Green Spectrums puts the “high” in high-end confectionery with a pastry-chef-built edible that somehow decided chocolate and gummies should be the same thing.

Most weed ideas sound brilliant when you’re smoking a joint. Very few survive until morning.

Choco-Lit did.

Green Spectrums’ signature edible takes two dispensary staples — chocolate and gummies — and basically asks why the hell anyone decided they needed to be separate. The result is a dome of hand-tempered, 55-percent Belgian dark chocolate topped with a fruit-jelly gummy layer, combining the snap and richness of proper chocolate with the chew of an edible gummy.

“I was like, ‘Well, wait a minute. Let’s take the two best things, gummies and chocolate, and put them together,’” Green Spectrums’ founder recalls of brainstorming products with his wife while the two were smoking a joint.

It is exactly the kind of two-in-one Frankenstein confection only a stoner might dream up — except this particular stoner happens to be a properly trained pastry chef.

And that changes everything.

Choco-Lit didn’t come from somebody buying bulk chocolate, tossing THC into it and designing a loud package. Its creator graduated from the Culinary Institute with two degrees, one in foods and another in baking science. His résumé includes executive pastry positions across multiple states, the Virginia Military Institute, the Hyatt in Florida, and the Plaza Hotel in New York. He also says his work as an executive chef earned two and a half stars from The New York Times for American fusion cooking.

Food runs even deeper than the résumé. His great-great-grandfather arrived from Italy through Ellis Island as an ice cream maker; his grandparents later operated ice cream parlors and soda fountains throughout the Bronx. His grandmother taught him to make old-school frozen custard as a kid.

Eventually, he opened his own ice cream shop in Peekskill and later ran a fleet of Sweet Central ice cream and food trucks making homemade ice cream, gelato and Italian ices.

Cannabis was running alongside all of it.

At 18, he was already messing around with weed in restaurant kitchens — green butter, cookies, brownies, tea — back when “decarboxylation” wasn’t yet part of his vocabulary.

“I became like the cookie king,” he says.

When CBD entered the legal marketplace, he and his wife sold the food-truck business and jumped in. By 2018 they were producing CBD commercially; by 2020, their small manufacturing operation had earned GMP certification. From there came contract manufacturing, THC licensing and eventually a 5,000-square-foot operation spanning cultivation, processing, manufacturing and distribution.

But Choco-Lit feels like the moment all those worlds finally collide.

The first prototypes were supposed to be a literal edible sandwich — chocolate, gummy, chocolate — until R&D led to the cleaner dome shape. The cannabinoids live in the chocolate, while the jelly delivers the contrasting fruit hit and chew. The launch flavors are banana with cinnamon sugar and raspberry, with more pastry-counter madness already being tested.

The chocolates have already picked up competition hardware, including second place at the High Times Cannabis Cup and first and second in Massachusetts.

“You get the best of both worlds, man,” he says.

He means gummies and chocolate.

But he could just as easily be talking about himself.

Pastry chef and pothead. Haute cuisine and getting high. Choco-Lit lives somewhere deliciously in between.

Read all about Choco-Lit in our current print edition found here!