@time

Kathy Johnston is so in love with chocolate, she lies awake at night thinking about it. “For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed,” she says. Her love of all things chocolate goes all the way back to her childhood, when she’d build ladders out of kitchen chairs to get at her mother’s hidden chocolate stash. As chief chocolate officer of Dubai-based chocolatier Mirzam, that’s a healthy fixation to have. Mirzam is one of several ambitious startups developing homegrown alternatives—in its case, it’s making high-quality, bean-to-bar chocolate featuring ingredients sourced from a historic spice route that ran from the west coast of Japan across the Middle East to Europe. Read more at the link in our bio. Photograph by Natalie Naccache (@natnacphotos) for TIME

February 07, 2022