Celebrating The Dancing Lion experience on World Chocolate Day

[In Recognition of World Chocolate Day, we’ve asked student contributor Talia Harmon to share her first visit to Dancing Lion Chocolate in Manchester, New Hampshire.]

Celebrating good chocolate

Rich Tango-Lowy is the president of the Heirloom Cacao Foundation, an organization that helps to preserve all of the natural resources that are used to make chocolate.

The Dancing Lion has a very welcoming, cozy, and homey ambiance. Rich, the owner, shared some chocolate facts with us, explaining everything in a simple yet thorough way.

He told us about how Hershey’s Chocolate added wax to their chocolate because soldiers at war needed a food that would keep them energized, while not taking up much storage space and not melting. Thus, adding wax helped solve these problems.

Dancing Lion Chocolate is located at 917 Elm Street in Manchester, NH and it is a chocolate shop. We visited one afternoon after school last year.

We drank a bitter and flavorful hot chocolate that was very similar to the kind that the Mayans, a Native American tribe, drank.

We also tasted gourmet marshmallows that didn’t leave a grainy residue in your mouth like the ones you can purchase at the grocery store. They were fluffy and chewy and very flavorful and sweet.

We also tried a variety of chocolates, many of them tasted earthy and bitter, but in a pleasant, cozy way. It felt as if we were Mayan royalty, trying all of these different chocolates, made with many different flavors from the natural world.

Both of these businesses’ missions seem to be focused on making everyone happy. This makes sense because the Heirloom Cacao Foundation’s mission is to protect the planet and places where the ingredients needed to make chocolate grow.

Having a clean and healthy planet makes people happy. Dancing Lion uses these ingredients to make chocolate and chocolate (or at least for the people who like chocolate) makes people happy.

By supporting Heirloom Cacao Foundation or even just the Dancing Lion business itself you are supporting places whose mission is to bring people happiness and keep our planet healthy. Saving resources that are used to continue bringing people happiness, and making the planet a cleaner, better place to live, is good for people and good for business.

Story by Talia Harmon, a student contributor for the Inkubator.

The Inkubator program is aimed at nurturing and growing New Hampshire’s local journalism ecosystem – support for educators, opportunities for students and pathways for future journalists, artists and creators. And beyond that, we want to engage our community in this process because together, we rise. Click here to make a tax-deductible contribution to the Inkubator.