Laura Graves loves chocolate and she has been eating and baking with it for as long as she can remember. The 33 year-old Arlington resident is a self-described chocoholic, so when she decided to quit her marketing job last fall to make gourmet chocolate truffles full time, no one who knew her was too surprised.

But she craved something healthier to pair with her chocolate fix, and she sensed that consumers did, too. Graves started experimenting with her favorite comfort foods – dark chocolate, South American grain quinoa, dried fruit and cacao nibs. Cacao nibs (pronounced ka-COW, similar to the Ker-POW cry that red racecar Lightning McQueen in Disney’s Cars movie makes when he sees the cameras) are the chopped up bits of cacao beans that form the base of commercial chocolate. Graves went on a two-week cooking trip to Mexico to study chocolate and its origins. And then Cacao Nibbles were born.