Scottsdale's Zak's Chocolate A Sweet Success Story

SCOTTSDALE, AZ — What started as a hobby in the Boston suburbs has landed Scottsdale's Maureen Elitzak among the country's top chocolatiers.

That's because Maureen, along with her husband Jim, have built a semisweet success story at their north Scottsdale chocolate company, Zak's Chocolate.

The couple's chocolates are renowned worldwide, winning four International Chocolate Awards between 2016-19, in addition to a number of mentions in a who's who of national and worldwide culinary publications.

The couple previously worked in finance before starting the chocolate business.

"We started making chocolate at home, too much of it to eat, and we started giving it away," Jim said. "And that's what sort of led us to the idea that this is fun, we're enjoying it. People were giving us good feedback. And that's how we got here."

It's safe to say that the Elitzak's business has definitely arrived, with the couple's ethically-sourced, small-batch chocolates becoming must-have confectioneries for anyone passing by their store, which is located inside the Agua Caliente Shopping Mall.

Zak's recently celebrated its sixth anniversary, which Maureen attributes to the community's support.

"We went into this without any experience in so many things that are relevant to this little business," Maureen said. "Like, we had no experience in the food industry. We've worked for lots of small companies, but we'd never opened our own business. We never even worked together.

"So part of what I think helped us is our attention and focus on quality, because we wanted to make sure that we made something that's better than what we were buying before."

Maureen said the company's focus quickly shifted toward finding and buying from suppliers that treat farmers and cultivators with respect and dignity.

The couple said they work with what they call 'a middle man,' that issues a transparency report on the chocolate providers they use.

The point of the report, according to Maureen, is to ensure that the farmers they work with are treated fairly.

"We know some of the benefits of some of the farms, that more of their kids are now going to school than had in the past," Maureen said. "So that's part of it, too. We're able to make a really good product, but we're also able to help people that for a lot of years were being taken advantage of by big companies."

The net result of Maureen and Jim's labor of love is a host of chocolates, ranging from vegan dark chocolate bars to a rotating selection of bonbons, caramels, milk chocolate bars and white chocolates.

For Jim, seeing Zak's move from a hypothetical to a two-person tour de force in the chocolate world has been well worth the long hours of work and many sleepless nights.

"Once we got more into the social, economic and environmental issues in the chocolate industry, the more we've wanted to share that," Jim said. "And I think that's a big part of what makes us unique. People that come into the store; they get this experience, whether they expected it or not, about what's unique about what we do.

Jim compares the couple's background as chocolate makers and chocolatiers with someplace that has both a distillery and a mixologist/bartender, in how both make unique products out of common materials.

"The way that I like to describe what we do that's really different is that we're like a bartender. We take something that most people have never thought about or heard of, and we turn that into something that starts to be more familiar, though it's in our style.

"So that's, I guess, how I like to sort of think about what we do."