Tabatha Carr, ND, was 16 when doctors first prescribed her blood pressure medication. “I was a woman’s size 20-22 when I was in high school,” she said. “I weighed nearly 300 pounds.”
Her father’s job took the family to Enid when she was 8 years old, and she stayed through high school. After graduation, she attended Oklahoma City University as a biology-premed major, completing an M.S. before taking a break from the health field.
“Honestly, I felt like a hypocrite,” Carr said. “I didn’t feel I could talk to people about their health when mine was so bad, so I went to work for Dell in Oklahoma City.”
Health was a strong draw for her, though, and she eventually went back to school to complete a program in naturopathy. At 30, she still had issues related to hormones and blood sugar, so she decided to change her “relationship with food.”
“I’d been on a diet nearly every day of my life, and when I changed my relationship with food, I dropped 80 pounds,” she said. “I switched to a raw food, plant-based diet. I wanted a dessert, so I started experimenting with raw cacao, virgin coconut oil and agave.”
She developed a line of plant-based chocolates she loved, and wanted to get feedback. “I went to the Texas Women’s Conference and met with the food buyer for QVC,” she said. “The buyer loved the chocolates. That was confirmation for me that I needed to make this a business focus.”
Since then, Carr’s success has moved beyond Oklahoma. The chocolates have been featured in the Grammys’ gifting suite and in Oscar nominee gift bags, and in 2020, Carr received a grant from Beyonce’s BeyGOOD Foundation.
Opening July 3, Good Girl Chocolate in Penn Square Mall will sell a selection of Carr’s creations, including dark chocolate bars, brownie batter bars, truffles, cookie dough bars, pecan fudge and almond praline bars. Prices range from $6.99 to $79.99, the latter being a 27-piece truffle box. Carr controls every step of the process of making her chocolate, from roasting and grinding the beans to making the chocolate, all of which will now be done on-site at the mall.
