Co-founder and chocolatier of Mama Ganache Organic Chocolates, Inc. Tom Neuhaus began his culinary explorations at Oberlin College, where a term project involving the interpretation of a hundred-year-old French culinary science textbook sparked his passion for haute cuisine Française. Realizing that he had found his métier, Tom began writing query letters to dozens of French restaurants, in hopes that one of them would find a place for him. His wishes were granted when Hotel-des-Bains in Aix-Les-Bains, France, took him on as a cook’s assistant in 1969. His new career took him back and forth, from the United States to Europe, where he continued to study and develop his unique approach to food chemistry. Stints at a number of distinguished restaurants in France, Austria, New York, and Washington, D.C., as well as the writing of food columns for the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner brought Tom back into the world of academia, where he developed one of the first food and beverage study software programs, gained a Masters in Food Science from Oberlin University, a Doctorate in Sensory Psychology with an emphasis on the role of moods in food selection behavior, and developed his current teaching program at California Polytechnic University, where he offers the only college-level French-language-based course on cooking French cuisine in the United States. Tom’s current passion is the international politics of food production, and the evolution of Fair Trade business practices, which have taken him to South America and to West Africa, where he currently focuses his efforts on behalf of local cocoa farming villages who supply Mama Ganache Organic Chocolates with the raw materials for the creation of Tom’s award-winning line of chocolate products.