Virtual Chocolate Tasting Team Building Activities
Virtual Team Building Chocolate Tasting
It’s all about bean-to-bar chocolate in this one-hour event! At our virtual team building tastings, we talk about how makers create artisan bars from scratch, starting with the whole bean. This allows them to highlight unique flavors that reflect the regions where the beans were grown. The results are truly spectacular single origin dark chocolate bars, and milks and whites that will blow your mind and create the perfect corporate bonding experience!
Includes: One-hour guided virtual chocolate tasting led by a chocolate sommelier, 3 artisanal chocolate bars per guest (made with transparently traded cocoa beans from our favorite award-winning chocolate makers), a welcome letter, and a tasting mat.
Pricing: Includes domestic shipping, taxes, and fees
Groups 1-20: $2,300 flat fee
Groups 21-30: $115/person
Groups 31-60: $99/person
Groups 61+: $89/person
Virtual Chocolate and Tea Tasting
Bean-to-bar chocolate and specialty tea have so much in common! In this one-hour team building virtual tasting, guests discover how both cocoa beans and tea leaves are like wine grapes: They have terroir (translation: They taste different depending on where they’re grown). We pair three of our top craft chocolate bars with three amazing single-origin teas from an award-winning tea company featured in Michelin-starred restaurants. Plus a drinking chocolate to enjoy later. Cheers to your new favorite pairing!
Includes: One-hour guided virtual chocolate tasting led by a chocolate sommelier, 3 artisanal chocolate bars per guest (made with transparently traded cocoa beans from our favorite award-winning chocolate makers), 3 servings of our favorite teas, a welcome letter, and a tasting mat.
Pricing: Includes domestic shipping, taxes, and fees
Groups 1-20: $2,800 flat fee
Groups 21-30: $140/person
Groups 31-60: $124/person
Groups 61+: $104/person
Virtual Wine and Chocolate Team Building
Wine and chocolate are often portrayed as perfectly paired partners, but you might be surprised to learn that not all wines and chocolates are compatible! We’ll discover the tasting notes in three artisan bars as we sip three carefully paired wines. You’ll learn to taste chocolate like a pro as we discover the nuanced flavors in the chocolate and how the wine and chocolate affect each other. Expect lots of discussion and banter as guests share their opinions about their personal favorites when it comes to chocolate and wine.
Includes: One-hour guided virtual chocolate tasting event led by a chocolate sommelier, 3 artisanal chocolate bars per guest (made with transparently traded cocoa beans from our favorite award-winning chocolate makers), 3 single servings of our favorite wines, welcome letter, and tasting sheet.
Pricing: Includes domestic shipping, taxes, and fees
Groups 1-20 : $3,600 flat fee
Groups 11-30: $180/person
Groups 31-60: $164/person
Groups 61+: $144/person
Our Story
Hi, I’m Megan Giller, the founder of Chocolate Noise!
I started this company because I’m absolutely obsessed with bean-to-bar chocolate and love sharing it with people around the world. There’s no better way to do that than a guided chocolate tasting!
While working on my book, Bean-to-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution, I met some of the most interesting, knowledgeable women in the world. Naturally, when I began leading chocolate tastings, I asked them to be part of Chocolate Noise. Now I’m so thankful to be part of a team of experts dedicated to the quality, great taste, and high ethics of craft chocolate.
Read more about my approach to tasting chocolate in The New York Times!
What Makes Us Different
We’re woman-owned and woman-centric.
Our founder wrote THE Book on bean-to-bar chocolate.
Our clients are Fortune 500 companies and bespoke event planners.
We feature chocolate made mostly in cocoa-growing regions, to support local economies and feature women- and BIPOC-owned businesses.
Combined we have more than 3 decades of experience in the chocolate industry.
We send guests multiple bars to try plus a treat for later!
We get great reviews.
Our Clients Include:
Testimonials: Corporate Bonding
“We had a great experience working with Megan and her team for one of our client’s holiday parties. Their knowledge on chocolate and the stories they can share are amazing. Looking forward to booking another event with them.”
“A great evening! Interesting bars I would never find on my own paired with witty banter and new [chocolate-loving] friends. What could be better? ”
“Their day-of team continued the excellent service, dropping some amazing chocolate knowledge and fun during our online event. And the chocolate that was included in our tasting package was delightful!”
“I hosted three chocolate tasting events with Megan for my business around Valentine’s Day and each once was very well executed. She was very knowledgeable and an absolute pleasure to work with.”
Dark, milk, white — we’re obsessed with all chocolate.
Then again, everyone has their favorites.
Take our dream chocolate quiz to discover yours!
Preview a Team-Building Virtual Tasting!
Get a peek at our chocolate sommeliers, preview how to taste chocolate, and see why everyone at our events has
SO.
MUCH.
FUN!
Why Chocolate for Virtual Team Building?
Everyone loves chocolate!
It’s the perfect gift to send colleagues or clients!
It’s fun to learn something new about a favorite food.
It’s a fun nonalcoholic treat that complies with many corporate requirements.
It pairs well with wine, tea, and other fun foods and beverages — all of which we can include in your tasting.
Occasions for Chocolate Virtual Team Building Activities
Virtual Chocolate Tasting Team Building Event
Maybe you’re reconnecting with your team as workers head back to the office. Or planning an intimate break-out session from a larger, company-wide meeting. We can tailor a chocolate tasting to fit your needs! We’ll customize the event based on your specific time requirements, addressing dietary restrictions to ensure everyone can participate. We can even dig down and get creative with specific themes. A perfect example: serving chocolate made by women to celebrate International Women’s Day with your team!
In addition to tasting some of the best bean to bar chocolate in the world, we’ll talk about how makers create these delicious bars from scratch, starting with the whole bean. With our fun ice breakers, everyone stays engaged and talking!
Company Parties
Chocolate is perfect for parties! Beyond the holidays, a festive tasting is the perfect way to celebrate your hard-working colleagues any time of year—what a gift to introduce them to the joys of ethically sourced, artisan chocolate! No matter what you’re looking for, we’ll work with you every step of the way to customize a bespoke experience just for you. Maybe that’s a team building virtual tasting of chocolates from around the world, or a mix-and-mingle in-person event with tasting stations displayed throughout the room. Rest assured, our chocolate is as beautiful as it is delicious! Wrapped bars make stunning displays, as well as lovely carry-home gifts for your guests.
Sales Meetings
Energize those long sales meetings with a chocolate-tasting break! Whether you need 15 minutes to rejuvenate and get back on track or want teams to bond over a longer, shared experience, we can create the perfect chocolate class for your team in person or virtually.
Client Appreciation and Entertainment
No matter how well traveled your clients may be, it’s likely they haven’t experienced an intimate chocolate tasting. Add curated wine pairings or craft beer and you’re in business. Plus, our beautifully wrapped bars make the perfect take-home gift! These events can be as simple as tasting a selection of locally made artisan bars, or you can go all out with multiple pairings and parting gifts. Either way, everyone will enjoy some of the best artisan chocolate in the world. We can’t think of a better way to say “thank you” than in the form of chocolate, scratch-made with love and care every step of the way.
Chocolate Making for Team Building
It sounds like fun to make chocolate truffles for a virtual team-building event — until you’re up to your elbows in melted chocolate and can’t take yourself off mute on Zoom. That’s why our tastings are so special: They give you a firsthand peek into the chocolate making life without all of that mess. We treat your guests to an upscale, luxurious experience of tasting artisan chocolate in the same way we taste fine wine. They’ll also learn all about how chocolate is made, starting from the bean.
Get a preview in our video!
Featured On
Discovery Plus Featured Us!
Our founder Megan Giller was interviewed on “The Messy History of American Food.” Watch the preview here!
FAQ: Team-Building Chocolate Tastings
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You may be wondering why it’s important to include team-building activities at your offsite event or in the monthly flow of corporate life. We can tell you all about how much fun your colleagues will have at our chocolate tastings and how special they’ll feel, but beyond that, the numbers don’t lie. When a company includes team-building activities in its corporate events:
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Cacao naturally contains both caffeine and theobromine. That makes it an ideal way to recharge and keep plugging away on those important projects after your event. Having fun is key to team-bonding success!
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We love working with repeat clients like Google, Hudson River Trading, Latham & Watkins, and Salesforce. We also work with many others, some of whom prefer not to be named online.
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Yes! We absolutely love customizing events for a particular group. We’ve featured chocolate from all BIPOC makers, from specific countries, drinking chocolate, and many other variations.
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Absolutely! A shout-out or special announcement at the beginning of the event sets the right tone for the rest of the hour, and we’re more than happy to have your manager or group leader speak before we get started tasting chocolate.
FAQ: Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Chocolate
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Bean-to-bar chocolate means that it’s made from scratch, starting with the whole cocoa bean, with an emphasis on flavor, quality, and ethics. Chocolate Noise founder Megan Giller published The Book on this type of chocolate, called Bean-to-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution. In our tastings, we focus on this kind of chocolate. Read more about it in our FAQ about our events!
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Chocolate Noise founder Megan Giller published her list of her favorite bean-to-bar makers in 2017 in her book, Bean-to-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution. Every few years, we update our list, and most recently we added Canadian makers. Check it out!
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Yes! We use the two terms interchangeably.
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Like many industries, bean-to-bar chocolate is overwhelmingly male and white. We aim to change that by supporting female-owned and BIPOC-owned companies! Here is a list we put together of Black bean-to-bar makers in the U.S. and internationally.
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Our founder Megan Giller wrote about this in her book! She defines single origin as “chocolate made using cocoa beans from one specific place, or ‘origin.’ The chocolate can be made from a single variety or a blend of varieties, as long as they’re from the same location. Not that right now, single origin doesn’t mean that the sugar and other ingredients in the chocolate are also from that same origin.”
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Cocoa beans taste different depending on where they’re grown, like wine grapes! Terroir is a French word that means “land,” and it connotes all of the factors that affect the flavor, like soil, landscape, and climate. You’ll experience this firsthand in our chocolate tastings! Also check out this blog post to learn more about terroir.
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Chocolate contains a small amount of caffeine, less than a cup of tea. It also contains another stimulant, though, called theobromine, that gives you a boost as well.
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We have a lot of thoughts about this one, which we share in our chocolate tastings! Fair trade indicates a certification system that, as founder Megan Giller writes in her book, is “designed to provide additional income to farmers. Fair trade guarantees a base price for certified cocoa beans and provides farmers with a bonus for community programs like health care and education. Many bean-to-bar makers feel that there are too many problems with this third-party certification system and prefer to practice direct trade.” So what’s direct trade? “A popular system among bean-to-bar makers in which makers buy ingredients directly from farmers. This means that they visit the farmers in person to see firsthand how the grow and process cacao, as well as helping to improve that process, which often translates to superior cocoa. Makers who use the direct-trade model develop long-standing relationships with farmers and pay them much, much more than the industry standard or even fair trade. Many keep open books and help the farming communities with humanitarian projects. There is no official direct-trade certification system.” Also consider transparent trade, which means the chocolate makers are transparent about the way they spend their resources (including how much they pay farmers), often publishing yearly transparency reports.
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Cacao grows 20 degrees above and below the Equator in a band around the globe. That means it comes from tropical countries like Ecuador, Grenada, Vietnam, Madagascar, Ghana, and more. Read more here.
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Yes! Cacao genetics are super complicated, which is why we wrote a blog post explaining it through Justin Timberlake songs.
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Everyone has their own definitions, but as founder Megan Giller writes in her book, cacao refers to “the pod and beans of the tree Theobroma cacao, as well as the tree itself. It’s referred to as ‘cacao’ until it is fermented and dried.” Then we call it cocoa! Cocoa is “cacao beans after they have been fermented and dried, in bean, nib, or powder form.”
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Despite what many people think, cocoa butter does not come from a coconut! As founder Megan Giller writes in her book, cocoa butter is “the fat in a cocoa bean (usually around 50 percent, depending on the bean). Cocoa butter melts at body temperature, which is why it helps create a luxurious, creamy mouthfeel and is often added to bars and bonbons.”
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As founder Megan Giller writes in her book, couverture is “chocolate usually used to coat confections or in molded bonbons. More cocoa butter has been added to it than to other types of chocolate, which means it has a creamier mouthfeel.”
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Cocoa nibs are broken-up pieces of the cocoa bean. By the time we see them in the store, the beans have usually been fermented and dried, and the husk has been removed from the outside of the bean. They’re great in smoothies or on top of yogurt, or in place of chocolate chips in baked goods!
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Cocoa powder is the result of pressing ground-up cocoa nibs with several tons of pressure. The liquid nibs separate into cocoa powder and cocoa butter. There are two types of cocoa powder, natural and alkalized. Most natural cocoa powder is sold as “cacao powder” — don’t be fooled by this labeling! It’s not usually raw or less processed. Alkalized cocoa powder, also called Dutch-processed cocoa, is darker and less bitter, and it’s the majority of what we see in the store and what we use to bake or make hot chocolate.
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Great question! Check out this blog post explaining the difference.
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Store chocolate in a dark, cool place, preferably between 60 and 70 degrees. A kitchen cabinet is perfect. Do NOT store in the fridge unless you live somewhere so warm that it literally melts when in the cabinet.
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Cocoa percentage means the percentage of a chocolate bar that comes from ground-up cocoa nibs and added cocoa butter. As founder Megan Giller writes in her book, “It is not related to quality in ANY WAY.”
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Ah, the controversial type of chocolate. Despite what many people think, in our world, white chocolate IS real chocolate. As founder Megan Giller writes in her book, white chocolate is “cocoa butter combined with other ingredients like sugar, milk or cream powder, and vanilla. There are no cocoa solids in white chocolate. To be considered white chocolate in the United States, it must contain at least 20 percent cocoa butter and no other vegetable fat,” among other requirements.
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Yes and no. Cacao contains lots of antioxidants and flavanols. The more it’s processed, the more these things are removed. A recent study at Harvard determined people need 600 mg of flavanols daily to get the health benefits from chocolate, which translates to an obscene amount of chocolate to eat (check out this infographic for the details). The experts agree that it’s best to eat chocolate for pleasure, not health.
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Those white streaks are the cocoa butter (the natural fat in the cocoa bean) separating from the rest of it. It’s called cocoa butter bloom. Bloomed chocolate isn’t ruined or moldy. A bloomed bar will have a more grainy texture than a tempered one, but it’s still very edible and the flavors will still be intact. It’s also perfect for baking!
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Chocolate and wine is a perennial favorite, and every year, we lead tons of tastings featuring these two. There’s definitely an art to it! We wrote a blog post all about how we do it; read the full post here.
Watch Us Talk About Bean-to-Bar Chocolate on TV!
When founder Megan Giller published her book, Bean-to-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution, her publisher sent her all around the country on a tour! That meant everything from chocolate tastings to chocolate-focused dinners to chocolate-wine nights, with a little bit of book reading thrown in for good measure.
Watch her talk about bean-to-bar chocolate on KUSA-TV in Colorado!