Vanessa, Creatrix of Gnosis Chocolate

Vanessa Barg (a.k.a. Chocolate Girl) is the founder and creatrix of Gnosis Chocolate. She has been hand making delicious raw chocolate since March of 2007.

Sprouting from the fertile ground of inspiration, hope and integrity this little chocolate business grew rapidly. Within its first year of operation, Gnosis chocolate found its way onto the shelves of over 50 stores across the country and into the mouths of individual customers from around the world.

As her business grows, Vanessa continues to uphold her commitment to promoting health for her consumers, the environment and society. Vanessa’s story is about following your passion with integrity - an inspiration for each of us.

WBDD: What is Gnosis Chocolate?

Vanessa: Gnosis means intuitive knowledge, knowledge of the heart and experiential knowledge. So Gnosis chocolate is what I’m using as an avenue or a vehicle for Gnosis, for knowledge.

It started out while I was attending the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN). At first it was just a chocolate bar I made for my clients and fellow students at IIN to help them replace their unhealthy chocolate. I love chocolate and I love food and food preparation. My mother is Italian so I always viewed preparing food as a way to show love. So that’s how it started out.

But the company Gnosis Chocolate has really turned into so much more. It’s turned into an avenue where I can fill my packaging and my website and my speeches and everything full of knowledge about health, wellbeing, spirituality, a social consciousness, environmental consciousness and conscious commerce. So it’s really become a vehicle and a platform for me to speak on all these different forms of Gnosis.

WBDD:How did you get started as chocolate girl and what has the success of Gnosis Chocolate meant in your life?

Vanessa:The very beginning of that name was a t-shirt my mother bought for me that says “chocolate girl” on it. That was way before I even started making chocolate. But that’s how that name got coined. I was wearing that t-shirt the first time I sold chocolate bars at IIN.

IIN is such a strong community of people that are there to inspire you to fulfill your passion. When they saw me starting to make this chocolate (it was not a company yet - not even the inkling of a company) they supported me so much that coming up with a nickname like that really helped me to embody the chocolate that I was making.

Since then, Gnosis Chocolate has become my baby and I take care of her very well. And I do view her as a daughter and the team as my team and I give a lot of time and energy to it. So chocolate girl definitely makes sense. I embody that now… full time.

WBDD: Is Gnosis Chocolate, or even chocolate, actually healthy?

Vanessa: To me chocolate is one of the healthiest foods on the planet. Bitter beans and bitter greens are the healthiest foods on the planet.

But I also want to address that “Is chocolate healthy?” is a really interesting question because no food on the planet is healthy. People are healthy. Systems are healthy. Food is not healthy. Food is void, really. It’s what your body does with the food.

I have found that when chocolate is raw and organic and has no refined sugar, if it’s just the bean, that the cacao itself is extremely beneficial to me physically and mentally.

One of the major reasons why gnosis chocolate is health promoting is that it helps my customers to replace unhealthy foods, like brownies or anything sweet. People are happy to replace unhealthy sweets with a bar of chocolate that doesn’t have any of the “bad” stuff in it.

But cacao itself is a great food, in my opinion.

If you look at someone who is a fruitarian or 100% raw and all they eat is romaine lettuce and cucumbers, a very clean and simple diet, maybe cacao is not going to be the same for them as it is for the rest of us. So it really is bioindividual, like every food.

In their book Naked Chocolate, David Wolf and Shazzie go into all the details of the biochemistry of cacao and the history of its use as medicine. They go into all the benefits of why raw is better. He wrote the book on it!

WBDD: Why does Gnosis Chocolate use raw chocolate?

Vanessa: Raw anything is closer to nature, so it’s less processed, there’s less “stuff” added to it. It has gone through less machines so it’s easiest for us to digest because it’s closest to nature.

Also the neurotransmitters, enzymes and antioxidants are much stronger and at higher levels. The food is much closer to how it was provided in nature and therefore we’re able to process it easier because it’s recognizable to our system.

I also promote raw chocolate because the raw food movement is a movement toward eco-sustainability and health. And that’s why every single ingredient I use is raw. Because not only is the food itself healthier because it’s raw but also because raw food production is much more environmentally friendly. It’s much more loving and in touch with nature. So the movement itself is something I want to support.

WBDD: Tell us about the superfoods you put into Gnosis Chocolate… What is Crystal Manna?

Vanessa: Crystal manna is a blue green algae that comes from Klamath lake. There was a volcanic eruption in this lake so the algae that grows in that lake are very high in minerals.

I started out by recommending that my clients eat more greens and drink more water. But found that when I started recommended adding green powders to their smoothies they were a little reluctant. So I just thought, “How can I pack the most super foods, the most minerals and the most greens into a bar of chocolate?” So even children who might not have eaten that green smoothie, they’ll have the chocolate bar and they won’t even mind that it’s in there.

That’s why I add it in there. It’s really high in minerals and it’s “greens” and I can get it in there where people don’t even suspect it. That’s my little game. “How much healthy stuff can I pack into a bar?”

In addition to superfoods, a lot of the ingredients in my bars are herbs or complete foods (like the nuts). It’s important to make that distinction and recognize that there are superfoods and herbs and whole foods.

Superfoods are an amazing category of foods. Goji berries are the highest in beta carotene, helping with your eyes and your skin, are a complete protein and harvested from one of the most sacred places on the planet. They are definitely a very high vibration food. The same kind of story goes for every other “superfood” that I use, be it pomegranate or acai. So it goes along with that game of how much nutrition can I pack into a bar.

But then there are also the herbs that I use. The way that I came up with the “Super Choc” bar is that I had been studying Ayurvedic and Traditional Chinese Medicine on my own before attending IIN and had been playing around with those herbs for my own health. I was reading about them and attending lectures and I had them in my kitchen. When I was making those first bars it was really just a matter of listening to my intuition of which herbs would go well together in chocolate and which herbs would inspire people.

For me it’s not only about the actual food and the actual ingredients, or even about the love that is used to prepare it by hand, but also about inspiration. There are now hundreds and thousands of people that walk into stores everyday, pick up my bar of chocolate and read the ingredients. They’re going to read about ashwaghanda and gotu kola and ginko biloba and Siberian ginseng and maca and reishi mushrooms and acai and crystal manna. And a lot of these people have never seen these ingredients before, they’ve never even heard of them.

So it’s planting a seed and hopefully inspiring them to open up and look into alternative medicine and into these herbs that have been used for centuries. I can’t take responsibility for choosing them. It’s really that they were put here on the planet as medicines. Hopefully by reintroducing them, just like reintroducing the word “Gnosis”, I’ll be planting a seed for people to do some research. And at least, the next time they see it, they’ll recognize it and they’re interest will be peaked.

WBDD: How are Gnosis chocolate bars made?

Vanessa: We start with the highest quality ingredients that I can find. By that I mean that I get as close to the farm or as close to the source as I possibly can. I take a lot of time sourcing the ingredients and a lot of thought around that. That’s a really important part to me.

And then it’s all about “Team Gnosis.” The people in the kitchen are all either certified health counselors or students at IIN or just really passionate about health. We work together and we make the chocolate 100% by hand with no machines whatsoever.

Our chocolate is literally made in a pot at very, very low heat. We pour the molds by hand and we take the chocolate out of the molds by hand. We bag them by hand in biodegradable cellophane bags. Then we put them into the 100% post consumer recycled boxes with the eco-friendly labels on them. We apply the labels by hand and then put the expiration date on them. It’s literally done by hand from start to finish. The only machine we use is one to chop up the nuts. I used to do that by hand but that became tedious after making hundreds of bars a day.

We barely make any trash at all because we reuse all of the packaging that comes in. We don’t recycle it. We reuse it. I feel that’s very important in creating the closed loop. Recycling only takes us so far.

WBDD: I understand Gnosis Chocolate to be a business with high standards for the quality and healthfulness of its product as well as its environmental and social impacts. Tell us about the business ethics that Gnosis lives by…

Vanessa: The most exciting part of this whole company for me is that a couple of years back I had no idea that I was going to start a company. I had no business plan and no investors and the company started. All that it took was the passion and courage to listen to my intuition. It started on its own with no start up money, no investors, no banks, no loans. The most exciting part is that the business model is based 100% around organic growth, meaning that it all comes from customer demand. I don’t do sales calls. I don’t do marketing. All I do is make the product with a lot of love, provide great customer service and put a lot of hard work into it (which to me, is always play).

The business ethics of this company are based on only what people are asking for and what people will support. The chocolate is on the shelf because it deserves and it earns its place there. It’s not bought. Marketing is when you spend money to try to influence people to buy your product. The stores that carry Gnosis chocolate called me because their customers have asked them to. Even Whole Foods, East coast and West coast, both got in contact with us. That really encompasses the entire business ethic that we work with… that we have to do what our people ask, and not any less. We have to give them what they deserve and really earn their dollars. Because it’s hard earned money and I realize that.

From the social stand point, I believe that by feeding people high quality foods I’m doing them a service. The members of Team Gnosis are with us because they’re passionate about their work and they believe in the company beyond just the chocolate bar. We have full time team members that are making a livelihood off of something that they’re passionate about.

The more this company grows the more I can spread this support. As the company grows we’ve been getting involved in more events and chocolate parties. We’re going to be very involved in Raw Spirit Festival in Washington, D.C. this year. The more that this company grows the more I can involve people in doing a project that is representative of all the other companies that people could start. Many people have told me that it’s inspirational to see what I’ve done and that they realize that they could do it too.

We’re also involved with the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation. We gave 50 pounds of chocolate to their “Chocolate for Charity” event this past year and 25 pounds the year before.

As for the environmental part, if we, as a small start up company, can create and ship our products without Styrofoam and make our product environmentally friendly, imagine what the big companies can do. If they start looking at the fact that people are supporting Gnosis chocolate even though it costs more and that they’re supporting the belief systems behind it hopefully we’re setting a precedent and raising the bar for all the other companies.

WBDD: What is your vision for Gnosis Chocolate?

Vanessa: My vision for Gnosis is quite large, I must admit. And I’m still developing it, but I know that it’s not just going to be Gnosis Chocolate. I don’t know if it’s going to be Gnosis Foods. I have lots of ideas for a whole line of food and people who are excited to jump on that. I don’t know if it’s going to be Gnosis events and host events all over the country and the world where I go and speak and host other amazing speakers. I have great ideas and contacts around that. Maybe it’ll be Gnosis Books or Gnosis Health. WE could do a whole collaborative of health counselors together. But the one thing I know if that it’s not just going to be Gnosis Chocolate.

My vision for Gnosis Chocolate is for it to become a household name that everyone knows. If you want high quality chocolate that Godiva (which is owned by Campbell’s Soup company) is not going to be your idea of high quality chocolate. There are a lot of high quality chocolates out there, but they all have sugar in them.

My vision is to be a chocolate company that is a “plantation to bar,” not just “bean to bar.” There are a lot of companies out there touting “bean to bar” but there’s a whole other field called the plantation. I’ve been really developing my senses and ideas about how to grow cacao and how it can actually benefit the rain forest to grow chocolate. So my vision with the chocolate is to source the beans myself and become more involved in the whole production end.

I want to make sure to incorporate general health and environmental, social, spiritual awareness into whatever I do and whatever Gnosis becomes.

WBDD: How can our readers find your deliciously healthy products?

Vanessa: They’re sold directly on www.gnosischocolate.com.There is also a full list on our website of all the stores that carry our bars, from coast to coast and all over the world.

This week our chocolate got shipped all over Eastern Europe and even Uzbekistan. We’ve got chocolate going all over the world. Korea, Japan, Singapore, Australia, NZ, Israel, islands in the south pacific. The island of Cypress buys a lot of chocolate!

When I wake up in the morning and go about my day it pops into my mind often that there is someone somewhere in the world looking at a bar of Gnosis chocolate and we don’t even speak the same language. It’s really moving to me to know that this company without the funding has really been able to grow. And I am so deeply grateful because I really view myself as being just a vehicle. Gnosis has a mind of its own and I’m just along for the ride.

WBDD: Thank you Vanessa for stopping by to chat with us and share this incredible information! The Whole Body Detox Diet wishes you all the best as you change the world with your passionate and successful company.

We encourage everyone to visit Gnosis Chocolate to order chocolate, bulk ingredients, and to find out more about their upcoming products and events. And congratulations to Gnosis Chocolate on their official Organic Certification!