Ryan and Emily Wiswesser fell for Alaska during a ski trip. In their first months in the state, they looked for small-batch Alaska foods to send to family and found those products surprisingly hard to track down. In 2012, they launched Alaska Artisanal, an online business that packaged Alaska-grown and Alaska-made foods into gift boxes. The boxes featured products from makers across the state, including pancake mix from Alaska Flour Company in Delta Junction, biscotti from Turkey Red in Palmer, and potato chips from the Alaska Chip Company in Anchorage.
Alaska Artisanal grew into one of Chugach Chocolates‘ largest customers. Two fourth-generation chocolatiers founded that company in 2011 in the Day Lodge at Alyeska Resort in Girdwood, the company says. When the founders left the business and moved out of state in 2016, the Wiswessers bought it.
Ryan came to chocolate after a career in finance at a public accounting firm. He learned the trade by speaking with the previous owners and attending training sessions and tastings. He told Alaska Magazine that he “sort of fell into chocolate.”
The company outlines two goals on its website: chocolate that tastes “exceptional,” and is built from ingredients grown, harvested or made in Alaska. Its homepage states the ambition plainly: “Alaska has world-class beer, food, and wildlife; we should have world-class chocolate too.”
Photo Courtesy Chugach Chocolates
Cacao trees require a tropical climate, so every bean travels far to reach Anchorage. The company has imported beans from Madagascar, the Dominican Republic, Fiji, and Vietnam. The company roasts the beans in micro-batches, cracks and winnows them into nibs, then grinds them into “chocolate liquor.” They add sugar and flavorings, and tempering gives the finished chocolate its shine and clean break before it is molded into bars or blocks.
Earlier coverage illustrates the scale of the operation. Alaska Magazine described two-pound roasting batches and chocolate poured onto a marble cooling table where it was cut and scored by hand. On some summer days, the chocolatiers started work at 3 a.m. so the bars could set before the room became too warm. Chocolatier Kyli Stewart told Alaska’s News Source in 2025 that early batches relied on improvised tools such as blow dryers and PVC pipes, while the factory now uses professional equipment.
The operation has since become more sophisticated. Chugach Chocolates purchased a flow packaging machine that could increase its potential packaging rate from 90 bars an hour to as many as 90 a minute, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). When some flavors would not run through the machine, the Alaska Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) sent a specialist to the factory within a week, identified the cause, and helped the company put every flavor on the line.
Photo Courtesy Chugach Chocolates
The company sells single-origin bars made with cacao beans from Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Hawai’i, Madagascar and Tanzania. Stewart described a true bean-to-bar process for the line, with each batch hand-sorted, roasted, refined, and tempered over several days. “The Madagascar is really bright and fruity … Vietnam, you can taste the ashes, like the volcanic ashes,” she said. The Hawai’i beans come directly from a cacao farm run by friends of the company who are from Alaska.
Photo Courtesy Chugach Chocolates
The company also sells bars with distinctly Alaskan flavors. The flavored bars start with the company’s 62% cacao dark chocolate and incorporate ingredients from other Alaska producers. The birch toffee bar uses toffee made in-house with syrup from Bridge Creek Birch Syrup in Homer and Kahiltna Birchworks in Talkeetna. Kelp for the kelp and cayenne bar comes from Kachemak Kelp in Homer. The potato chip bar features kettle chips from Mat-Su Valley potatoes by the Alaska Chip Company, the same brand of chips that once supplied Alaska Artisanal’s gift boxes.
For its Prince William Sound sea salt bar, the company makes its own salt using seawater collected by the owners in Whittier. The couple has also picked wild raspberries for a bar studded with cacao nibs, and transformed spent wort from nearby Brewerks brewery into a chocolate treat called the Beer Crispie. The Birch and Berries Trail Bar combines the company’s chocolate with Alaska lingonberries or blueberries and birch syrup. A dark chocolate espresso bar debuted in 2017 as a collaboration with Anchorage’s Black Cup.
In a recent social media post, the company thanked, “Just want to send out a big big thank you to all of you who support small businesses like us, and to all the small business that make it possible to do what we do – from the farmers and co-ops that produce cacao, to the local companies that gather and make truly exceptional Alaska ingredients, to the amazing shops that carry our chocolate all over the state.”
Photo Courtesy Chugach Chocolates
In 2020, Chugach Chocolates moved into a newly built, larger factory in midtown Anchorage. The COVID-19 pandemic hit that same year. Minutes from an April 2020 meeting of the Alaska Food Protection Task Force show that the boutique shops the company relied on had closed, leaving it with summer-season inventory and prompting it to pursue direct-to-consumer sales.
The couple had planned to open a storefront in 2020. “We were getting ready to open it up when COVID hit, and we knew it wouldn’t be feasible,” Ryan told the Anchorage Daily News. A post-pandemic labor shortage caused further delays, but they eventually opened a tasting room beside the factory in April 2023. “It feels like this has been a long time coming because it was planned for so long,” he said. “It’s different than the wholesale we’ve been doing, but it feels great to have that direct connection with our retail customers, and allows us to offer more products.”
Reaching customers across Alaska takes more than a single storefront. Chugach Chocolates was among the Alaska-made brands that Starboard Cruise Services brought to cruise-ship stores. “We’re a small chocolate business utilizing local flavors in a state with one of the smallest populations, the largest in-land area [more than twice the size of Texas], and challenging transportation. Having our products on cruise ships to all reaches of the state has been crucially important,” Ryan told the Moodie Davitt Report. In July 2026, FinanceBuzz named Chugach Chocolates Alaska’s pick in its list of the tastiest chocolate shops in every state.
For the Anchorage team, the mission remains the same. “Alaska is our brand,” Stewart said.
“What’s next for us is just continuing to strive to have the best chocolate that is made in Alaska.”
Photo Courtesy Chugach Chocolates
