“Every carefully chosen fixture, tile, machine, drawing in the beautiful, gleaming shop….I watched the Parliament chocolate makers tending big, rotating vats of chocolate, ladeling small scoops onto trays and decorating them like tiny pieces of art.”
— Deborah Fallows, The Atlantic.
Parliament Chocolate
Redlands, California.
After initially tasting success with his first business, à la minute, an ice cream shop that uses liquid nitrogen to freeze dairy into ice cream, Ryan Berk and his wife, Cassi, decided to open a small chocolate factory inside a 1930’s era building whose first tenant was the White Owl Café. Inspired, the Berks named their new venture Parliament, as in, “a parliament of owls.”
For the Berks, every batch begins with a simple idea — “What does Parliament Chocolate taste like?” To help answer this question, Ryan and his small team strive to create a product that is reflective of where it came from. This means identifying the characteristics of the farm—the environment, the people, the profiles, as well as the fermentation process.
