When Brent and Monique Evans left their careers behind, they didn’t retire – they reinvented. The couple, married 24 years, transformed a decades-long fascination with chocolate into Indigenous Chocolate, a micro-batch single-origin bean-to-bar company now rooted in the heart of Cashiers.
The path to Indigenous Chocolate can be traced back to a Baton Rouge dinner group. Tasked one evening with creating dessert, the pair fashioned three miniature chocolate confections – and something clicked for Brent. He enrolled in an online chocolate tasting course and soon moved beyond evaluating commercial chocolate to sourcing raw cacao beans and roasting them at home on a tabletop coffee roaster. What began as a hobby quietly became an obsession.
Monique and Brent Evans
Neither had professional experience in chocolate, though that hardly seemed to deter them. Engineering firms and speech-language pathology were a long way from cacao beans and roasting drums. Brent owned a global electrical engineering firm. Monique worked as a speech-language pathologist, yoga teacher and food writer, contributing to publications including In Register and 225 Magazine in Baton Rouge.
“So what’s next?” they asked.
Brent has since sold his firm while Monique stepped away from her other work, and the couple began looking for a place to build something entirely new. Exploring the North Carolina mountains, they discovered Cashiers.
What had drawn them to Cashiers was a community that valued craftsmanship – the kind of place where a small artisan business could genuinely take root.
Indigenous Chocolate launched commercially in November 2022 in Alys Beach, Florida, before the Evanses relocated their factory to Cashiers last July, opening their current production and retail space at 188 Burns Street in October 2025. They have also become familiar faces at The Village Green Farmers Market, where they’ve participated for the past three years.
Brent, the company’s chocolate maker, imports raw fermented cacao beans from roughly 15 to 20 countries, sourcing from the top tier of cacao producers worldwide.
The process from bean to finished bar takes seven days and relies on only two ingredients: cacao and organic vegan cane sugar.
Roasting at lower temperatures for shorter periods allows Brent to coax out distinctly fruity notes that often surprise first-time tasters.
“We don’t make candy,” Monique said. “We make chocolate.”
The Burns Street shop functions more like a tasting salon than a conventional retail chocolate shop. Visitors can work through curated six-chocolate flights or reserve private in-depth workshops exploring the nuances of bean-to-bar chocolate. The space also serves cacao tea, rich Xocolatl prepared in the Mayan tradition using only cacao and hot water, along with curated wine, beer, sake and vermouth pairings selected to complement the chocolate.
In Cashiers, the Evanses have created something still relatively rare in the South: a true bean-to-bar chocolate company built around craftsmanship, sourcing and a belief that chocolate can express place as vividly as wine.
If you’d like to learn more, check out indigenouschocolate.com – but c’mon, you owe yourself a visit.
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