UMD Chocolate Lab Hosts Annual Valentine’s Sale

DULUTH, Minn. – UMD Chocolate Lab experts hosted their annual Valentine’s Day sale this week.

Students in the Department of Chemical Engineering take a course on chocolate making.

Part of the course is to travel to Trinidad to harvest cocoa and then bring back beans to eventually make it into chocolate.

A lot of the principles in chocolate making relate to what they teach in the department. The master chocolatier says everything is made in small batches with no extra additives.

“So what we tell people about is that we don’t have enough to share with every single person. We try to practice ethics in our purchasing and our production. So as it is, we just end up with just a small amount and just enough to sell outside the door of the lab here or take for demonstrations and sales,” according to Lyndon Ramrattan, labor coordinator and master chocolatier.