in single-origin beans. His Costa Rican beans grow near a friend’s coffee farm, so he co-imports one metric tonne of cacao beans in 60- to 70-kilogram sacks alongside his colleague’s coffee supply.
“Since the cacao is grown near coffee and citrus farms in really volcanic soil, it makes a really strong chocolate,” he explains. The terroir — the environmental factors specific to a place, which affect flavour — creates a richness, which comes out particularly when he prepares dark chocolate, leaving the bars with pronounced notes of coffee.
To make his chocolate, Turner drum roasts the cacao beans, then cracks and winnows them to separate the nibs and husks (shells). A grinder fitted with granite stone wheels crushes, refines and conches (mixes) the cacao nibs over the course of 24 to 48 hours.
Then Turner adds sugar, whole milk powder and cocoa butter before tempering the chocolate, a process of heating and then cooling it to about 30°C to build stable crystalline structures within the chocolate. This important step is what keeps chocolate from melting on touch and produces the glossy sheen that makes it look so enticing.
Turner pours the chocolate into moulds to create single-origin bars of dark, milk and white chocolate, as well as bark studded with almonds, hazelnuts, blueberries, strawberries or raspberries. Turner’s Chocolate also sells slabs of untempered chocolate to pastry chefs at local restaurants, leaving it in its less-refined state to allow chefs culinary freedom.
Part of the appeal of setting up in Whistler is getting to demonstrate those exciting parts of the chocolate-making process — the original piece of the puzzle that was missing from Robson Street. “Locals and visitors crave and enjoy experiences here,” he says; they go on brewery tours or throw axes for fun. This ethos fits perfectly with Turner’s plan to incorporate hands-on chocolate-making classes and experiences into his growing business.
In the meantime, Turner continues his one-man show of perfecting the chocolate-making process, juggling his retail shop and his presence at farmers markets in Pemberton, Whistler and Squamish with dreaming up new cocoa creations to the delight of chocolate lovers.
Xoco Westcoast Chocolate
The power of family is behind the sweet smell of success for Xoco Westcoast Chocolate in Squamish. Annette Young and her son Kevin opened the tiny contemporary chocolate shop in downtown Squamish in 2015.
Annette began making chocolate out of her Squamish home 30 years ago. Inspired by her love of chocolate and desserts, she completed a professional chocolate-making course before opening her small shop, Xocolatl, in 1995. Growing up, Kevin loved “playing with boxes and sneaking chocolates” in the back of the shop.
Inspired by time spent in his mother’s business, where he was “always in the kitchen, hanging out and chopping chocolate,” Kevin started making chocolate at 16. He trained at the Pastry Training Centre of Vancouver and with Las Vegas-based chocolatier Melissa Coppel. In 2015, the Youngs bought back the business Annette had sold in 2000 and rebranded it as Xoco in homage to its previous iteration.
The Youngs craft all their chocolates in-house, using a tempting variety of flavouring ingredients, many of them locally sourced. Kevin uses tea from Lucas Teas in Squamish to infuse the chocolate in Xoco’s London Fog bonbons and nut clusters, and he purchases and processes fruit from the Squamish Farmers’ Market. The company partners with Backcountry Brewing for its seasonal Christmas collection chocolates.
The Youngs’ mutual passion for artisanal chocolate-making has resulted in a delicious and creative assortment of bars, barks, bonbons and clusters. “We want things to be delicious, and we want people to be eating them all the time,” says Kevin.
Xoco Westcoast Chocolate is available online, at its retail store in Squamish and at grocery stores along the Sea to Sky corridor.
