A candy counter that became a design-led chocolate house.

Compartés is a chocolatier in Los Angeles that dates itself to 1950. Its website calls it “a family-run chocolate house” and says it has been “handcrafting chocolate bars and truffles in Los Angeles since 1950,” and speaks of more than 75 years of chocolate making. The company spells its name with an acute accent, Compartés, though much of the press coverage drops it.

The company tells its early history briefly. It says it began “as a landmark dedicated to traditional European-style truffles” and quickly became a Hollywood favourite, and its website names Marilyn Monroe among the stars it served; we give those as the company’s claims. It says it still uses “antique kettles, hand-scooping, and small-batch European techniques,” methods it describes as “largely unchanged for over seventy years.”

The modern brand is the work of Jonathan Grahm, whom the website calls its head chocolatier. According to the company, he “walked into Compartés at fifteen, and never left,” at a time when the shop was “a traditional candy counter,” and it changed shape with him “into the design-led, small-batch house it is today.” The company says only that the craft “was entrusted to a new family of chocolatiers”; we have not seen a dated account of when the Grahm family took the business over, so we do not give one.

Grahm’s own story, as the company tells it, mixes Los Angeles and travel: it says Venezuela taught him about tropical cocoa, delivering wine with his grandmother to the city’s restaurant kitchens taught him taste, and time in Paris and Italy refined it.

Chocolate as art.

Packaging is the centre of the Compartés identity, and the company says so plainly: “Our packaging is our signature.” Its website says its truffle boxes carry “bold, geometric prints and classic Americana designs,” and that each chocolate bar is wrapped in “custom artwork created specifically for that flavor profile,” so that the box needs no gift wrap. The designs, it says, come from Grahm himself: “Our chocolates are designed by our chocolatier, Jonathan Grahm, making the packaging as collectible as the chocolate is delicious.”

The company traces this to a frustration. It says that when Grahm began designing the wrappers, “bold color on food packaging was uncommon,” that he was “tired of boring boxes” and wanted “a bar worth keeping, not just opening,” and that the idea it calls “Chocolate As Art” grew out of that. Each season, it says, original artwork is made in a Los Angeles studio and translated directly onto the wrappers.

The flavours lean on Los Angeles too. The company names California Love bars, with palm trees and pink sunsets on the wrapper, a Strawberry Shortcake bar after Grahm’s favourite childhood ice cream, and Donuts & Coffee, after a shop he has visited for twenty years. It says it puts “unusual” ingredients such as handmade doughnuts, cereal and homemade marshmallows into chocolate, and sells fruit from California orchards and farmers’ markets dipped in chocolate by hand.

Design collaborations have followed. Architectural Digest reported in May 2015 on a range of Compartés chocolate created with the Los Angeles interior designer Kelly Wearstler, according to English Wikipedia’s article on Wearstler. In December 2025 As Ever, the lifestyle brand of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, released a line of chocolate bars made with Compartés, People reported. The company also lists bespoke commissions for fashion houses and other brands, which we have not checked one by one.

Chocolate as a design category.

The seven brands in this group all sell chocolate under their own names, and six of them are American: Scharffen Berger, Ghirardelli, TCHO, Recchiuti, Vosges Haut-Chocolat and Compartés come from the United States, and Hotel Chocolat comes from the United Kingdom. The phrase “chocolate maker” covers a wide range of businesses, from companies that buy cocoa beans, roast and grind them and make their own bars, to confectioners and chocolatiers who buy in finished chocolate and turn it into truffles, bonbons, boxes and gifts, and many firms do some of each.

That range matters for design. A brand built on the bar lives on the wrapper and the shelf; a brand built on the shop lives in its windows, its boxes and the experience of buying a gift. Ownership matters too, because premium chocolate names are often bought by larger food groups, and a famous label does not always tell a shopper who stands behind it today. The one British name here adds a further model: a high-street chocolatier with its own shops and cafés that also grows cocoa on its own estate.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now, where its cocoa comes from and where its chocolate is made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A working kitchen, a television judge and a family business.

Compartés says its chocolate is made in Los Angeles. Its website describes the business as “a working chocolate factory in Los Angeles,” adding that “unlike brands that outsource production,” its chocolatiers temper the chocolate, infuse ganaches and place toppings by hand every day. Its curbside-pickup page, in October 2026, described the city address as “a working chocolate kitchen with a pickup point at the curb, not a store,” where “every Compartés box is made and packed,” and said it did not offer walk-in shopping or factory tours. We give these as the company’s own statements.

On cacao, the company is less specific. It says it sources “the world’s best cacao” and blends it with ingredients from California farmers’ markets, and that Grahm tasted cocoa from “hundreds of farms” before settling on the house’s three signature chocolates; one photograph on its website is captioned as sun-drying the harvest in St Lucia. It does not name its cacao suppliers or origins in the pages we read.

Grahm has also become a television figure. English Wikipedia lists him as a guest judge on the Netflix baking competition Sugar Rush in July 2018 and as a guest on Food Network’s Cake Wars in February 2016. The company’s website lists further recognition, including Forbes 30 Under 30 and the Inc. 5000, and press in Vogue, The New York Times and Oprah’s Favorite Things; we have not checked those claims individually. It describes itself as family-run and has not, in what we read, published details of its ownership.

For a design guide, Compartés shows how packaging can carry a chocolate brand on its own: each bar is a small printed artwork, collected as much as it is eaten. Compare Mast Brothers, whose printed paper wrappers made it famous, and Vosges Haut-Chocolat, another American chocolatier that sells on story and flavour. For this guide we use a sunset pink, navy and citrus yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Compartés’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.