Ritual Chocolate puts quality first with cacao, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp

Anna Seear, president and co-founder of Ritual Chocolate, compares the quality of the cacao for her chocolate to the grapes that comprise a fine wine.  

“Initially we were making single-origin bars with just cacao beans and sugar,” she says. “We were purists. We really wanted to share the amazing flavors you can get from unique cacao beans—like a fine wine, where genetics and how [the grapes are] grown contributes to the flavor. It's the same with cacao, but nobody thinks of chocolate like that. So that was something we really wanted to share with people.”

Seear’s products have evolved from when she and her partner, Robbie Stout, first opened Ritual Chocolate in 2010. Customers can still buy single-origin bars, but the company now offers a scrumptious selection of blended bars as well; flavors like honeycomb toffee or juniper berries and locally grown lavender. 

The business has changed too. There was the move from Denver to Park City, Utah, and Seear’s transition from jill-of-all-trades (making the chocolate, wrapping the bars, cleaning the factory, etc.) to more back-office management. And yet, Seear’s commitment to everything from transparent sourcing to clean ingredients to slow, intentional roasting has remained steadfast. 

So, too, has the company’s financial management and accounting platform: QuickBooks Online. And while Seear says the business’s needs have changed over the years—meriting a variety of integrations—the reason Ritual Chocolate has remained with Intuit QuickBooks is much the same as Seear’s decision to use only the best cacao: In the end, nothing beats quality.

QuickBooks Online comes with all the right ingredients

“I would definitely recommend [QuickBooks Online] for people starting a business, because it really helps you to get on top of your numbers,” says Seear. She speaks from experience, having started Ritual Chocolate on QuickBooks from Day One. 

“It's great for so many different types of businesses,” she says. “We have a lot of customers across the country, and it’s always been really great for us to keep track of payments and our accounts receivable and accounts payable. Everything's always in one place.” 

Prior to opening Ritual Chocolate, Seear used QuickBooks while bookkeeping for other small businesses to track and manage finances. Her experience working with the product made her feel confident that the functionality was worth the investment. 

“I really like QuickBooks Online because you can have multiple users logging on with different access levels,” Seear explains. “Our bookkeeper, she can access invoices and make payments, but she can't see everything. And our sales manager, he's able to see customer information and some invoices, but again, can't see the larger numbers of the business. Then our accountant has a login, and they can see everything. So you see, it's really helpful when you have multiple users and permissions.”

Another feature Seear appreciates is QuickBooks Payments. “One of my favorite parts is being able to send out payment links to people. You can see if they've opened them, and you can send messages to customers as well and see if they've been opened and read. It's really helpful,” says Seear.

“I think one of the biggest problems [business owners] have with getting paid is just knowing if you're getting to the right person—if they're seeing the messages or seeing the invoice. So a lot of times, we're just trying to find the right person in the company. Maybe someone's moved on; maybe we don’t have the right email. It's also really easy to update information in QuickBooks and run accounts receivable reports to see how many days old an invoice is.”

For Seear, invoicing is another key benefit of using QuickBooks Online. “The invoices are really customizable,” she says. “If someone's doing a special corporate order or modifying one of our bars and it's a different amount than we'd normally charge, we always run it through QuickBooks.” Besides being easy to customize, QuickBooks invoices are also easy to deliver, conveniently available in the mobile app, and ready to sign at the touch of a fingertip. 

Beyond that, Seear says she appreciates the QuickBooks Online dashboard: “It gives you a snapshot of the company.” She’s also a fan of budgeting and reporting. 

“We pull P&Ls, balance sheets, statements of cash flows…and it's nice,” she says. “You can pull them for different timeframes and also do comparative reports from year-to-year or month-to-month. I pull a lot of customer reports, just to look at different sales at different times and get a picture of how we’re doing in different areas of the business.”

Lastly, when asked how QuickBooks is growing with her business, Seear says the product’s seamless integrations with 3P apps helps a lot.

“For me, [QuickBooks is] the standard for bookkeeping. Every new program that comes out—I'm sure they're working to integrate it with QuickBooks in some way.” 

For Seear, that means easy access to any tools she needs along the path ahead. Integrations are key for Ritual Chocolate, which uses apps like Square and Shopify—both of which integrate seamlessly with QuickBooks. Another favorite integration? Intuit Mailchimp.

Like cacao and sugar, QuickBooks and Mailchimp just work

“We started using Mailchimp around 2018,” explains Seear, who says the primary purpose was to engage other businesses as well as Ritual Chocolate’s direct customers. She says Intuit Mailchimp has made a big difference, helping her business development manager create more visually compelling newsletters.

“You can customize pretty much everything,” including fine details like fonts and image spacing, she says. “It’s easy to drag and drop new elements to quickly build a new campaign. Very user-friendly.” When they’re finished, Seear’s team uses Mobile Preview to check over their work and make sure everything looks good before hitting send.

Seear says Mailchimp’s built-in automation has also played a part in Ritual Chocolate's email marketing success. Not only does it provide smart editorial suggestions, but it gets the job done in half the time. “The Creative Assistant is fun to use when trying to come up with new email content,” Seear says, “and the AI integration for subject lines is helpful too.” 

But Mailchimp does more than aid the creative process; it’s also a tool that can be used to measure the success of each communication. 

“As you grow your customer lists, you need a way to see how effective the newsletters are with open rates and the direct sales achieved,” Seear says. “As a small business, it’s important to be able to test things out and see how effective they are, and to be able to adjust quickly and be nimble.”

Mailchimp makes it easy to track trends and see data-driven insights. And because it’s part of the Inuit ecosystem, the link between QuickBooks and Mailchimp is seamless. “It’s connected to Shopify and Square, so we can track purchases from each email directly,” Seear says. “Mailchimp can easily scale with us as we grow.”

Ritual Chocolate shares its roots—and a few industry secrets

QuickBooks may be the king of accounting, but Ritual Chocolate rules in cacao. It’s a difference in quality that starts right at the source. 

“In 2008, we visited a cacao farm in Costa Rica, and it was just amazing to see the agricultural side of cacao,” Seear says. “[To see in person] that chocolate comes from a fruit, and just on the farming side, there's so much that goes into it.”

Since then, Seear and her business partner have visited many of the farms they work with, which mainly hail from Madagascar, Belize, Peru, Ecuador, and Uganda. 

“Those are the main ones, but I'm actually just putting out a micro lot bar, where we're getting beans from this really cool little farm in the Philippines,” gushes Seear. When asked if she can actually taste the difference in flavor between beans from different countries, she gives an emphatic “Yes!”

“There’s a huge difference. It really doesn't take a connoisseur to taste it,” Seear explains. “It's not like wine, where you think, ‘Oh maybe I taste something.’ Our Madagascar [chocolate] is light, fruity, citrusy, and it's amazing because it's a dark chocolate. Our Ecuador is very fudgy-rich. It's a low cocoa butter bean, so it's got quite a thick and fudgy texture. And then our Belize is more of a balanced flavor, so it's like dried fruit with a nice rich base. And our Peru is very high in cocoa butter, so it's just really buttery and silky and has kind of floral, nutty notes. So they all have their own characteristics, and that's what’s so fun about sharing it with people.”

The difference, too, isn’t just Ritual Chocolate’s sourcing. It’s the care Seear and her team take with roasting their beans—a subject in which Seear is an expert. “On the farm side, before we even get the beans, they're harvested from the pods, fermented for about seven days, and then sun-dried. So when we get the beans, they've gone through this fermentation process, and there's so much complexity in the flavor, acidity and tannins. There's still a long way to go before it really starts tasting like chocolate.”

That’s where Seear and her team come in. ”We sort through the beans, lay them out, and we actually roast the beans in convection ovens—just a really light, slow roast. It's almost more of a toast, just trying to keep all the great flavors of the beans we're getting.”

Seear explains that the roasting process is one of the biggest differences between the quality of the chocolate people get from Ritual versus that made by large corporations like Hersheys or even Seear’s childhood favorite, Cadbury. “With industrial chocolate, they do a high roast, getting all the flavors out using poorer quality cacao. We’re doing the opposite, where we're getting really unique cacao and trying to keep all those amazing flavors in.”

Folks interested in getting a taste of Ritual Chocolate’s amazing flavors don’t have to go to Utah to experience the difference, though making the trip does come with a few perks. 

“We have a small cafe attached to our factory that we share with a coffee roaster who's in the same building,” she says. Customers can grab a hot drink—including Ritual Chocolate’s out-of-this-world hot cocoa—then do a factory tour and tasting. “It’s really fun to get people in, just to experience the whole process. There's so much that goes into chocolate making, and I think people are really interested to learn more. So it's fun to get people in and share that.”

With QuickBooks and Mailchimp, business owners know exactly what they’re going to get

Your financial management and email marketing platforms shouldn’t be a surprise; instead, they should pair as well as a quality chocolate and sweet filling. Business owners deserve a product that’s reliably good, no matter what—just like a bar of Ritual Chocolate.

“For us, [Intuit] just works well,” Seear says. From someone who knows quality, that’s the highest level of praise. 

Learn more about what Mailchimp and QuickBooks can do for your business here.

Disclaimer

The views, information and opinions expressed in this article are those of the people interviewed and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of Intuit, Mailchimp or any of its cornerstone brands or employees. The primary purpose of this article is to educate and inform. This article does not constitute financial or other professional advice or services.

QuickBooks Online and Mailchimp sold separately. Integration available. Availability of features and functionality varies by plan type. For details, view Mailchimp plans and pricing.