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The vibrant packaging will catch your eye first—abstract patterns with rich colors like seafoam green, mustard yellow, deep plum and burnt orange. Then, the flavors. Banana cardamom brulée. Apple and honey oat crumble. Passion fruit sesame. Vanilla smoke. All entwined in sumptuous bars of chocolate.
“My list of failed flavor combinations is crazy long, but every once in a while, something works from the get-go, or you see a glimmer of how it could work,” says Mike Davies, the owner and mastermind behind Crow & Moss. The four-year-old chocolate factory in Petoskey is a magical intersection of passion and creativity, with a pinch of obsession.
Photo by Danielle Charles-Davies
Inspiration struck on a car ride home at a time when Davies was searching for his next chapter. In 2018, he and his wife Danielle (the brilliant graphic designer and photographer behind the Crow & Moss brand), made the difficult decision to sell a business they’d started together five years prior, a café and pastry shop called Dripworks, to focus on health complications that Danielle was facing. Davies knew he wanted to continue working with food and started experimenting in his basement at home with some basic equipment, including his wife’s pink hair dryer for winnowing cocoa nibs.
“I just fell farther and farther down the rabbit hole,” he recalls.
Photo by Danielle Charles-Davies
Photo by Danielle Charles-Davies
At the heart of it all, Davies honors ethically sourced heirloom cacao in single-origin bars made simply from cacao and organic cane sugar. Currently, Crow & Moss offers bars from four origins: Ecuador Camino Verde, India Anamalai, Dominican Republic Zorzal and Honduras Wampusirpi.
“Much like coffee, cacao is a plant that has such potential to enrich people’s lives on both ends of the production process, farmer to consumer, when sourced sustainably and responsibly,” he says. “Equally, it can cause a lot of harm when profitability is the only focus.
“Craft chocolate is a labor of love, full of daily problem solving and seasonal challenges,” Davies continues. “No one is getting rich doing it, it’s all for the love of chocolate and the stories it can tell as it makes its way from the farmer to the bar.”
Photo by Danielle Charles-Davies
Carly’s current obsession: The banana cardamom brulée bar. Davies first roasts the bananas until they caramelize and sear to the pan to intensify their sweetness, then blends them into velvety dark chocolate laced with fragrant spice.
Gift this: The Honduras Wampusirpi drinking chocolate got a shoutout from Food & Wine last year (best hot chocolate for dark chocolate–lovers). I taste-tested and can confirm: it’s Decadent with a capital D.
New: Davies recently began offering baked goods like brown-butter pistachio chocolate chip cookies, pear gâteau Breton (a rustic French butter cake), and his favorite, pecan pie blondie bars. “I love adding depth of flavor with components like brown butter, something you can’t necessarily detect on the surface, but underneath cranks up the complexity.”
Photo by Danielle Charles-Davies