Hopkins sophomore Jamasen Rodriguez is well on his way to becoming the next big name in chocolate with his company, Jama Cocoa. Rodriguez founded the company in June 2011 and was soon joined by fellow classmates David Aaron White, Demilade Obayomi, Davik Orith and Shreyash Milak in the endeavor of making hand crafted chocolate truffles.
“[Jamasen] wanted to create a company that sold really high quality chocolate truffles, but that also embodied the urban spirit. Also the spirit of art and high cultural value,” David White, Hopkins sophomore and Head of the Jama Cocoa’s Public Relations, said. “We really want to give a chance for local street artists to showcase their work, through our product.”
The company’s boxes, first released last year, incorporated the works of many street artists into their packaging.
“We had several collections,” White said. “The most prominent was a street artist called Blue, and that was the theme, where he just had a couple sketches he’d done in the past and we bought those from him. We bought the rights and we ran those on our first set of boxes.”
Since then the company has sought to perfect its product and marketing strategy. In the past year, Jama Cocoa has gained investors and developed its infrastructure. From humble beginnings in the Wolman Hall kitchens, these chocolatiers have grown their business significantly, now renting kitchen spaces and equipment throughout the Baltimore area to produce their truffles on a much larger scale, turning out two hundred of their hand crafted truffles in about four hours.
The Jama Cocoa team took part in this year’s Business Plan Competition, through the Center for Leadership Education. “We were able to hand out samples to the judges,” White said, “And they were able to approve. Even though we didn’t win the Business Plan Competition, we did lose all of our samples, so we were really happy about that.
The company’s main focus at the moment is brand awareness, both on and off the Hopkins Campus. They have accumulated over 10,000 followers on Twitter and seek to gain wide recognition through digital media by the time they begin mass-producing their product. “We’re actually in the middle of our branding process right now and we’re getting the company officially incorporated,” White said.
Jama Cocoa will be giving away free samples on Friday from 11-3 p.m. The event will be held outside the Levering Plaza, in order to raise awareness of its product, as well as to help the company determine who is interested in their product. People will have the option to enter their information in order to help Jama Cocoa see who likes their truffles.
“We really want to collect as much data from people, in a non-invasive and fun way,” White said. “We could easily send out a survey to the 4800 kids on this campus saying, ‘If we released a line of high quality truffles would you by them,’ but what we’re really interested in is making sure that people like our product.”
The company’s future ambitions lie in eventually establishing their own shop and, hopefully, growing from there.
