Our Story

Partners in life and business with a love of travel and good food and drink, we put our passion into each and every batch of our chocolates, handcrafted in a 1910 brick mill building in Southern Vermont. We moved here from San Francisco over twenty years ago after setting off on a serendipitous cross-country adventure, falling in love with the area and putting down our roots in the Connecticut River valley, inspired by the landscape, community, and the Vermont cheeses and foods we discovered while living on the West Coast.

John and Dar of Tavernier Chocolates making a coffee pourer in the kitchen

Our town and the surrounding valley are home to a myriad of farms, orchards, forests and meadows that provide a plethora of freshly-farmed and foraged foods. This bounty of pure and delicious flavors are the basis for Vermont’s outstanding artisanal cheese, bread, beer, wine, maple and restaurant culture. It is these resources that we tap into as Vermont chocolatiers.

Dar Tavernier-Singer and John Singer of Tavernier Chocolates in front of a barn at Scott Farm

Our journey to become artisan chocolate makers has taken many twists and turns, but it feels like everything we’ve done has culminated in what we do and love now. We draw upon our travels, the exciting innovations in California cuisine while we lived there, the farm-to-table movement, the delicious leisurely Sunday lunches and memorable cakes and pies of Dar’s grandmothers, as well as our backgrounds in art, music, biology and chemistry, restaurants and cafés to inform our craft.

Starting out at our local Farmer’s Market in 2014, we built our following throughout the years and opened our cozy little Factory Shop off our kitchen space, moving to our present location in the historic Brooks House on Main Street in downtown Brattleboro in 2024.

Tavernier Chocolates creates elegant chocolates from Vermont farms and local foraged ingredients.

We have worked over the years with a small team of talented farmers and herbalists, artists and artisans, and chefs and cooks.

Dar’s experience in the front and back of restaurants and cafés in Europe and the U.S. gave her working knowledge of how to approach creating recipes and presenting them to the world so they tell a story. The flavors of fresh local produce and the spruce tips, wild mint, berries, wildflowers and other foraged treats she would taste growing up in the Northern Adirondacks and St. Lawrence Valley resonate in Dar’s recipes today as a Vermont chocolatier, as well as a great respect for those who work the land and grow and forage food.

John’s experience as a craft coffee roaster and manager of a small roasting shop, where he visited origin and regularly tasted and cupped world renowned coffees with leaders in the field like George Howell, have provided him a great background to sourcing and working with chocolate.

Dar and John Singer standing in front of a brick wall

Chocolate combines the things we love the most: art, food, science and place. We are absolutely thrilled to be doing what we do, and to be doing it here in southern Vermont.

Learn more about Tavernier Chocolates by watching our film below, and more about our name, our team, our process, and our approach to making the best Vermont chocolates, and check out this behind-the-scenes peek at a food photography shoot featuring our chocolates.