Bigger, better, sweeter: Miami’s first chocolate factory gets a new home

When you walk into the sleek new home of Exquisito Chocolates in Little Havana, the first thing you notice is the aroma. The alluring scent of chocolate, glorious chocolate, wafts toward you, sweet but not cloying, heady and intoxicating.

Sadly, owner Carolina Quijano can’t really smell it anymore.

“I guess I’m too used to it,” she says, laughing. “I’m here all the time.”

Quijano, the University of Miami graduate who founded Exquisito Chocolates and opened her first factory in Little Havana in 2018, doesn’t mind missing out on what makes her shop so unique. She’s in tune with chocolate, how it should taste, how to make it — and how to make it better.

Finally opening a brand-new factory after a lengthy journey through Miami’s byzantine permit process is even sweeter than the scent she can no longer detect. Still located on Eighth Street in Miami, a bit east of the original, the new Exquisito Chocolates is more than twice the size of the first, with glass walls that allow customers to see how Quijano and her team go about the business of roasting cacao beans and refining chocolate, creating an artisanal candy that is light years beyond its commercial competitors.

Moving from a 1,250 square-foot-space that once seemed huge into 3,300 square feet feels miraculous, says Quijano, who was born in Miami but raised in Barranquilla, Colombia.

“We were so cramped in there,” she says of the old space. “Now we can just work in a more organized way. We have more control over how we’re doing everything.”

There’s more space to showcase the retail products, particularly the candy bars and bonbons for which the brand has become famous. In the new factory, Quijano and her team can also make ice cream and pastries, sell coffee drinks, and give customers room to spread out, sip and enjoy. Even the location is an improvement, she says: It’s across the street and a few doors east of the popular Cuban restaurant Sanguich.

“We have a lot more visibility, so a lot more people can come and see us,” she says. “Our old space was very, very tiny, so people couldn’t really appreciate everything that we did. I did a lot of tours and classes, and it just became so difficult to do that we had to stop. So now we can really showcase what we do.”

Many brands have made good use of Quijano’s chocolate, which has found its way into doughnuts from The Salty; ice cream at the beloved neighbor Azucar as well as the national brand Salt & Straw; cocktails at the Calle Ocho hot spot Café La Trova; and the beer at Lincoln’s Beard Brewing Co. and the now-closed J. Wakefield Brewing.

Part of Exquisito’s appeal is Quijano’s insistence on starting from scratch.

“Most of the time, when you go to a chocolate shop, they buy mass produced chocolate and melt it down and add stuff to it,” she explains. “We treat making chocolate like a winemaker makes wine.”

Quijano starts with cacao beans from seven different farms in Latin America and the Caribbean, roasting them in a huge, repurposed coffee roaster. It’s a four to five day process to get blocks of chocolate that are then shipped to wholesalers. For the chocolate bars, ice cream and other treats sold in-house, the process of refinement continues with the help of a few contraptions Quijano has MacGyvered into existence, like a former freezer that now warms pans of chocolate and a decoration station for her colorful bonbons that involves panels of Plexiglass to protect the white walls and a disposable air conditioner filter.

This painstaking level of attention continues through the process of creating all of the desserts. Exquisito makes its own peanut butter for a candy bar that evokes the taste of a Snickers bar, and the Oreo-like cookies for the cookies and cream ice cream.

The extra space makes every step along the way easier, including offering room for a tasting wall, where customers can sample little bits of each chocolate bar from the most bitter dark chocolate to the sweet cafe con leche bar that is Exquisito’s biggest seller.

In some ways, the business has grown easier, Quijano says. She has more accessibility to farmers who produce high-quality cacoa and make it easier for her to keep up with the sustainability practices she believes in. In other ways, it’s harder. Farmers are at the mercy of climate change, which can mean hotter days over longer periods, and unpredictable weather in the form of hurricanes, which can badly affect crops.

Shifting tariff rules can be a headache, too. At one point, Quijano said, a shipment of cacoa from Colombia was already on the water when she learned there would be a 50 percent tariff assessed on the products. Fortunately, that tariff was rescinded, but it was an uneasy few days until it was.

Political unrest in places like Haiti and sudden spikes in gas prices in countries like Colombia also factor in to what products are available, she said.

“It becomes harder to have consistency, especially with how much stuff we do,” she says. “We don’t know if we’re going to be able to have our hot chocolate, our standard hot chocolate, in stock, because you’ve got to wait and see. And it’s not like you just replace it with something else. Some chocolates are sweeter naturally. For example, like our Guatemalan tends to be very citrusy, very acidic. In ice cream or hot chocolate, you don’t necessarily you want that, but for some reason, in a chocolate chip cookie it’s delicious.”

In addition to tours and truffle-and-chocolate making classes, Exquisito will offer wine and chocolate pairings, even beer pairings, just as soon as Quijano gets a license. Until then, she hopes locals and tourists will stop in to see how things work.

And she promises there’s something for everyone, whether it’s a frozen hot chocolate or a dark chocolate ice cream or the insanely tasty Tumaco Milk, a dark milk chocolate bar with caramelized milk and brown butter.

“I’m not a wine person, so I’m always a little intimidated ordering wine at a nice wine place,” she says. “But I don’t want people to have that experience when they come here. So even though we sell the more high-end chocolate product, I still want to be accessible to people with things like the cookies and cream bar. Everybody’s taste buds are different.”

Exquisito Chocolates

Where: 1920 SW Eighth St., Miami

Hours: 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday, Wednesday-Thursday; 10 a.m. 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday

More information: www.exquisitochocolates.com or (786) 558-4580