Spencer Bowie, Aldo Ramirez Carraso, and Sienna Trapp-Bowie
Fortuna Chocolate | Boulder
April 2017
In 2008, Boulder native Sienna Trapp-Bowie was working in Mexico City for an L.A.-based fashion brand by day and continuing post-grad anthropological investigations by night. Her would-be husband Aldo Ramirez Carrasco was a recording engineer moonlighting as a bartender when they met through a mutual acquaintance. By 2009, the couple had moved to Tokyo, where Carrasco furthered a career behind the stick, Trapp-Bowie trained Japanese executives in the American-style of business, and they both dove deep into the food and beverage culture of Japan.
In 2012, Trapp-Bowie’s brother, Spencer Bowie, visited his sister in Tokyo and decided to stay, finding work as a singer and teacher. The three developed a fascination with an artisanal Danish beer called Bøgedal. By 2014, Trapp-Bowie and Carrasco were in Denmark working alongside the Bøgedal family, learning small-batch production methods and gaining inspiration. With a desire to start an artisan business that connected Mexico with America, the entrepreneurs decided on cacao. Within months, they were in Oaxaca and traveling with Botanist Nisao Ogata through communities of cacao farmers.
Committed to supporting the farmers and their products, the couple returned to Colorado, reunited with Bowie, and began experimenting and eating a lot of chocolate. By late 2015, they had built out a 26-foot truck for chocolate production, secured financing via the Colorado Enterprise Fund, and opened for business. Fortuna Chocolate has a retail and a wholesale arm, and a brick and mortar location is on the way in 2017.
