About Joan
Joan Steuer is one of America's foremost authorities on the chocolate market, and the leading expert on chocolate trends, innovations and the chocolate-loving consumer.
More than twenty years ago, way before it became trendy, Joan created a career from her passion for chocolate and began her lifelong quest to learn everything she could about the subject as the founding editor of Chocolatier, the first magazine dedicated to chocolate lovers.
In the late eighties, Joan founded Chocolate Marketing, LLC, a firm that has provided creative innovation, strategic counsel, consumer insights, and brand positioning and product development work for more than 200 clients ranging from global Fortune 500 companies to award-winning artisans as they navigate their way through the world of chocolate. Clients have included a diverse range of some of the world’s most well-known brands —from Chocolate Marketing’s first client Procter & Gamble, to Unilever, General Mills, Sara Lee, Ben & Jerry’s, Häagen Dazs, Starbucks, Mrs. Fields and Godiva to smaller chocolatiers such as Fran’s Chocolates, Ltd., Chocolat Moderne and BT McElrath Chocolatier.
Joan has created and helped develop hundreds of chocolate products sold in nearly every retail aisle and has a unique ability to transform consumer insights into highly successful products by knowing what will sell. As a highly respected pro among her peers and industry leaders, she sits on the Communications Committee for the National Confectioners Association, is a member of the International Food Futurists’ Global Advisory Board, and a sought-after keynote speaker, moderator and seminar leader on trends and tastings at food conferences, trade shows, media events and sales meetings.
She has provided chocolate information and content in nearly every media platform to educate the novice chocolate lover as well as the sophisticated connoisseur, and has spent considerable time analyzing the range of consumer emotions and mindsets that determine chocolate choices. Joan has also co-authored two cookbooks, Best-Ever Brownies and Marshall Field’s Frango Chocolate Cookbook.
Considered the go-to-media resource on all things chocolate, Joan has been a guest on many national television shows including CNN, The Martha Stewart Show, Good Morning America, and Live With Regis, and has been profiled in numerous national publications including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post. She recently appeared as a chocolate expert on both the Food Network and History Channel and hosted a Travel Channel show on chocolate as well. People magazine even dipped Joan in chocolate for a feature with a subhead “If you are what you eat, then Joan Steuer is a chocolate mousse cake”.
As a renowned expert in the chocolate industry, Joan has delivered many State of the Industry addresses and was one of the first inductees into the Chocolate Hall of Fame. Known for her abundant energy, creativity, and skills as a strategist and innovator spark who ignites enthusiasm and speeds execution, Joan has inspired top-level executives as well as chocolate lovers in nearly every city in the U.S.
Joan is at the forefront of chocolate trends, has an uncanny ability to forecast future opportunities, and has been called “America’s Leading Chocolate Guru.” Today, Joan’s mission is unchanged: to share her chocolate knowledge in an extraordinary way.
