Rabble-Rouser Chocolate & Craft Co.
Is social change forever a struggle or can you make it sweet and tasty? You can, and Montpelier’s Rabble-Rouser Chocolates & Craft Co. does it every day.
The first thing that Grace Kirpan, a worker at Rabble-Rouser Chocolates & Craft Co., said to me when we met was, “Can I show you how I wrap a Bernie Bar?”
Who wouldn’t want to watch a Bernie Bar being wrapped? In the partitioned niche where products are labeled and packaged, Grace, wearing a red-and-white-striped rugby polo and with both hands cleanly gloved, lifted a molded rectangle of 70 percent dark chocolate with a liberal amount of flaked sea salt from a rack of trays as tall as she is. She sat down at her workstation and took a large piece of foil from a box. Shiny side down, she squared it exactly one inch from the edge of the table. She gently placed the chocolate bar just so and expertly made eight precise folds, creasing the four edges firmly to make sure the bar would fit in the Bernie Bar outer wrapper.
Bernie is, of course, Vermont’s junior U.S. Senator, Bernie Sanders. Grace says, “This is my favorite bar to wrap.” On each wrapper, Bernie, now in his 80s, is smiling broadly, and Grace, in her late 20s, smiles back.
She has a good job at Rabble-Rouser because the business has in-house staff to support workers, like Grace, of all abilities. She is essential to Rabble’s operations, and she represents only a fraction of the kinds of things the company does for individuals and for the greater good.
Everyone knows that Rabble-Rouser is 100 percent employee owned and managed because a big panel in the window facing the street says so. At the most basic economic level, being offered the opportunity to train your way during 24 months into company ownership and profit sharing is the purest kind of worker advocacy. Maia Castonguay, 19, is one of the business’s six full owners, working alongside one “rising owner” at Rabble-Rouser. Lifting the brim of her Dunder Mifflin baseball cap, she says, “I’ve always wanted to run a business, and now I am the Shop Team leader.”
Sharing is another imperative at Rabble-Rouser—its high-ceilinged, spacious, and wonderfully conceived café openheartedly welcomes community goings-on. I would be hard-pressed to think of a more powerful kind of commitment to community building than sharing my space with people who…well, could use some space.
“We gave one front corner to a theater company for a display,” says Ryan Geary, a co-owner as well. A sincerely artistic fellow whose own framed graphics hang in the café, he’s responsible for many things at Rabble, including the package designs, website, and purchasing. “We’re Bread and Puppet’s Montpelier outpost,” he says. Next to the plushy, modern, dark gray sofa in the café, right by the shop windows where no one can miss it, there are colorful posters tacked on the wall above a large table and a repurposed baker’s rack stockpiled with Bread and Puppet Theater information and prints for sale, including the troupe’s hand-painted posters and its “Cheap Art Manifesto.” The theater company’s politically radical mission harmonizes with Rabble-Rouser’s core premise: a little bit of trouble-making will make good things happen.
Much more space-sharing takes place every day in the café’s community area. On Sunday afternoons musicians with whistles, flutes, fiddles, and other traditional instruments gather there for a jam session. They play Irish tunes and to hang out for a couple of hours to entertain themselves as well as others. Every Thursday, that same space—which is furnished with a 12-foot-long table and chairs and a plushy, modern, dark gray sofa that matches the one in the café area—is home to a group of hard-of-hearing and deaf customers who come in for conversation, coffees, and to browse the café’s emporium of gifts and crafts. Maia says, “We figured out a way to chat with everyone by sharing our notepads back and forth, and we communicate great that way.”
As for atmosphere, I shall not neglect to point out that the aromatics of fine chocolate and brewing coffee waft throughout the entire place.
The popular community table at the heart of Rabble-Rouser's café
Ryan adds, “There is always something going on at the community table. Our workers may sit down for lunch there, while at the far end, several people might be having hybrid business meetings, half online and half in-person. We invite everyone to gather there, to be together, to connect. We can even reserve the table, say, for your book club or knitting circle. In 2020, we were one of the first public spaces in town to re-open after the coronavirus lockdowns.” As for atmosphere, I shall not neglect to point out that the aromatics of fine chocolate and brewing coffee waft throughout the entire place.
At Rabble-Rouser, advocacy almost always comes in the form of chocolate, whether it is sold retail, wholesale, bulk, or online. Although Senator Bernie sees no financial gain from his namesake chocolate bar, other organizations do receive cash donations from the sale of custom chocolate confections made on site. One beneficiary is the Friends of the Vermont State house, a private nonprofit organization that supports the preservation and interpretation of Vermont’s historic capitol. (The statehouse is just around the corner from Rabble-Rouser.) “We craft chocolates that look like capitol domes,” says Maia, pointing to a display of shiny, golden foil-wrapped candies.
Not long ago, dissent arose in the shape of body parts at Rabble-Rouser. “In the wake of the restrictive reproductive rights legislation signed into law in Texas last year, we’ve been selling many more of our chocolate vulvas,” Ryan says. “We send one dollar for each one sold to the Afiya Center, a reproductive justice organization in North Texas founded and directed by Black women.” The mostly anatomically correct bars come in three chocolate flavors—a perky peppermint (pink), a buttery caramel (tan), and a rich divine (dark).
The Dulcey Truffle, a 2021 Good Food Award winner
Other times, meaningful activism is as simple as a warm, comforting bowl of dal and rice. “Rabble-Rouser’s pay-what-youcan lunch menu offers only a few selections,” says Ryan, “but there are enough choices for us to be able to give local, nutritious, whole foods to the community, regardless of anyone’s ability to pay. Many customers pay-it-forward to sponsor a meal for those who need one.” Occasionally, nothing does more for equality and inclusion than a small sign on a washroom door. At Rabble-Rouser it simply says “The People’s Potty.” If that’s not Social Justice 101, then I don’t know what is.
Are you wondering if the owners and workers at Rabble-Rouser spend all day enraptured with their better angels and benevolent values? Perhaps they do; however, some of the chocolates they make don’t just support good causes, they are nationally recognized. The confectionery team has a sensational talent with chocolate, all of which is ethically sourced from South and Central America and grown on small, family-owned farms. No surprise, they win awards. Rabble has crafted an interesting and delicious salted caramel bar using dulcey, a kind of roasted, caramelized white chocolate. (Originating in France, it is also known as blonde chocolate.) The bar won a Good Food Award in 2014. In 2021, Rabble-Rouser’s “Dulcey Truffle” won the same honor, and their newest, the “Peanut Butter Milk Chocolate Bar,” is a finalist in the 2022 GFA lineup.
Now at last we all know Rabble-Rouser’s secret formula to happiness, success, fame, and, quite possibly, world peace. This is it: invite others to share your space, feed people, give to good causes, speak out, and turn workers into owners while creating fabulous, award-winning chocolate confections.
