Former Employees Allege ‘Systemic Racism’ at Dandelion Chocolate

Former employees started calling Dandelion Chocolate out after social media posts expressing solidarity with Black Lives Matter

Dandelion Chocolate, a Mission District-based bean-to-bar chocolate brand with retail shops and cafes in SF, Las Vegas, and Tokyo, has “culture issues with anti-Blackness not being treated seriously,” former employee Adonis Valentine tells Mission Local, Valentine says that the company’s general manager took extra care to make certain that people of darker complexion were always particularly nice and smiley,” and was put on a performance plan for being “aggressive.” Valentine quit in August of 2019 when, they say they realized, “every single person who was having an issue with being deemed aggressive is Black.”

In another case, former employee Cheyenne Eisert says that in March of 2019, a manager texted her a photo of an orangutan with the words “met your distant cousin.” Dandelion’s CEO, Todd Masonis, tells Mission Local that the company transferred that manager “to a different location, one that had lower tips.” Another employee, Gjaidan Stewart, who had first brought the texting incident to company HR, was transferred to that same location, despite previous requests not to work with the alleged troubling texter. “It seemed very pointed and intentional as a way to manage me out,” Stewart says.

Masonis says that the company is “rethinking” how it responds to incidents like those from last year, but that “I think a lot of these incidents were from in the past — doesn’t excuse them — but it just means I think our thinking has evolved over time.”

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