We make chocolate. We also spend a lot of time around campfires.
At some point, the two things started to feel connected — not just commercially. Genuinely.
We’re not anthropologists. But a book changed the way we see this.
Richard Wrangham is a primatologist at Harvard. His book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, makes a case most people haven’t considered: cooking over fire isn’t just something humans do. It’s what made us human in the first place.
His argument is simple. Raw food takes enormous energy to digest. Cooking pre-digests it. The caloric surplus from cooked food is what funded the growth of the human brain — over hundreds of thousands of years. We didn’t develop intelligence and then discover fire. We discovered fire and then developed intelligence.
We had to read that twice.
The archaeological record puts controlled fire somewhere between 400,000 and one million years ago. The social consequences were immediate. Fire created the gathering point. Everything else — shelter, community, conversation, food culture — organized itself around the hearth.
One detail we found remarkable: the Latin word for hearth is focus. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the etymology. The campfire was literally the center of attention — before the word existed.
Johannes Loubser, an archaeologist who has studied early human settlements across multiple continents, notes that in almost every site, the hearth is at the center — not at the edge, not in a corner. At the center. Everything else arranged around it.
We’ve noticed the same thing at modern campfires. Nobody plans it. Nobody assigns positions. But within a few minutes, everyone faces the fire, and the conversation becomes different from any conversation that happens indoors. Less formal. More honest. People stay longer than they intended.
This is not nostalgia. This is several hundred thousand years of muscle memory.
The s’more arrived much later — 1927, to be precise.
The first written recipe appeared in a Girl Scouts handbook called Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts, published by Loretta Scott Crew. She called them “Some Mores.” Three ingredients: marshmallow, chocolate, graham cracker. No technique required. A marshmallow on a stick is technology available to anyone who can find a stick.
For almost a hundred years, that formula hasn’t changed much. The marshmallow is still marshmallow. The cracker is still cracker. The chocolate has largely stayed what it was in 1927 — commercial, shelf-stable, engineered for consistency rather than flavor.
That part we can speak to.
Commercial chocolate is made to survive a supply chain. It contains less cocoa butter — the natural fat in cacao that gives chocolate its gloss and its melt — because cocoa butter is variable and expensive. Vegetable fats replace part of it. Sugar content is high. The bar stays solid at room temperature because that’s what it’s designed to do.
At a campfire, stable is the wrong quality.
Real chocolate — single-origin, made with cocoa butter intact — melts at approximately 34 degrees Celsius. That’s body temperature. It’s also the temperature of a hot marshmallow fresh from the fire. You don’t need to hold the chocolate over the flame. Place it on the warm marshmallow, wait thirty seconds, and it moves — slowly, from the edges in. The two things become one thing.
That is the s’more the format was always capable of producing.
And then there is the flavor question — which is where we spend most of our time. Single-origin chocolate carries the character of the place it came from. The soil, the altitude, the fermentation traditions of one farming community in one region of the world. Madagascar tastes nothing like Ecuador. Mexico is nothing like Brazil. In a s’more — where the chocolate is the only complex flavor element — that difference is everything.
The campfire has been earning better ingredients for 400,000 years.
We think it’s finally getting them.
*Our S’mores Upgrade box: 12 single-origin chocolate bites, one origin per box, enough for everyone around the fire. Choose yours.