Kim Hack
What a Long, Strange Trip it's Been...
After graduating from Dartmouth College and earning a post-grad degree in graphic design, Kim started her career as an advertising creative for several Chicago agencies. She made the switch into marketing after receiving her MBA from Northwestern and managed brands and businesses across several different sectors before moving to the wine industry.
Craft chocolate makers were just beginning to pop-up and Kim sought them out during business trips at home and abroad. She realized varietal, origin and craftsmanship are as important for cacao as they are for wine, but there was nothing like a “wine shop for chocolate” where people could explore, learn and taste.
She decided to launch Cocoa + Co in August of 2001. But then the world changed and she had to put the idea on hold.
Kim eventually left the wine industry and began consulting for Fortune 500 companies before helping launch an angel investor group focused on sustainable agriculture. But she just couldn’t shake the idea of creating a café and retail playground for chocolate lovers.
In 2015, Cocoa + Co. opened its doors in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood--the realization of a vision she had nurtured for more than a decade.
For the next ten years, Kim welcomed chocolate lovers to her cafe, creating and curating all manner of wonderful things to eat and drink. There is simply nothing more rewarding in the hospitality business than being in the midst of a crowded venue, happy people buzzing, then stopping to savor whatever they've chosen to treat themselves to that day. It was heaven!
But after ten years, the demands of the cafe were crowding out the opportunities to share a deeper connection to chocolate through teaching and tasting. Kim sold the Cocoa + Co. cafe to another enterprising woman entrepreneur late in the Fall of 2024 so that she could focus on being a kind of "Chocolate Evangelist"--spreading the joys of Cacao wherever she went.
Cocoa + Co. - Tastings was born!