Store Visit: ZenBunni

We moved our gallery to Santa Monica and packaged up the chocolates more seriously and sold almost 30,000 bars in little over a year with no advertising (before Instagram). We had officially become chocolatiers…

R+T: What kinds of ingredients go into your artisanal, biodynamic, organic (and beyond-delicious) chocolates?

Very rare and incredibly hard to attain ingredients. We do everything the hard way, because we only accept the best –people say that a lot, but very few do. We didn’t feel like anyone was doing this in chocolate and took it upon ourselves to be those people. There are roughly 6 million cacao farmers in the world, only 5 are biodynamic. So our chocolate is literally “one in a million”.  We are the only Biodynamic Chocolatiers in America, and very excited to bring the magic of ancient farming and sustainability to everyone out here. To source biodynamic ingredients has become a labor of love –being so challenging, the reward is quite fruitful (pun intended). It took us 3 years to find the farmer who now grows our biodynamic jaggery in southern india, which we use to sweeten our dark microcosmic chocolate bars. Our chocolates are 70% and free of dairy, gluten, soy and refined sugar. We like to tell people that we take our chocolate very seriously…and very lightly at the exact same time! The true magic of Alchemy (which we named our daughter).

R+T: Can you share a bit about Biodynamic farming, its importance, and the role that it plays in the creation of your chocolates?

Biodynamic farming is a certified system of farming like organic, but well beyond organic standards. (Biodynamic Farming actually predates “organic farming” and is the first recognized sustainable farming practice in the world) It embodies ancient farming practices that took place in every country across the globe long before the age of technology and industry. It didn’t have that label, but it has been in practice since people first started to grow food. They grew food with a great deal of reverence for the moon cycle and what was happening in the cosmos. Farming was a very spiritual and holistic practice that played a major part of the daily lives of everyone in the community. Rudolph Stiener (the inventor of Waldorf Schools) took note of this philosophy and basic principles and created a method to honor that relationship and nourish the farm and treat it as a “living organism”. He developed incredible preparations with herbs, manure, crystals, and symbiotic relationships with animals to bring life force to the land, and establish a sound system of “holistic agriculture”. The level of time, energy, and consciousness it takes to create and maintain a biodynamic farm resonated with us as the perfect method to cultivate our food philosophy and the way we craft our chocolate.

R+T: Your Rabbit Hole is as amazing as the products you create! Can you tell us a bit about the space?

A little over two years ago, a dear friend told us that he was opening up a 80sqft cafe on Abbot Kinney. We couldn’t believe such a small space existed on such a hot street…we joked with him and said “if you ever hear of anything like that again, pleeeease tell us.” A week later he said his landlord would rent out his bathroom closet…WE’LL TAKE IT!!

It was so tiny, we thought…this should be a Rabbit Hole! We had just been learning about “Cobb Structures” and thought this was the perfect opportunity to put it into practice. The landlord had no idea that it was about to get real messy, so truckloads of clay rich mud from our property in Topanga started piling up and we began to create our alchemical mix of mud, sand, straw, and the download came to put cacao in it…of course!!! We thought it was going to take a few weeks, but it took months, but the finished result was a earthen cave with chocolate in every square inch and crystal clusters growing out of it…it’s become quite the attraction. We continue to add new elements all the time as the canvas is quite fun, and plan to build variations of these all over the world (anyone interested?)

R+T: Could you possibly pick a favorite chocolate treat?

Zen’s favorite is the collaboration with our dear friend Shiva Rose, a bulgarian rose with hand ground cardamon salt. Anything floral usually tastes like perfume or powder due to it’s low quality and synthetic ingredients, so to be able to craft a chocolate that actually taste like rose was deeply gratifying. Bunni’s favorite is the “Cali Almond – soon to be renamed “Alchemy Almond”, as it’s our daughters favorite as well. There are only two biodynamic almond farms in the whole world, we soak and sprout ours in marine phytoplankton sea minerals and create an upgraded version of the classic paring.

R+T: What is the most rewarding part of your work?

Helping Mother Nature, that is really the only goal. To bring life back to her is the most rewarding. Biodynamic farming creates incredible “living soil”, the earth is down to very little top soil and if we can bring awareness to one of the most sustainable methods of farming one bar at a time and educate people on what’s really happening, we feel, as stewards to this precious earth that we’ve done our job in this lifetime. The more we grow, the more farms and farmers we can support and convert into practices that innately have been apart of our natural way of being since the very beginning.