Weight Loss Journey: Losing 60lb with Sam Ratto of Videri Chocolate Ep 3

You get to talk to people about like, you know, what we're doing. And then if, you know, somebody goes, oh, I don't like dark chocolate. One of our favorite questions to ask people is, what's your favorite kind of candy? And if somebody says Skittles or like Sour Patch Kids, we give them milk chocolate. If they say, oh, I love chocolate-covered almonds, we start with sea salt.

Welcome to the Find Your Edge podcast. Get ready to dive into all things training, nutrition, recovery, and more. Whether you're a new or experienced endurance athlete, a weekend warrior, or someone who just wants to improve your health and fitness, this podcast is for you. I'm Chris Newport, founder, head coach, registered dietitian, exercise physiologist, and certified personal trainer with the Endurance Edge and the Fueling Edge. With more than 20 years experience in the fitness industry, 18 years in multi-sport, and over 10 years as a sports nutritionist, I'm speaking with athletes and experts about actionable steps you can take to reach and sustain peak performance and health. Let's do it. All right. Welcome back to the Find Your Edge podcast. This is Chris Newport, and I'm here today with Sam Ratto of Videri's Chocolate. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Awesome. So I wanted to start off with having people get to know you a little bit. So tell us a little bit about yourself. Your business and how you got into making chocolate. This whole episode, by the way, is probably gonna make me hungry. So.

Same here. Every time I talk about chocolate, it makes me hungry. Well, yeah, I am the owner of Bonaire Chocolate Factory. I co-founded it with 2 other people back in 2011. And as of 2018, I became a sole proprietor with some private investment. And over the course of, shoot, almost, we're in our 10th year now, We've won a handful of awards for making bean-to-bar chocolate, and our staff is engaged in the process all the way from sourcing beans to making a bar of chocolate to turning to bonbons or adding it as a topping in our soft serve window right now. But the thing that we love the most about Vidéria is our community engagement and how we engage with, number one, our team and our coworkers, and then how we engage with our community and my proudest moments as a business owner these past almost 10 years now is when we get to do charity work, donations, fundraising, and then honestly just seeing people enjoy chocolate. It's really, it really is the gift that keeps on giving when you get to see somebody, maybe they're like a 14-year-old, you know, kind of cool kid, you know, boy that has a nut allergy that hasn't had chocolate his entire life. And because we're nut-free, he can eat our chocolate and him and his mom start crying. That's a pretty amazing story.

That's awesome.

Yeah, yeah, that happened. And then actually, he actually worked at Videra for 2 years before he went to college. So that was kind of a nice full circle. He came back in with a resume and he's like, I had chocolate here for the first time when I was 14 and I want to work here now. And we're like, you can. And so it's stuff like that over the past, you know, it'll be 10 years in December of 2021. That's kind of how we measure ourselves as a business is our engagement with our community and how we feel when we're working there.

That's awesome. So rewind 10 years, how'd you get into this? How'd you get into being a chocolate maker?

That's such a fun roadmap. So I grew up in Southern California and I grew up playing soccer and skateboarding and surfing and all those sorts of fun things that you do when you live by the beach. And then I got a job in the skateboarding industry when I was about 19 or 20 years old. And I worked for a company in that industry for about 8 years. And in 2008, right before the big financial crash of 2008, my department was eliminated due to budget cuts. And I came home to my ex-wife and I said, hey, Let's move to North Carolina. And we moved here in 2009. And the goal for me was to go to NC State to get into PGA, PGM, to look at becoming a superintendent of golf courses. I was raised by farmers on both sides of my family, and it was just a really interesting synergy. My ex-wife had family in the state. I traveled through here. A few times and really enjoyed it. It's, you know, where Raleigh is located, it's 2 hours from the beach, 4 hours from the mountains. You know, you can get on a flight to New York City in an hour and a half, and it's just a wonderful state with wonderful people in it. And so when, when I got here in 2009, I started going back to college and started working at actually Escazú, uh, the other chocolate shop in Raleigh, when they were transitioning from their confections operation to more of a bean-to-bar operation. And my job was to sort and roast and winnow the beans. And I had, up until the day I walked into that shop, I didn't know that chocolate was, that came from a fruit. It was incredibly healthy for you. And it had the potential of, you know, flavors that I'd never tasted before. You could get lemon and hazelnut in a chocolate bar. You could get, you know, blueberries and graham crackers. You could just get all these different flavors. And my brain was just flying. And long story short, uh, that didn't work out with me working there. And in this, I think it was kind of the fall of 2010, maybe almost like October, November, my dad came down to Raleigh. He lives in New York City. And we were driving somewhere and, you know, he'd been in the chocolate shop and he goes, if you were going to start your own business, who are the first 5 people you would hire? And to this day, I remember the road we were driving on. I remember the weather. I remember like what he was dressed in. Like, I remember every single part of, of that one question. And, um, yeah, I, I boldly pitched a business. I was lucky enough to get funding and start Bodegari in December of 2011. And the best way to like kind of round out that roadmap is the process of making chocolate for me was, I could understand for some reason, I've learned more about why now, but sorting beans and picking the ones that were best, roasting them to the aroma, the way in which you kind of winnow, which is the cracking of the bean, which separates the nib, which is what 100% chocolate is, from the shell, which is called the husk. And then just, I was able to do research, reach out to other chocolate makers, talk to other people. And then the most quote-unquote annoying part is you just have to eat a lot of chocolate. So through that whole process of moving here in 2009 to try and become a superintendent or a land manager of a golf course or something like that to be outside, I lucked into my passion that for the rest of my working life, I hope I work in a chocolate factory, eat delicious chocolate, and travel the world sourcing cocoa beans and doing stuff like that. It's been pretty amazing.

That is wild. So you went from skateboarding to golf to chocolate. It seems like a very logical progression.

It really does. Like when you look at it from, you know, yeah, it, um, over the past 9+ years now, you know, the first couple of years we would get approached by a lot of PR or marketing people and they'd say, what's your story? Like, where'd you go to culinary school? What'd you do this? What are your parents like? And you would essentially give them a roadmap to your history, and they would kind of look at you and be like, well, how does that equate to you being a world-class chocolate maker? And over the course of, I'd say, the last 6 years, I've really honed in on it, and it goes back to my dad's dad, my grandfather. Him and his family ran a family farm, they still do, in Modesto, California, under Ratto Brothers Produce Company. In fact, you can still every once in a while in the wintertime at different restaurants, you can see kale, chard, spinach, or basil that's in our Rattleberry boxes, which is pretty fun back here in North Carolina. But when I was younger, my older brother and I would go shopping with my grandfather for like big family meals. I'm one of 26 or 27 cousins. And he would always, you know, we'd be shopping for something. He's like, oh, I forgot to bring romaine lettuce home from the farm. Can you go over there and pick some? It was from his farm. He just was buying it at Safeway or whatever. And I would go over there and I would get these 2 or 3, you know, big giant heads of shiny romaine lettuce. And he would look at me and he'd go, what do those smell like? And I would smell it and I'm like, I don't know, pool. He goes, go find ones that smell like dirt. And I was like, okay. And from that part of my brain that I I did not know really existed, and I had not remembered that story. It started bringing me back to the history of both sides of my family are farmers, and what both sides of my family do most of the time when we're buying produce or eating something or cooking a meal is we're smelling things, and we're thinking about the aromas and the flavors and how they build. And it's a big leap from that story to me being able to make chocolate, but in my brain, it's not much different. You smell beans that come out of a bag and sometimes they smell like unripe mandarin oranges or they smell like a musty kind of forest floor. And then you crack them open, you eat them, you kind of taste what they taste like, and then you start roasting them. The flavors blossom into fruit flavors and nuttiness and citrusy and sours. And, you know, some of the beans are very interesting. If you over-roast them, they taste very bland when you make chocolate out of them. Some beans, you under-roast them, they taste burnt. Like, it's just a magical thing. It's just an absolute magical product. And getting from, you know, being raised by farmers on both sides of my family to be a chocolate maker, my brain makes a lot of sense, but It's, uh, it's not a straight line.

Yeah. So it sounds like you've got this really cool blend of art and science, like, so the science of roasting a bean, which I would love for you to walk us through that and how it gets from the farmer to our mouths in a, you know, a bar or bonbon or whatever. But also it seems like there's a lot of intuition and creativity and fun and just sort of that natural instinct that goes into it.

Oh, 100%. I mean, and then like I said earlier, you have to eat the chocolate. That's the, the hardest, best part about our job is that when you're doing all these things, you're able to eat chocolate. And, you know, most of the chocolate that I ingest is in the roasted nib form, which is 100% chocolate, no sugar added. It's just you know, we roast our beans for about 16 to 20 minutes, just different varieties. And I'll kind of walk through that process in a second, to tasting the ground-up nibs called liquor. I don't really eat a lot of like the finished product per se, like the, you know, I eat a lot of chewy salted caramels because those are my vice, but it's not as if I'm, you know, snacking on a bar of chocolate because during my day I've probably had a cup of cocoa nibs. I've probably had a couple tablespoons of that product refined down and the cocoa mass separated and cocoa butter separated and stuff like that. And it's just a really fascinating process. But yeah, I mean, it's all about like your experience. And then the biggest thing for us, like I said at the top, was it's about our customer experience. If somebody comes in and it's the greatest chocolate in the world and we give them a bad experience, it's a bad experience. And so our big thing is, you know, pre-COVID when we could show people around, we could walk everybody through the, you know, where we source our beans, look at our sorting room, you know, you could stand next to us at the roast pad and literally stand there while myself or Mordecai was roasting. We'd crack beans open, we'd hand them to you during the whole process, and it was always so much fun to watch somebody in the roasting process. I'd always ask them, "Do you have 15 minutes? Do you really want to dive into this?" And they're like, "Yeah, I have 15 minutes." And in that roasting process, I would talk to them about sorting, what we take out of the beans, why we take— obviously take little pebbles and rocks that come off of the drying decks in countries of origin that are processing these beans after they've been fermented. Then I'm talking to them about size and shape. We try and get flat ones out of there because they don't have enough meat in them and they burn quicker. And then you would kind of walk through the process. And if somebody was there at the beginning of a roast, at about 6 minutes, that bean starts to change, uh, flavor. It starts to give you a little bit of aroma. At the 9 or 10 minute mark, you really start to get a sense of what that bean is going to do. In fact, what that whole roast is going to do. And in about 12 or 13 minutes, you really smell everything That's a part of that, that bean. And then in between, like I said, 16 and 20 minutes, different varieties have different times just based upon the weight, the size, and the moisture content. And then, you know, after they come out, like right when they come out at about, you know, that 16 to 20 minute mark, they have a flavor. But once they cool for another 15 minutes, they have an almost completely different flavor. Again, if somebody wants to stand there for 15 to 30 minutes, they get to see the whole thing and smell the whole thing and taste the whole thing. It's wild. I mean, it really is a very wild process and it's so much fun because it smells delicious. Whenever it's roast day at Baderi, which is usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays now, and you can still come out to the patio that Black White Coffee Roasters operates, a coffee shop, and you can come to the patio. If the wind is blowing from the west, the whole patio smells like the best chocolate brownies ever. So it's just a fascinating, like fascinating ride.

Yeah. It sounds like I need to work from, uh, Vediri on Tuesdays and Wednesdays or from that coffee shop when, uh, that breeze is just hitting just the right way. That sounds amazing. And if anybody has not been to your shop, it is, it's really beautiful. It really is. An experience, and I look forward to when that whole process or that whole experience can open back up for people.

It is. We, we can't wait. I mean, it has been interesting to totally transform our factory into more of a, just a pure factory space because we're not letting guests in, but it was so much fun. And we just redid our counter right at the beginning of COVID which was like kind of perfect timing. To give our customers and guests a better experience and give our team a better opportunity to, you know, hand out samples and talk about chocolate. And then, you know, ask people where they're going to go eat later. That's one of the things that I really miss is talking to people about, you know, maybe they're a visitor or like me, they're a transplant, where they're visiting, where they're going to go eat, what are they going to do, you know, asking if they've gone to NCMA and walked outside, you know, like all those sort of things. I miss that so much. I'm like, I just want to talk to somebody about like what taco stand they went to or if they enjoyed, you know, eating at Capital Club 16 or Garland, you know, like I just, I'm like, I'm like, what did you eat? What did you eat? What was, what was over there? Was there anybody outside? You know, I just, I'm just itching for it.

It sounds like it's all about the, the sort of human experience for you from tasting to talking to other people about other types of food.

Oh yeah, I mean, because, you know, one of the big things, like when you, when you were saying, like, you know, beans start with farmers, those farmers start, you know, working with brokers, that's how we get our beans. The partners that we work with invest heavily in the farms and the communities, and it's not just a one-stop shop. They're not buying beans one year and then leaving the next year. We're working with farmers that do it for a long time as a partnership. And then when we bring them in, you get to talk to people about, like, you know, what we're doing. And then if, you know, somebody goes, oh, I don't like dark chocolate, one of our favorite questions to ask people is, what's your favorite kind of candy? And if somebody says Skittles or like Sour Patch Kids, we give them milk chocolate. If they say, oh, I love chocolate-covered almonds, we start with sea salt. And then you kind of move from there. So like even that part of it where You know, you get some wild answers. Like people are like, oh, I don't like candy. I only like 100% dark chocolate. Give me the darkest thing you have. And we're like, well, we have 90%. So it could go any direction, but it would go that direction because you'd have a conversation with somebody and just ask them what their favorite thing is. And then they would tell you and you try and see if you make something that they enjoy.

So Skittles to chocolate. What would be your recommendation there? If somebody said, I like Skittles, but I don't like chocolate, what would you, how would you lure them in?

The easiest one to do, honestly, is if they, if they got $3.25, is to have them eat a chewy salted caramel. The way we make our chewy salted caramel is it's just a delicious treat. We make a somewhat chewy— when we say chewy, it really is if you bit into the piece with like with your teeth, you could pull the caramel away and within like an inch the tail goes away and you can just, you know, easily kind of chew the caramel and it would go away. It's not like a store-bought brand where you're like gnawing on the chewy caramel. And it has sea salt. We get our sea salt from Bull Bay Salt Works outside of Charleston. And the combination of our 70% classic dark blend, that chewy salted caramel together are just incredible. Like it's just a, it's an incredible thing. I used to say at the counter that if we dropped one of these and I stepped on half of it, I'd pick the other part off the ground and eat it. I'd be like, I'm not wasting that.

Like 5-second rule.

Exactly.

So I know you mentioned something about like the farmers. So give us kind of the rundown of how it's, how this process starts, the kind of Reader's Digest version of, you know, sourcing your chocolate and then how does it get to you and then how do you roast it and get it into a bar?

So I will— I'll try and run you through this fast. The best way to put it is we get all of our beans from Central and South America right now. We have a source that we get from Tanzania on occasion, but most of our beans come from the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Ecuador. And like I said earlier, we work with brokers that buy the majority of these farmers' beans, whether it be from a direct farmer, which is sort of rare, Or if it's from a co-op of, you know, 50 to 1,000 farmers in like a place like Guatemala where you have native cultures that are very traditional, have been doing this for thousands of years, and they're buying what's called wet beans. So the cocoa pod grows on a tree. It grows on the trunks and the branches of the tree, not on the edges of the branches. You crack it open, there's usually about 40 to 60 beans in there. And then the process that most of our brokers buy beans from people is essentially they call it wet beans. They put them in buckets or bags, they take those buckets and bags to a central fermentation location where they can dial in the fermentation, where they're looking at pH levels, temperature, time, when they actually agitate them or turn them over. And it's a pretty detailed process. If that gets messed up, the whole harvest is gone. They've done a lot of good work and a lot of incredible work on figuring out better ways to ferment and lessen the chance of ruining an entire crop. Then it goes out onto a drying deck and it dries in the sun, or some places have to be forced heat because they're, it's, you know, in a rainforest and it's too humid or moist to actually dry the beans. Then they get put in 50 to 70 kilo sacks, which is about 110 to 100 60 pounds. Then they get put in containers and shipped to wherever port they're going to. Every once in a while, you'll get a container that maybe has a hole in it that water gets in on its journey and the beans start to re-ferment and you could essentially lose 20 tons of beans because there's literally a softball-sized hole in the container, water gets in, sun hits it, it heats up, it starts to re-ferment, and it then grows mold and all these other things. And so that's kind of an interesting thing about cocoa is that it's not a stable product in the shipping, much different than coffee would be, where coffee is— the green coffee is a much more stable product. There still are issues with it, but to get cocoa beans to America or anywhere is a fascinating process. And it's almost a miracle that they show up in edible form as much as they do. So then we get them and we bring them into our factory. We have the space to fit about 2.5 tons, which is about 16 to 30 bags of beans. We have a sorting machine that we purchased that is like a hopper that's got a vibrator on it that has a screen on the bottom. So the little broken bits or maybe little pebbles or maybe some debris falls in and then it runs along a little conveyor belt, and we, you know, we push away the bad beans, like I was saying, the flat ones. Maybe you find a little stick, or maybe a piece of plastic from the bag, or a tag, or maybe some burlap or something like that. And then when we get a whole bucket of beans, which usually takes between an hour and an hour and a half to sort a bag of beans, we then take it over to the roast pad and we roast them. And that is where we get to impart our flavor profile and how we get to change those cocoa beans into something we like to eat and what we like to smell. And it's for like the varieties of Guatemala that we have, we roast them in between 16 and 18 minutes, I'd say in 18 to 20 kilo batches. It takes about 3 batches to roast a bag of beans. For Dominican, we roast them anywhere in between 18 and 20 minutes, and Ecuador is 16 to 18 minutes. We try not to get the beans above 265°F. We're not really big fans of that flavor profile, and the way our machinery works in our factory, we don't like to create flavors we have to quote-unquote off-gas. So our goal is to gently and lower and slower roast those beans so we have to process them less. I— and more to like a nutritional point— keep more of the good nutrition and compounds in those beans. As opposed to leaving them in a grinder for 5 or 6 or 7 days and knocking off all the volatiles and things like that. But getting back to the process, once we roast the beans, we let them cool for a day, then we put them in a winnowing machine, which cracks and separates the shells from the seeds. The shells are called husk, the seeds are called nibs, and we get about 70 to 75% of the weight of that, that bag of beans in edible form. And then we put them into a chocolate grinder. And it's actually another company that I started called Rotar Chocolate Machines. And it goes— that machine has two purposes. One of them is to make our 70% blend where we put a recipe of Guatemala, Dominican Republic, and Ecuadorian beans in a grinder, just the beans for 24 hours, and they grind and refine with just a little bit of added heat. After about 4 hours and about 70 kilos worth of those nibs, it looks like brownie batter. And when you put your face close to the drum and you smell those beans being refined, sometimes it'll knock you back, it's so acidic. It's really fascinating how much is in there. The other process we use for that machine is we put single-origin cocoa nibs, so like 90% Ecuador, it's just 90% Ecuador and 10% sugar. And we let those— that mixture refine for 4 to 5 days. And what we're looking for first is the flavor that we want, and then the texture that is desirable for us to eat. And sometimes the 90% Ecuador is a little bit of like a velvety texture. It's not as smooth as like your normal store-bought chocolate, but the flavor is incredible. And we're looking for flavor over texture. It kind of goes against the European model of texture is key and it builds flavor. We believe that flavor is key and texture is a very fun, like, advantage that you have with different machinery. Once we're done making our single origin, the first process where you just put the 70-some-odd kilos of nibs in the machine and it makes a product called liquor, that liquor blend gets put into our conch, which is a machine that when you walk into the dairy, whenever people can do that again, You can see it in the window and it's a horizontal conch that grinds and refines the, the, the liquor and cocoa butter and sugar. And it processes a batch of chocolate in about 16 to 18 hours. And that machine makes all of our 70%. So 70% Classic Dark, Sea Salt, our 70% with Coconut Bar, all of the chocolate that's used to make shells. For all of our confections. You know, we make baker's chocolate for bakers and chefs. You know, we partner with companies like Union Special and Strongarm Baking in our area, and they make, you know, delicious croissants with our croissant sticks and cakes. And I don't know if y'all have seen on Instagram, but Beasley's has a chocolate chess pie that is out of this world. So we get to make—

Now I know where I'm going.

That's awesome. So yeah, we get to do things like that. And so that comes from that 70% classic dark. And then the next process is you go into the tempering phase. So this is the part where it goes from like a block of chocolate that is edible because it has sugar and cocoa butter in it to something that is heated up to a certain temperature and slowly and methodically lowered to a working temperature. And poured into molds or, you know, covering caramels or ganaches or things like that. And that process is very tedious in small batch bean-to-bar making. Most chocolate that you buy in the store, if you've ever looked at a chocolate wrapper, which, Chris, I imagine you have, has about 7 to 12 ingredients in it. Our 55% dark milk chocolate has 4 ingredients. It's got those cocoa nibs, which are liquor, the cocoa butter, which is derived from cocoa nibs, sugar, and whole milk powder. So in, in our bar, there's just way less of those ingredients. We don't have stabilizers, we don't have, you know, PGPR or, you know, xanthan gum or soy lecithin or things like that. And it's not because we don't want to use those things, we just don't want to taste them. You know, some of that stuff that A Hershey bar has 12 ingredients in it. Those are modern marvels of engineering and chemistry. I mean, those bars can go from melted in your pocket to put on your kitchen counter to back to solid form and they don't lose temper. They're modern marvels of engineering and the industrial revolution. It's really interesting to look at. I personally don't like eating them, but that's kind of the space that that we want to put ourselves in. We want to taste something that's delicious, that is as close to that fruit that you get to eat in, you know, in countries that grow cocoa beans. But yeah, that's kind of it. In the process, if we were to get a bag of beans on a Monday and we would sort and we would roast and we would winnow and we would grind and we would refine and we would temper and then package, it would take about 7 days in our process right now to get you a bar of chocolate. And then when you add confections and bonbons and truffles into that, you add another 3 to 4 days per variety. Now the process rolls over itself, you know, like we always roast on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but there's chocolate being made, you know, Monday through Thursday. There's single origin chocolate that's running Thursday through Monday. So there's things that are rolling over themselves as best we can in our space. But yeah, it's a handmade, labor-intensive, delicious process.

Clearly you are very engaged in the start to finish, and it's very intense. And I think that hopefully that will bring some level of appreciation for people who, you know, because your chocolates are amazing, but they're also not the price of a Hershey bar.

No, not even close.

For people to understand that difference. I feel like that's really important to really connect with their food in the way that you have so laboriously put, put your heart and soul and nose into the whole process.

I mean, that is, that is it. That is it. I, uh, I didn't, to be honest with you, I had no idea how much this process was going to affect me and most of my life. One of the main reasons that you and I were emailing back and forth before we got on this podcast is one of the main reasons that I started exercising and working out in a specific way was because I had to pick up a 160-pound bag of beans that isn't a dumbbell. It's a wonky, almost 3-foot-tall bag of beans that is usually in a burlap sack or a jute sack or this weird plastic thing. And you have to get down in a proper squat, put your arms around it, pick it up, and like put it on something. And if you're, you know, if you're like— I've started to learn how to do it, not to, to be too proud to ask for somebody else to help me pick those things up. That's the main reason that I like got into exercising, is I didn't want to hurt myself. I was like, this is, this is difficult. I mean, you have to pick up a 50-pound block of cocoa butter, you know, bags of sugar, 50 pounds each. Like when we interview people and hire them on the job interview and the like employment letters, are you comfortable lifting a 50-pound bag of something over your head? So it's very like, it's very much, that's another part that I didn't really realize, you know, naively before I started that you also had to take that consideration of your like personal mental health and fitness that you're ready to engage in really hard work. And then the end product is delicious chocolate that is, I'd say, 3 times the price of a store-bought chocolate. And there's global forces that make it so. The child forced labor and slave labor still exist in every bar of Hershey's, Mars, Toblerone, bag of M&M's, Snickers bar that you eat, there's little kids as young as 6 and 7 years old in the fields picking cocoa beans and getting paid less than 25 cents a day. So it's hard to kind of talk about because I have an 8-year-old son and I just kind of pause every time somebody goes, "This is too expensive." And I'm like, Yeah. Do you want to know why?

Let me tell you the backstory.

Yeah, exactly.

That is definitely something that, as in particular as Americans, I feel like we take a lot of our food for granted. And we're also a country who spends some of the lowest amounts on our food budget, which it really should be that we're spending more for our food in order to get a better quality product, whether it be kale or chocolate.

Yeah.

So I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah. I'm also glad you brought up this whole, um, picking up heavy bags of things. So you've been picking up more than bags of cocoa beans and sugar. You've recently lost a ton of weight. Tell us a little bit about that health, the health journey that like, how did you get started into that? And where are you at with that?

So I first got into the health journey in about 2005. 14. Uh, but Eric had been open for approximately 2, 2 and a half years. I had, at that point, I had almost a 2-year-old son, and I was overweight. Um, I look at pictures of me now or video of me now from, you know, opening of an area or the early days or whatever, and I'm like, wow, that was, that was you living your best life, eating pork belly wherever you went and as many fried chicken wings as you wanted. Like, I was just You know, being a real business owner of a truffle factory and just letting it roll. And my little brother moved to Raleigh for 3 months with his wife before they moved to New York City. And him and I saw like a, you know, one of those deals of, you know, your first 3 classes are $10, just come check it out. And we walked up to Raleigh Strength and I met Kim and Chanel. And they were like, yeah, we love your chocolate, go to work. And I was like, okay. And I think the first—

No free passes, apparently.

Not, no, no, no, no. This is like, as a small business owner, I was like, this is a good deal. You know, like most of these classes are expensive or, you know, the monthly memberships were pricey. And I was like, I'll try it and see if I like it. And the thing that I really enjoyed about that place, and sadly it has closed recently, is they would take you through the process of what was proper form before they let you You know, start clean and snatching something or trying to do a Murph WOD, you know, like any of those like really intense CrossFit things. And then I, I started going to the 4 o'clock class about 2 or 3 days a week. And I, I got to a point where I was in pretty good physical shape. You know, I could pick up the beans easier. I had more just general like endurance and stamina through my day. You know, at that time I was working essentially 7 in the morning to 7 at night. 5 or 6 days a week. And, you know, my son didn't like sleeping through the night. And so he'd usually wake up at 5:30 in the morning. And it was one of those things that I would go over to, you know, Raleigh Strength at 4 o'clock, take the 4 o'clock class, take a shower, go back to work for an hour or two. And, you know, I started feeling better and I kind of hit a plateau at Raleigh Strength because I believe my body type is not built for weight loss under those kinds of workouts. My body type being from, you know, Italian farmers is my body gets a signal that you're working and it just holds on to everything. So instead of me like losing weight, I was just gaining mass. And I was like, I don't really want to be 260 pounds but can like, you know, overhead squat 180 pounds or whatever it was. Or I didn't really in my, in my short time there, I didn't really need to do 100 pull-ups and 200 push-ups and 300 air squats in 25 minutes. I was like, no other part of my life will this ever happen. And so I, I was like, I gotta find something else. And I love cycling, and I do not like running outside. It's just not for me. I, I grew up playing soccer, and after the age of 30, my knees are like Nope. Like, this isn't for you. Like, long distance running is not for you. And so I, um, through a good buddy of mine, Josh Dedman, he introduced me to, uh, Metabolic, which is, you know, two, two doors away from Videri. And, um, at the time, Dusty, who was the owner of that facility, uh, who's a former professional hockey player, asked me a couple of questions about my fitness and what I wanted to get out of it. And he's like, okay. Here's what I recommend you do. And he's like, if you come here 2 or 3 days a week to start and you feel good and you stretch and, you know, you maybe don't drink as much beer at night, you'll start to see some, some, uh, some weight loss. And the thing I loved about those classes specifically— and again, everybody's journey is different, right? Like, what I loved about Metabolic is probably the same thing that people love about CrossFit. It, for me, Metabolic clicked into essentially soccer practice. It clicked into, strangely enough, like surfing. You know, you're doing a lot of rowing, you're doing skier, you're doing things like that, you're doing sprints. And the other thing I really liked about that place is there wasn't anybody in there looking at you if you weren't picking up the heaviest weight. Everybody was in there just like, I'm working, I'm out of breath, I have a 25-pound kettlebell that I'm swinging for 45 seconds, and then I'm gonna put it down for 15 seconds, try and catch my breath and pick it back up. And that, that journey in starting in about 2016, I started to see some, some gains in this in the form of my cardio got a little bit better, arms were getting a little bit stronger, my, my grip, I noticed my grip was getting a little bit stronger from like playing golf and things of that nature. And then even when you're working in a chocolate factory, every once in a while you have to chop a block of cocoa butter and it takes about 25 to 45 minutes depending on the block. And you essentially have to hold like a bread knife, like a serrated edge bread knife and push down on it, like using your core correctly and like pushing down on it. So number one, you don't cut yourself. And number two, you can like efficiently process through this block of cocoa butter. And so that was like, the next jump. And then I started dating my, my girlfriend, uh, in 2019, and she was just a wonderful little gym rat that, uh, that loved to go to Metabolic. She went to Yoba, she went to Flowcore, she went to Core, she went to all these boutique fitness places. And she was going some, you know, 5 or 6 days a week when she wasn't traveling for work. She would sometimes do 2 a days And I was just enamored. I'm like, I'm into this. We can eat well, we can go to workouts. Like, I was just— it got me even more excited. And I started going to Flowcore, I'd say once if not twice a month. And I started doing the TreadX program where you do, you know, 20 minutes of running on that treadmill, interval training, and then 20 or 30 minutes on the reformer. And that was another little boost where I was like, okay, I can, I can jog for about 20 minutes, which is about, you know, almost 3 or 4 miles or whatever. And then I was getting my core strong and I was like, well, this is pretty fascinating. Like I feel better. And then, um, uh, when the pandemic hit in March, uh, my girlfriend and I decided to buy a Peloton because, you know, I, I, I made a commitment to my staff and to my family that I was going to try and stay safe. And I didn't think that going to group fitness classes was the best idea, um, at that time. And I was like, I looked at, you you know, my girlfriend, I said, Katie, I think we should do this because we at least get to, you know, exercise in a way that, you know, both of us can use the bike and, you know, we had space for it and all that sort of stuff. And that kicked me to another stratosphere of endurance and cycling. And that program for me, um, comboed up with, you know, wearing a mask to go to a metabolic class once or twice a month and also wearing a mask to go to Flowcore. I had been able to lose. I think I'm, I think I'm below 200 pounds now for the first time since I was 19 years old, you know?

Wow. And you said 260 was your starting, your starting weight, right?

260. Yeah.

Okay. And now under 200 pounds. And it sounds like the key was that you didn't do it really quickly. You did it with finding an exercise program that felt like a good fit for you. And it sounds like was fun and nonjudgmental, and you're sticking with it and still eating chocolate.

Still, I eat so much chocolate. Um, so the other thing that's very important in this journey is, um, number one, my girlfriend, and number two, my friends that work out with me, Josh Dedmon and Tanya Martin, who work, uh, Josh runs his own production and photography company called Steady Film. And Tanya Martin is a partner at Baldwin and Design Firm. And my friend Lindsay, who also works there, and my girlfriend, they have propelled me on this journey. And it's, I don't think I could have done it alone. I am definitely competitive. And so I was definitely very excited to, you know, go into Metabolic and you're doing suicides or sprints or something, and you're trying to beat somebody or, you know, that energy for me was, was that bigger catalyst. And I think if I just was by myself and I was trying to do these workouts alone, I know for a fact I've tried it multiple times. I just don't do it. But if there's my girlfriend said, you know, it was like, hey, I'm on week 4 of this core program. What week are you on? Or, you know, Tanya, Josh, and Lindsay are like, hey, I did this 45-minute ride. I want to get in there and I want to do that and I want to better myself. And then because I'm competitive, I do other rides or I do other workouts or, you know, I stretch in a different way or I, you know, find yoga programs that I really enjoy, but I look at it as when I was 35 or 36, I think, and, uh, a good buddy of mine who's about 5 or 6 years older than me said, man, when you get to your 40s, it sucks. Your body is not into you. You can't just kind of cruise. Everything gets loose. And I was like, oh my God, I'm already loose. Like, I don't want to get looser than this. And so, um, my goal was by the age of 40, which I turned 40 in 2020 was to feel like I was in a good enough shape that, you know, if I had to, you know, run a 10K for charity, I can do it. And it would be hard, but I could do it, you know. And I, I, my goal overall in life is to continue finding things that, you know, blast out some of those endorphins, blast out some of the negative stuff in your body and your brain and your blood, and working and moving and being outside. And, you know, I have an 8-year-old son and he loves playing soccer and golf and riding his bike and running and climbing on trees. And like, if I am not in good shape or physical shape, like, he's gonna think I'm boring. I don't really want that, you know. I want, I want him to come over and be like, Dad, let's go play soccer and then ride our bikes and then, you know, then do this. And like, that's just, it's a, it really is the The bigger part of a community of how you can motivate yourself and motivate others and kind of ride their coattails when they're, when they're jamming.

That's awesome. It sounds so— when we wrap up everybody's podcast, we try to have people provide 2 to 3 actionable things or sort of big picture items that we focused on today so that they can walk out, walk away to help their own health and performance. I have. I'm going to cheat a little bit because the 3 things so far that I've gotten from you are to connect to your food, learn where it's made and how it's made, and to really smell it too, to identify or to connect to your food in, in different sensory ways, to find a support system on your health and fitness journey and know that it, it doesn't happen overnight. And it's, it truly is a journey. And to continue finding things that challenge you. How do you feel about those things? And would you add anything to it? Yes.

I would also add, if you can figure out a way to not drink alcohol Sunday through Thursday, it is, it changes. I'm on day 28 of dry January.

Okay. Nice. That's great.

Yeah. It's, it's fine. I'll be honest. I'm like, It's fine. But it's—

So in other words, sometimes it's not as bad as we think it might be.

That is a great way to put it because what I, and I do visioning also in my business and my personal life through my training with the Zingerman's Deli Zing Train group. And they make you write these little like, you know, 1-week vision, 1-month vision, 1-year vision. And you kind of want to say like, this is where I would love to be if everything went right. I would add that if you're, if you're on a fitness journey, it's a journey. Like, it's going to take a good amount of time. And you— what, instead of it being negative, like, oh, this is going to take a long time, you get to build a bunch of memories and experiences and like gather things that kind of propel you further into your life. And, you know, nobody's getting younger and we're all working on, you know, on just trying to be better people for the most part. And I think that is another thing, like it takes some time. It will be worth it.

That's awesome. I love that. So it's a fitness journey is about building memories and experiences.

Oh yeah. 100%. Some of my most unfavorite favorite things to do is to look at my buddy Steadman. We did a workout. We traveled, um, to London a couple years ago for a Rotar chocolate machines install, and he was doing some filming. And we woke up in the morning, I was like, all right man, let's go do like a, like a CrossFit workout. And we like go for this like jog and we do some like push-ups and, you know, squats, just like a bodyweight workout. And we like turn this one corner and there's a literal like old castle. And I was like, let's go run up and down the stairs on this old castle and like work out in an old castle. And it was like If we didn't work out, we wouldn't have ever done that.

You know, that's awesome. That's so cool. So we, uh, at the Fueling Edge and the Endurance Edge, we're so excited to have the Videris as part of our meal service. We use your chocolate pieces in some of our protein bites and some of our cookies, and we look forward to continuing to use it, using different things that you guys produce in our meals and snacks and things like that. What are some of the other ways that you feel like people can support you as a small, as a small business?

Oh, the best way to do it right now is get your pre-orders in for Valentine's Day. We're going to start shipping product out February 8th, and we've got a bunch of really cool products this year. Uh, the other way is to come to our soft serve ice cream window. We're open Tuesday. Yeah, we're open Tuesday through Saturday, 1 to 9 PM. And Sundays from 12 to 6 PM. And, you know, we make all of our toppings in-house, we get the mix locally. It's— and again, our facility is completely nut-free, gluten-free. And yeah, it's just, that's the best way to do it. And, you know, this month we're raising money for No Kid Hungry, where we do a roundup donation. I think we've already been able to get about a couple hundred dollars in that, and being in a slow month and weather and all this other stuff that's going on. So yeah, that's the best way to support us is come by and say, hey, awesome.

Is there a website that they, that everybody can find you at? Cause I'll be sure to link to that.

Uh, the dairychocolatefactory.com. Uh, you can also shop through Instagram, which is @the_dairy_chocolate and Facebook @the_dairy_chocolate.

Wonderful. So I'll make sure to link to all of those different things. Sam Rado of the Dairy Chocolate. It was a pleasure speaking with you. I'm so excited to go buy a bunch of chocolate and smell it all and taste it all and enjoy it.

Oh, perfect. We can't wait.

Awesome.