THE SHOP
Many of you know that we have been developing a shop for Durham. The shop is a dream that we are making into a reality. Simply put, Cocoa Cinnamon, the shop, is a coffee, chocolate, tea & spice lounge – a place to relax, indulge, socialize or even be alone. For us, the space is at least as important as the products. As you may know from your interactions with us with bikeCOFFEE or at chocolate shows, events and markets, we love hand making each coffee and chocolate and carefully selecting and preparing each tea and spice. We can’t wait to create the space that is equal parts community house, indulgence room & home away from home. We’ve been making some headway and when we have significant news, we’ll be sure to tell you about it.
It is hard to describe why we do what we do. Many times if you talk about your deepest motivations it sounds heavy handed. We love the lightness of indulgence. We also love the idea of the coffee house/chocolate lounge as a nexus for being. As most of us do, we find a great discrepancy between the world we can imagine and the world in which we live. Business, for us, is one small, daily and significant way for us to create a world that we imagine — one in which people can be diversely inhabit a common space, a place equally about peace and the potential for radical ideas, a place to be with your family, friends or alone. A place where you can sip on a drinking chocolate with touches of cinnamon, ginger and pure vanilla or drink a delicately brewed tea from Yunan, China. We aim to create a space that is of the community and incites community across many boundaries. We aim to be as sustainable as we can and as we grow and lower prices and more distribution opportunities become available to us, we can become more self sufficient, generate more of our energy. With success, a business has the opportunity to become tighter, greener, more sustainable, better. We don’t want any of this to come off as preaching; that’s not at all what our space is about, but we do want you to know what our goals are that set our foundations behind the scenes.
Cocoa Cinnamon ™, the name, comes from a dream. I don’t know why it came, but it might have to do with the reading I’ve (we’ve) been doing over the course of years. I was taken along a path that led from Drowning Bear and Will Thomas of the Ocanaluftee Cherokees to George Washington, Simon Bolivar, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Captain Cooke, Christopher Columbus to histories of Islamic artists and mathematicians, which inevitably ran across stories and books on the spice trade, coffee, cacao and the amazing culture and recipes that seep up in that awesome melange. All of this combined and brewed in our minds and with the experiences of our last coffee shop in the mountains started our quest for our new lounge in the amazing place that is Durham.
