The inaugural LA Chocolate Festival takes over Magic Box @ The Reef in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday and Sunday, November 7 and 8. The event runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, with tastings, workshops and small-batch chocolate makers.
The festival is being billed as Los Angeles's first of its kind, according to LAist. It will be held at Magic Box @ The Reef, 1933 S. Broadway, in the city's downtown arts and innovation district. The festival website confirms the November 7–8 dates and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. hours.
Festival director Brian Cisneros, who is leading the event, told LAist that the goal is to help attendees learn to read chocolate labels, taste chocolate properly, and meet the craft makers behind the bars themselves. He added that visitors should walk away able to judge whether a particular chocolate is worth its price tag or fit to give as a gift, per the same account.
A Seattle Festival Offers a Comparison
The event has a connection to the Northwest Chocolate Festival: LAist reports that Cisneros started the Seattle show, which grew from six craft chocolate or bean-to-bar makers in the U.S. to more than 100 exhibitors from around the world.
His path to chocolate runs through Southern California. Cisneros grew up in Bellflower and has a grandmother who lived in East Los Angeles, before moving to Seattle for high school, LAist reports. He has said he wanted to connect people with ethical chocolate because of the trade implications involved, the outlet notes, a theme that threads through the craft chocolate movement more broadly.
A 2019 account gives another measure of that event's growth. According to Confectionery News, Cisneros started the Seattle festival in 2008 with seven exhibitors and 12 workshops. By 2019, attendance had risen from 600 to more than 10,000; that year's event featured 186 exhibitors from 26 countries and 76 workshops.
Exhibitors, Workshops and Tickets
The sources give different estimates for the Los Angeles event's exhibitor count: LAist reports around 30, while the festival website advertises more than 40 exhibitors, 12 workshops and over 100 tastes across the two days. The available information does not reconcile the difference.
Workshops are included with admission both days, the festival's website says, and the ticketing page lists passes as valid from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with access to both the exhibit floor and workshops. LAist reports that weekend passes cost $65 and single-day passes $45, or $35 for entry after 11 a.m. Tickets for attendees under 18 cost $15. Children age 7 and under get in free with a youth pass, according to the festival's ticketing page.
The lineup includes Northern California small-batch maker Dick Taylor and Las Vegas-based vegan chocolate maker Melissa Coppel, LAist reports. The festival website describes an offering that includes dark, milk and vegan chocolate, as well as drinks, pastries and desserts. It also says the event brings craft chocolate makers and dessert artisans together; LAist notes that savory food will be available outside.
Why Craft Chocolate Is Having a Moment
The festival arrives amid a broader shift in how chocolate gets made and sold. The chocolate industry was long dominated by large conglomerate producers, LAist notes, but craft and bean-to-bar makers have carved out a growing niche. The Fine Chocolate Industry Association estimated in 2019 that fine chocolate held around 5% of the overall market, according to Confectionery News.
Interest in craft chocolate also intersects with questions about conditions in the wider cocoa trade. The Guardian reports that cocoa farmers receive roughly 6% of the value of a chocolate bar sold. It also cites a Cocoa Barometer report that found deforestation continuing at an alarming rate in Ghana and Ivory Coast, with child labor still widespread on cocoa farms.
The Guardian describes a different approach at Beyond Good: the company buys cocoa beans directly from farmer cooperatives in Madagascar and makes its chocolate at a facility in Antananarivo, working with about 100 farmers and employing several dozen people there. That is one example of a direct-trade model discussed in the broader conversation about chocolate sourcing.
What Labels and Sourcing Claims Tell You
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's labeling guidance says some nonstandardized foods may use the term “chocolate” only under specified conditions, including criteria concerning flavoring ingredients or what consumers expect the food to contain. That guidance does not establish what makers must disclose about cacao percentage or sourcing. Separately, the International Cocoa Organization's November 2025 bulletin reported a 489,000-tonne global cocoa deficit in 2023/24 and estimated a 49,000-tonne surplus in 2024/25; those figures do not identify price changes or the origins behind them. Sources: U.S. Food and Drug Administration; International Cocoa Organization. Dick Taylor's own sourcing page describes transparent cacao trade as a way to increase visibility into the supply chain. That is the maker's account, not independent verification of its sourcing practices, and the information cited here does not compare those claims with disclosures on a particular product label: Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate.
LAist's guide to the festival comes as the outlet navigates its own financial pressures. LAist describes itself as 100% community funded, and notes that Congress voted in 2025 to defund public media, a move that eliminated $1.7 million from the outlet's annual budget going forward.
