Maverick Chocolate Co.
Paul Picton, Founding Owner of Maverick Chocolate Co.
Maverick Chocolate is Cincinnati’s resident bean-to-bar chocolate maker, and has been blossoming out of Findlay Market since it was founded in 2013 by Paul and Marlene Picton. Since opening, their chocolate has routinely won awards for its quality and ethical standards, two values that have remained the North star of Maverick Chocolate for more than a decade.
Paul was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba and moved to the States more than 20 years ago. He landed in Cincinnati to follow his career as a mechanical engineer in the aviation industry, which allowed him to travel the world. As a lifelong chocolate enjoyer, he was able to expand his scope of what chocolate could be by tasting chocolate from different origins and filling his carry on with these delicious treasures from afar.
“I left my corporate job in 2013 and was no longer going to Europe every two weeks like I used to,” Paul says. “So I ran out of chocolate. I thought, ‘where am I going to get any good chocolate?’”
Paul decided that if he couldn’t find the chocolate he wanted to eat, he’d make it. He founded Maverick Chocolate in 2013 and decided to house his burgeoning business here in the heart of Cincinnati. “We're foodies, so we knew if we wanted to have a food business, it needed to be a Findlay Market,” Paul said.
Though all of their cacao is imported, any additional ingredients like spices, coffee, and fruit they use in their bars or truffles are sourced as locally as possible, often coming from within the Market District itself. Spices come from Dean’s Mediterranean and Colonel De, fruit from Madison’s, and coffee from Deeper Roots to name a few.
When it comes to sourcing cacao, Paul keeps ethics at the forefront of his purchasing decisions. He often attends the Northwest Chocolate Festival, which puts him in touch with not only other artisan and craft chocolate makers, but also farmers, co-ops, and distributors whose values align with Maverick Chocolate’s. Two principles to guide Maverick’s sourcing for the most part—prioritizing organic cacao and working with ethical companies.
“There's a lot of problems with child slave labor and other ethical issues. We want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem,” Paul says.
In the early days of Maverick Chocolate, Paul couldn’t get his hands on equipment for his small operation. The only commercial chocolate-making equipment on the market were geared toward large chocolate manufacturers, and Maverick wasn’t that just yet. So Paul drew from his expertise in fixing machines and rigged a chicken rotisserie into his first chocolate roaster. “We did a lot of that when we started—making our own equipment or modifying it in most cases,” he says.
For many years, all of Maverick’s chocolate was produced at the Findlay Market location. At the time it was the sole location and it served a dual purpose as both a retail floor and a production space. As they continued to grow and open more retail locations, their production needs outgrew 129 W. Elder, and it was time for Paul and Marlene to think about opening their own production facility.
They landed on a building in Covington to restore and retrofit to meet their needs, and every step of the way in the design process, they had the guest experience in mind. “Going forward, our real focus, I think, is going to shift to education,” Paul says. “We want to do more chocolate classes—history of chocolate, chocolate 101, and how you make chocolate. We really want to sort of develop that side of it.”
Anchoring your business in strong values and upholding a high standard of quality is not an easy feat, but Maverick wouldn’t be Maverick without these principles. “We're doing this because we're passionate about what we do and we believe we're bringing value to our customers, and that's pretty rare. You really don't see that,” Paul says. “But that's why I like being at Findlay Market.”
Published April 2026