Bonbons aren’t just sweets for Jocelyn Dubuke. They’re hand-painted, layered statements, designed with the kind of attention to detail that turns a bite into a full-body experience.
The Atlanta-based chocolatier behind JARDÍ Chocolates is one of four local makers featured in BITTERSWEET: The Design of Chocolate, now on view at the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) through October 12. The multisensory exhibition centers on the role of design in chocolate’s global evolution, from ancient Mesoamerican origins to contemporary craft.
For Dubuke, the design process starts with flavor, her primary source of inspiration. One of her most popular bonbons began just that way. She paired lemon with thyme, an unusual but complementary match, and then added lavender to round out the profile. “The thyme is very often paired with lavender in French provincial cuisine,” she says. “And lavender also goes well with lemon—think lavender lemonade! So I landed on that.”
From there, she thought about how the flavors would land on the tongue. Dubuke explains she focuses on saltiness to heighten the perception of the flavors. “I blended dried lavender with sea salt on the bottom of the truffle, so it was a layered flavor experience—salty bottom hitting the tongue first, then a sweet/sour white chocolate ganache.”
That kind of thoughtfulness runs through Dubuke’s creative process. Each bonbon starts with a central flavor, then evolves through choices around texture, size, shape, and color. “Some flavors are very intense, so having a large piece wouldn’t be pleasant,” Dubuke says. “Others need a lot of space to accommodate all the fillings.”
JARDÍ’s Coffee Hazelnut Cookie bonbon, for example, layers coffee sauce, coffee ganache, and hazelnut crunch. Her Yuzu Bergamot bonbon is smaller and sharper, designed for a more focused, high-acid impact. “Except for my most traditional flavor, all my fillings have some texture variation and multiple flavor components,” she says.
With her Salted Blueberry bonbon, she places salt at the bottom of the shell to activate the salivary glands and heighten flavor. “It sometimes makes people gasp or laugh when they first experience it,” she says. “Which increases how much flavor you experience. I’m the weirdo, watching people eat,” she adds with a laugh.
Even Dubuke’s use of color is both aesthetic and functional, sometimes signaling a flavor, other times adding to the overall visual composition of a collection.
“Even when you do understand the science, you can’t see it… so it still feels a bit like magic to me sometimes.”
Jocelyn Dubuke, Founder, JARDÍ Chocolates
Her commitment to design detail fits squarely within the framework of BITTERSWEET, which invites visitors to consider chocolate not only as food, but as a designed object with social, cultural, and environmental implications. Alongside JARDÍ, the show highlights Xocolatl Small Batch Chocolate, Lewis Pogue Chocolate, and Alpharetta-based Cocoatown, which manufactures bean-to-bar equipment for chocolate makers around the world.
There’s also a global chocolate map, a timeline of packaging design, and an interactive station that invites people to make their own paper “truffles”, plus chocolate tastings.
But what lingers is how personal it all feels.
“There’s something very emotional to me about creating something that people consume,” Dubuke says. “Food can either feed or poison people, and you have to take it seriously.”
Bonbons, she adds, are often used as gifts. “We’ve been part of weddings, and once someone even used them to apologize for breaking someone’s heart,” Dubuke says. “All of those feelings and intentions come through—or at least I try to make them come through—when I’m in the kitchen.”
Her practice is as grounded in science as it is in storytelling, anchored in crystallography, thermodynamics, and emulsions. “Even when you do understand the science, you can’t see it… so it still feels a bit like magic to me sometimes.”
And her intentionality extends to sourcing. Dubuke uses only B-Corp-certified chocolate from Valrhona and Tcho, buys ingredients from the woman-owned Pastry Depot in Atlanta, and works with a family-run packaging supplier in New York. “It’s hard to be fully sustainable since so much food packaging is single-use,” she admits. “But being ethical in the chocolate choice is the main way.”
At MODA, BITTERSWEET asks visitors to consider the systems and design choices behind the chocolate we consume. Dubuke’s bonbons offer something more intimate: a fleeting, crafted moment meant to be tasted, remembered, and felt.
