To many of us, the first day on a job at which your sole responsibility is to talk about, explore, and taste chocolate and then decide which of the finest ones to buy sounds like a dream come true. But it wasn’t for Chloé, a respected chocolate expert known throughout the chocolate industry as “Chloé Chocolat.” And not just because she had to wear a special uniform she disliked, because her basement office was windowless and had pipes running all over the place, or because she was being introduced to everyone as the “privileged chocolate star” from Paris, breeding resentment and hateful glances from the rest of the staff. The problem wasn’t even that when she finally was taken to the chocolate counters, there were eight journalists and TV crews and a PR person barking at her to answer all their questions about a job she had started minutes before.
No, the day really went from bad to worse when the BBC invited an exhausted Chloé for a television segment on chocolate that evening.
“First, the PR people dress me like the Queen of England—things I would never wear in my life—and I’m completely depressed,” Chloé recalls. “Then, I am pushed into a taxi and we arrive after the show has already started. That’s when the producer tells me she has prepared a blind tasting for me. I tell her I never taste chocolate in the evening, but after such a long day even I am beyond caring. And then suddenly I hear them announce that I’m going on air. I am taken on the set and the host hands me a plate of chocolate and says, ‘Now eat!’”
Chloé mimics the slightly withering look she gave the host that night as she continues her story: “I looked at her and said, ‘You do not eat first. You smell first.’” Then, without ever taking a bite, Chloé sniffed each piece and separated the five chocolates into two groups, labeling one mass market and the other fine. She was, of course, correct. The stunned host wondered how she did could tell the difference. “I told you, I smelled it,” she said.
That evening in 2003, a BBC TV host learned what Chloé and other international experts, manufacturers, and chocolatiers throughout the fine flavor industry repeatedly explain: The pleasure found in fine chocolate is not about eating or even tasting alone. True, there are important distinctions between munching mindlessly on a chocolate bar or bonbon and savoring its pleasures, but for Chloé, these pleasures go beyond taste. In fact, in a 2012 BBC radio interview, she explained the differences between mass-market and fine chocolate by connecting it to another sense—hearing—likening the best mass-market brands to the “boom boom” of a jazz drumbeat and fine flavor brands to the rich complexity of a symphony.
“You have to listen to chocolate in the same way that you listen to music,” Chloé explains. “You have to listen to appreciate certain music. You have to give the flavor notes of chocolate many tastes and chances. It doesn’t mean you’ll actually like the chocolates but you may and you certainly will appreciate them.”
Chloé Doutre-Roussel got into chocolate because no other product had ever made her happier. Every time she ate chocolate, she felt intense pleasure and wanted to understand how and why. A couple of times she was so completely shaken by what she ate—by Steve De Vries in 2002 and by Domori in 2003—she even lost the words to explain her feelings. It was not that those chocolates were the best Chloé ever had or perfect in texture or flavor (neither was) but they offered her a new experience—pleasure that she could not put into words because, she says, “it was totally unrelated to my past experience.” She needed a whole new sensory vocabulary. It gave her hope for what was to come.
And, oh, what was to come: an explosion of small manufacturers and chocolatiers, especially in the United States and Canada but also across Europe and in emerging fine flavor markets like China, Ecuador, Brazil, Costa Rica, Bolivia, and beyond—all of them chasing flavor and customers locally and internationally. As a result, the choices in fine chocolate are almost as overwhelming as the possibilities. This has led many people to question whether such variety is too much of a good thing: is it economically unsustainable, given that demand is increasing and chocolate is so underpriced? Others are far more optimistic, seeing the dawn of a new model that has little relation to what has come before, a model that embraces diversity and consumer education at the local and global level.
Chloé’s main concern is that consumers won’t or can’t appreciate this diversity soon enough for many fine flavor manufacturers and by extension, the diversity, to survive—though this is not necessarily an absolute negative. “What we need to do with chocolate is appreciate the differences between the two-dollar, five-dollar, and ten-dollar bars instead of just producing more and more chocolate the people will not understand.”
This leads Chloé into her current nightmare: people who want to skip all this experience and education and know her favorite chocolates. “The first question you always get is ‘What is the best chocolate—what are my favorites?’ I’m tempted to say, ‘Who cares?’ Like humans, you have chocolates that you will like a lot, those that you like but that have some negative qualities but the positive overpowers the negative, and then some you just don’t like at all even though they’re very good. So it’s a question of finding what positive things are most important to you. Like music or friends, each person must make his own opinion and those opinions evolve. Your favorites also depend on your culture, background, childhood, and your mood at the moment. I think that in our favorites we should always have the ones that we know please us and that we know we will get pleasure from, and those that shake us and we are not used to them yet but we eat them until our body is used to that new vocabulary.”
Yeah, but who has time for that?
Manufacturers and chocolatiers will tell you they follow their hearts in creating their chocolate and bonbons but too many consumers follow the herd and buy into marketing and the power of packaging. Even those with a deeper understanding of flavor, cacao, and chocolate want what they want—dark or milk, organic or raw, meltingly smooth or crudo, nuts or nibs or perhaps pink peppercorns or some coarse Balinese salt—and want it now. Fine flavor manufacturers are selling to a generation that wants pleasure fast. “When most people eat a piece of chocolate we want that pleasure immediately: boom! That’s the music of mass-market chocolate,” says Chloé. “We do not have the patience to wait. Just like in love, we have lost that art of the flirt and letters and wooing and seduction.”
So, can consumers learn to slow down, taste, explore, and value the costly complexity of fine flavor? That’s the dream, of course, and there is hope. But consumers can be fickle and even dismissive when it comes to matters of taste, and though the future looks bright by some measurements, sometimes the numbers aren’t what they seem.
In Fall 2017, their long awaited book, Making Chocolate, hopes to demystify the chocolate making process even further. In the midst of their book tour and frustrating delays on completion of their new San Francisco factory space, Todd still keeps education and communication integral to the success of the company. “I think now is probably one of the most exciting times for chocolate in the past 150 years. It seems like industrial chocolate accomplished its goal of making a very inexpensive and consistent product for the mass market. I feel like that has been optimized to death and there isn’t as much room for innovation in that segment. But during this push to industrialization, it seems like some things were lost -- most notably the nuances and interesting favors that can be inherent in cacao.”
“I think the chocolate maker movement is bringing these ideas back to chocolate and awakening consumers to what chocolate can be. And once people make that leap that chocolate can be much more than they expected, they try to learn and taste more. So I think all of the innovation and education is happening with small makers, and while it’s a tiny blip now, if you compare it to microbrew or coffee, I think it’s going to have a very big impact within a decade. We definitely make an effort through our sourcing report and by highlighting the farms and stories on our bars and signage. We also run customer trips to origin and host talks. I’d say most small makers tend to want to do this, but there’s a lot of cost involved so it can be pretty difficult to do a lot of it.” The majority of craft chocolate manufacturers and chocolatiers around the world think and feel the same way: Life is better not just with chocolate but also with flavor. Which is why “education” is the one word almost every flavor researcher, grower, manufacturer, and chocolatier uses when talking about how to get people to connect to, appreciate, and pay more for fine flavor chocolate in the future.
Steve De Vries De Vries Chocolate learned a lesson years ago as one of the small fine flavor pioneers in the United States. “If you are making basic chocolate, putting enough sugar in, then the majority of the world will go, ‘That’s yummy,’” says Steve. “But I go after flavors that aren’t necessarily immediately yummy but are uniquely mine. It drove me crazy for years. First, I was doing it and people would taste my chocolate and just go, ‘What the hell is this?’ When I started doing more tastings and I got people one on one then I would do a lot better. So when we can’t be there, we battle against immediately yummy.”
Dan Pearson of Marañón Chocolate in Peru knows the pitfalls of battling the yummy all too well. “Many pastry chefs and chocolatiers have said to me something like, ‘There’s one thing about this chocolate you have, Dan: you can’t put anything with it. You could put in whole cream and make a ganache but you can’t infuse it.’ Some of them say their business models are to buy the cheap crap and infuse it with artificial flavors—that’s how they make their money. My chocolate is too expensive for their target markets. They can use the worst damned beans in the world infused with more vanilla and more soy lecithin and more artificial flavors so we’re convinced that it tastes like something good. But the difference between that and the natural flavor of my fine flavor beans and other fine flavor manufacturers’ beans? It’s like the difference between fresh lemonade and Country Time.”
These days, it is not only manufacturers in established markets like the United States, Canada, Japan, and Western Europe battling against preferences of their customers and chasing customers for the future, but also those in newer markets, especially manufacturers in fine flavor-growing regions pursuing customers inside their borders.
Michelle and Dean Morgan’s Zokoko in Australia may be, in Michelle’s words, “tiny, tiny, tiny,” but they are putting an outsized effort into tastings to grow their local market. “People are blown away by the fact that two chocolates can taste completely different even if they are at the same percentage,” Michelle reports. “Then they want it finer and finer in terms of texture and realize that the Cadbury Dairy Milk that they had in their childhood is grainy and that the darker chocolates in the supermarket are still thirty to thirty five percent sugar and have milk solids. Then give them something that is dark but not necessarily bitter and not over-roasted and they really like it.” Michelle and Dean have even made a few batches from a couple of different growers in Queensland, Australia to good results and have great hopes for the future. “So it is all about education in Australia right now. On the ground, it is about helping farmers understand that what they do affects the end product—how what they do with harvest and fermentation and drying stages is so critical. With consumers, we are after the sort of light-bulb moment in which they try the chocolate and say, ‘Whoa, I can’t go back to stuff from the supermarket.’”
That is exactly the foundation the late Mott Green said he built Grenada Chocolate on (and it remains the company’s foundation today): “The local market is what’s been keeping us going and sustaining losses in investment and export. That is been fantastic. Grenada is small so we can make the chocolate on the side of the island to bring it to the other side of the island and it’s only twenty miles away and the cocoa is right here and all around us. There are tourists here to sell the chocolate to and locals here who have a taste for the chocolate and are not in abject poverty. That has worked and made us much more profitable.”
Across the Caribbean Sea in Guatemala, Mott was a tremendous influence on Carlos Eichenberger as he built his Danta Chocolate. Despite exporting only 10 percent of his production overall to Europe and the US, Danta survived by selling fine flavor chocolate into a national market dominated by the sweet drinking chocolate so popular in Latin America. At first, it was only people who had been to Europe and had higher-percentage chocolates and liked them that were Danta’s core audience. A little national-pride marketing didn’t hurt either: Guatemala may be known as a coffee- and sugar-producing country but, according to Carlos, those crops were introduced later in the country’s history; cacao is native. “That’s the first thing I try to drum into customers or potential customers: the fact that they should be very proud of this national heritage,” says Carlos. “Then the second educational hurdle is the lack of sweetness in our products. When they try our higher- percentage chocolates, it is another part of the education process to get them to appreciate the stronger flavors and the lack of sweetness.” Today, the overall market for fine flavor chocolate in Guatemala is growing and Danta along with it: Carlos opened an atelier/boutique in Guatemala City and bought a commercial space that he transformed into a production and sales facility where Danta’s chocolate products, including pastries and gelato, are made, while the “dirty part” (from storage and roasting through liquor production) is handled elsewhere.
“Guatemala is changing,” notes Carlos. “People have become more discerning about chocolate and understand the difference between artisan and commercial or industrial products.” This has, in turn, opened up new markets for Danta and other Guatemalan producers: Danta was selected to be part “Export Coaching,” a program sponsored by the Dutch government in which Latin American fine foods and cacao producers are provided training and aide in finding and exporting to and new markets for their products.
While Carlos targeted his audience directly, El Ceibo in Bolivia, the 100 percent locally owned and run Bolivian tree-to-bar chocolate manufacturer, was completely surprised by its local fine flavor success. After all, Bolivia would seem to have a limited market for fine chocolate. According to Volker Lehmann, who owns a fine flavor farm there, of a population of around ten million, fewer than 5 percent “knows what good or fine chocolate is.” That’s why, for almost twenty years, none of the two-dozen-plus products El Ceibo produced for the Bolivian market were fine flavor and why their initial foray into fine-flavor production targeted international audiences. Yet El Ceibo, which developed its fine-flavor product line with Chloé Doutre-Roussel in 2008, has had an unexpectedly huge success locally: While 50 percent of its fine flavor sales are in the United States, where they have set up distribution, 30 percent comes from Bolivia, more than double that of Japan, its next largest customer. No one predicted that, especially when it is more expensive than other “premium” chocolates in the market, such as Lindt. As a result, El Ceibo is nurturing the Bolivian market for the future because, as Chloé states, “Shipping and customs charges to Europe are more than five euros per kilo, making it very expensive for them to develop a larger international market for an already very expensive product, so it reduces its competitive potential. If the success can continue in Bolivia, and if consumers remain proud to have a Bolivian product expanding in their own country, this is great for the market.”
The same thing is happening throughout South America with recently established manufacturers like Amma creating chocolate specifically designed for a growing Brazilian market. Even more established companies are turning their attention to the local market.
At Pacari in Ecuador, Santiago Peralta is already there. In the past, most Ecuadorians could only find high-end Ecuadorian chocolate at the República del Cacao airport stores. Santiago is trying to change all that by introducing his fine flavor bars to the local market. “The Ecuadorians, after years of tasting, tasting, tasting and explaining our chocolate to them, never go back to the milk chocolate or the candy that they used to have,” says Santiago. “There are now tens of thousands of people in Ecuador who eat our chocolate often. Before if you asked an Ecuadorian where the best cacao beans on the planet came from, they would say, ‘Ecuador.’ But if you ask, ‘How come?’ they’d say, ‘I don’t know.’ They had not experienced the difference. But as soon as they taste it they get it. It is so clear. You don’t need a refined palate to understand why this is fruity or this is floral. This connection is clear and is just a matter of education to understand.” In fact, Santiago preaches his gospel of fine flavor at the local university, giving talks and organizing tastings for hundreds of students. “But we need a bigger experience,” he adds, “more massive, or we will just see it in the fine hotels and airports.”
This message resonates with the chocolatiers George Soriano and Julio Fernandez of Sibö Chocolates in Costa Rica. Sibö chocolates used to be available only at hotels and places frequented by tourists. Today, Sibö is manufacturing its own chocolate and has its own stores, including a cottage workshop, which is more of a destination for tasting tours and lunch fare, and a new San José shop and café in the Escazu business district, where their customers can assemble a custom box of bonbons and sip hot chocolate. A local chain of supermarkets and specialty food stores, among other places, is also selling Sibö chocolate bars. Much like Carlos Eichenberger in Guatemala, George and Julio have tried to educate as many people as possible on the environmental, social, and economic importance of cacao to build the business. “We thought the market was right in Costa Rica to introduce a Costa Rican-made chocolate. We started out telling people that it is very important that cacao originated from this region. It is an indigenous plant. Coffee is from Ethiopia. Sugarcane comes from India. Bananas come from Malaysia. Cattle are Eurasian. Cacao returns us to our roots. And cacao fields require a certain level of biodiversity, so where you have a cacao plantation, you have lots of life. And in terms of the social component, we are named Sibö, which is the name of the creator god for the Bribri tribe in Costa Rica.”
But George and Julio discovered that reaching out to locals and simply telling them about indigenous crops and heritage and biological corridors was not enough. “They thought that was interesting but then so what?” adds George. “We found we could really engage people by telling them we harvested and made the final product and bonbons here—that our fine flavor cacao did not have to be exported to Belgium, Italy, and the United States. That had never been done before. You give them that and have them taste it, and then tell the story that’s attached to it—the story that’s wrapped up in that piece of chocolate.... Today, our chocolate bars are sold mostly to Costa Ricans. A lot of our customers are college-age kids and high school kids who are fascinated by the fact that it is a Costa Rican chocolate made from Costa Rican cacao. You can make fine chocolate in Costa Rica.”
Sibö’s success has also been contagious in Costa Rica. “When we started nobody was doing any good finished chocolates here,” says George. “It took us four years but soon there were new chocolate shops and everyone is interested in buying Costa Rican-origin chocolate now and we are expanding our export business to the United States and Canada. Only the ones who are doing terrible chocolate and charging a fortune are the ones who are doing us a disservice. We hope and want more people to do it right and raise the bar.”
This is already happening in the United States: over 200 fine flavor chocolate brands have been founded in the United States since 2005, including Hawaii’s Manoa Chocolate, Maui Ku’ia Estate Chocolate and Lonohana Chocolate, all of which make bean-to-bar chocolate using beans actually grown in the USA on the Hawaiian Islands. They define the “craft business” spirit Adam Davidson spoke about in a New York Times Magazine article “Don’t Mock the Artisanal-Pickle Makers.” And what Davidson writes is what every manufacturer hopes for: “When it comes to profit and satisfaction, craft business is showing how American manufacturing can compete in the global economy.” In fact, many manufacturers prefer the word “craft” or “specialty” to “artisanal.” “We say we are about craft chocolate, because it’s about mastering a hands-on craft,” says Rick Mast of Mast Brothers Chocolate.
US craft manufacturers may be small in terms of revenues but they have been driving recent changes for the better in the industry: Change the world—make better chocolate. They pride themselves on direct and transparent trade, paying top dollar for the best beans, speaking out against forced labor, investing in education, and making chocolate that tastes nothing like the multinational mass-market brands. And while most of those manufacturers and chocolatiers in the United States must turn to gourmet stores, specialty shops, the Internet, and supermarkets to sell their products, more and more of them are also building their success in what might be called a very European way: targeting their local communities at markets, events, and their own retail locations and combining that with a factory tour and tasting experience.
For example, when we asked Todd at Dandelion Chocolate “With the new factory you have had an opportunity to expand your production space - how did that impact your future processes and do you think you will be doing your processes any differently into the future”. He replied, “We had to rethink a lot of our process when we decided we wanted to expand. We’ve given ourselves 3 goals for the new factory: 1) more chocolate 2) more efficiency and 3) better taste. I think most people miss #3 when they expand, but we are actively doing experiments to do determine how we get better flavor, even at larger scale. So we’ve been playing around with machinery and processes that give more us more control over various parts of the process. There will be some more automation -- we a very happy to automate repetitive or purely mechanical tasks and free up the chocolate makers to spend more time evaluating samples, running experiments, and tasting chocolate. Whether it is Theo Chocolate in Seattle, TCHO in Berkeley, or Taza in Somerville, Massachusetts, small manufacturers are opening their doors to packed tours of people eager to learn about flavor, how chocolate is made, and where it comes from. They are even trying to be heroes in their own backyards. Shawn Askinosie, whose factory is located right in the middle of the country, in a lower-income neighborhood in Springfield, Missouri, uses the power of chocolate to educate local high school students in his Chocolate University. The students travel with Shawn to Tanzania as part of the program and then get to taste chocolate made from beans they brought back from their trip—chocolate like they never had before. And with no parents to tell them they might not like it.
“They soaked it up,” says Shawn. “I don’t know that there has been anything more gratifying for me as a person. This project may very well have an impact on their future. That is a big deal for me. We work with kids in the fourth and fifth grade of our little elementary school, too. We incorporate nutrition into our program just like we do for farmers in the Philippines. It is awfully glamorous to do that in the Philippines, but what about here? What about right in my own backyard? We are in the midst of the program to have them make a product and I’m going to buy it and sell it and all of that money will fund a nutritional program for one hundred kids. But it is all with young people learning at the same time about chocolate.”
Of course, tastings, tours, and other programs can only reach so many people and go so far. To complement those tastings, manufacturers worldwide offer a vast amount of information to consumers about their chocolate and fine chocolate in general. Industry websites and retailers complement the manufacturers’ work and provide glossaries, reference materials, and topical blog posts. For example, manufacturers like Chocolates El Rey in Venezuela break down all the flavor components of its chocolates and provide comprehensive detail on flavor, including how consumers might use each chocolate. TCHO says one of its biggest contributions to the chocolate world is how it positions chocolate by flavor with its Flavor Wheel (nutty, earthy, floral, etc.) in order to help consumers understand that there are a number of flavors out there and that chocolate doesn’t just taste like chocolate.
Dan Pearson of Marañón Chocolate takes a hands on approach at origin, taking chocolatiers and chefs who have decades of experience in chocolate but have never seen where that chocolate comes from to Marañón Canyon in Peru so they can understand before they taste. He took Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert there to learn about the beans that went into their “Good & Evil” chocolate bar from Éclat Chocolate in 2012 and 2013, a journey captured for Bourdain’s show on CNN that led to a much broader awareness of where chocolate comes from, how cacao is grown, and the people behind it. With the interest in fine flavor chocolate only growing from bar to bonbon, Dan could not agree more that the work of small and some larger manufacturers, bean-to-bar makers, and chocolatiers to educate themselves and consumers are paying off big time for not only his business but also his farmers: “The best bean-to-bar makers know where it is at. Everything is better. The marketing is better and more transparent. What goes into flavor is getting better. So our business is getting better. This is a tsunami, and we can’t keep up with demand. And that is a good thing. This is a good thing for the future even if it stresses us now. We want our customers and consumers to understand that like wine this stuff is seasonal and can’t be produced on demand. It’s an annual harvest, and new trees take three to four years to yield any beans. This is what awareness builds for a better future from the ground up.”
The list of international efforts at education like Marañón’s is long and only growing and echo the words of Richard Callebaut of Swiss giant Barry Callebaut: “We put a premium on the importance of education so consumers can make the best decisions.” Moreover, chasing, educating, and satisfying hungry customers is hardly limited to just the growing regions and the established US and international markets. Stories abound about new markets opening up for the future. In India, Barry Callebaut operates a training school in Mumbai. Reuters reported that Belgian chocolatier Thierry Detournay has become “Indonesia’s Willy Wonka,” producing a better chocolate for Indonesia’s booming middle class; his Chocolate Monggo now employs 150 people. And Thierry is not the only Belgian looking past his own chocolate-mad country. The headline of a Financial Times article said it all: “Chocolatiers savour sales to emerging market new rich.” According to the article, “If you are a Belgian chocolatier you have to find your ‘new rich’ elsewhere, particularly—as it turns out—in Russia and the Middle East.” Eastern Europe is getting in on the fine flavor craze, too: Chloé Doutre-Roussel has consulted with a bean-to-bar chocolate maker, Chocolate Naive in Giedraičiai, Lithuania and has volunteered help to two others in Budapest, Hungary.
Then there is what many fine flavor manufacturers see as the biggest potential market: China. The Chinese market is particularly intriguing to fine flavor manufacturers because, unlike India, the Chinese do not traditionally have a very sweet tooth, so fine flavor chocolate has a certain appeal. Angelo Agostoni, president of ICAM in Italy, recalls hosting a delegation of Mainland Chinese customers in Italy and one person politely tasting the dark chocolate being offered. “He said, ‘Wow! This is chocolate I would like to be offered. This is something I love.’ It was the first time he had bitten into a dark chocolate. Generally the Chinese are very fond of bitter flavors. Mainstream chocolate brands available in China have been very sweet products, so chocolate in their mind was sweet—which is why he was not so fond of it.” Today, the professional chefs ICAM services in China are expressing more and more interest in high-end, single-origin, and organic chocolate. And while this group still represents a small part of the economy, ICAM sees the market continuing to grow as they learn and explore. Barry Callebaut has recognized this change as well and has opened a factory an hour from Shanghai and a Chocolate Academy in Shanghai.
Now, Shanghai is a more westernized in terms of its tastes, so fine chocolate’s presence there is a little less surprising than the success of Polly Lo and Laurier Dubeau’s La Place Collection in Beijing, which started as an Internet-only business. “Even the hygienic department didn’t know what license to give us because they never heard about a chocolate business in Beijing before,” Laurier recalls. “They heard about pastry shops and hotels but not a little chocolate business.”
Laurier disputes the idea that the Chinese “don’t do chocolate” because they don’t eat a lot of sweets. “They do eat a lot of sweet stuff but they don’t eat very heavy cream-based and French desserts,” Laurier explains. “Chinese people even have their own chocolate, but it tastes like candle wax—even the Chinese, they don’t really like it.” What the Chinese do have a taste for is gifts, so Polly and Laurier used their business contacts in Beijing to set up shop and sold their chocolates initially as corporate gifts via Internet sales. “We did not think they were ready to just come in and buy a box of chocolates,” Laurier says. “They would buy it as a gift. We started with IT companies because IT people were the first ones to go abroad from China. Then we sold to the banks and then oil. China is a big gift culture and they love to give gifts but they don’t want to give a gift that you can find anywhere in the supermarket, so that worked for us.”
Education hasn’t always gone smoothly. La Place’s customers often ask if it specializes in Belgian or French chocolate because those are the perceived prestige chocolate countries. Moreover, there was no word for truffles in Chinese, so Polly made up her own expression, tefu—te means special in Chinese and fu means good fortune or happiness, so the truffles are a “very special happiness” or “very special good fortune.” The good fortune seems to be working. According to Laurier, “Now more and more we are finding people saying, ‘No, no, no, I don’t need a box, this is just for myself, I just want to taste.’”
Because of Laurier and Polly and the efforts of all fine flavor manufacturers around the world, consumers everywhere are becoming more and educated about the origins of cacao and chocolate worldwide. They are learning how flavor varies depending on terroir, postharvest processing, and chocolate making. The results are reflected in recent consumer trends, including what some call the “purist trend,” where customers have a preference for a single origin, a bean type, or percentage of cacao. Does that mean that fine flavor manufacturers see fewer flavor trends developing in the future, like maple and coconut sugar sweeteners, or inclusions, like the salts and peppers, fruits and nuts, and everything from pop rocks to coffee to bacon? Of course not. As Gary Guittard says, “Adding stuff to chocolate is part of the fun of being in chocolate. I think we are pushing the envelope today but then again it all comes down the flavor. If it is something that really tastes good, then it is probably going to have legs. And that is the fun of it all.”
Angelo Agostoni of ICAM thinks this is all possible because of the increased level of education among consumers: “Consumers have become more educated and even with milk chocolate there is generally higher expectations for quality and flavor. As a result, we have experienced a revived passion and interest for milk chocolate, playing with higher cocoa solids than traditional milk chocolate, or enhancing secondary notes to deliver caramelized milk chocolate or creamy milk chocolate or malted chocolate and even some limited interest in very high quality white chocolate.”
“Twenty years ago,” Richard Callebaut of Barry Callebaut says, “we did twenty percent dark and eighty percent milk. Today more like fifty-fifty but there is strong interest in milk.” In fact, milk chocolate, particularly higher percentage milk chocolates and caramelized milk profiles, were top of mind for the future for several manufacturers and chocolatiers and are commanding a premium compared to the milk chocolates of yore. That’s certainly true at Valrhona, which had incredible success with the launch of its Caramélia milk chocolate and is now pursuing many chocolate varieties. “We are producing a large range of flavors in dark chocolate and milk chocolate and we also came out with white chocolate,” says Philippe Givre of Valrhona’s École du Grand Chocolat in France. “I think our customers will prefer more and more dark chocolate but maybe will rediscover milk and white chocolate with new techniques or textures. In our work at the school, it’s so interesting to make ‘alliances’ of different chocolate flavors with the other ingredients we use in recipes. The more we use different chocolates, the more we learn associations and techniques to sublimate and complement flavors.”
Some manufacturers and chocolatiers even admit to liking milk chocolate or even—gasp—preferring it. Michal Recchiuti of Recchiuti Confections in the United States says without qualification that he is “really into milk chocolate.” At Cioccolato Originale Cecilia e Paul in Italy, one of Paul De Bondt and Cecilia Iacobelli’s signature bars is a layered dark and milk chocolate bar with sea salt between the layers, “representing the two of [them] united in one.” Others are simply enjoying the challenge of creating excellent milk chocolate bars to attract more consumers into the fine flavor market. For example, Duffy Sheardown of Duffy’s Chocolate in England will continue to explore “surprising differences” in the milk chocolate bars he manufactures like his award-winning 55% Criollo bar made from Venezuelan Ocumare or one made with oak-smoked cocoa nibs.
But whatever it is, Frederick Schilling of Amma and Big Tree Farms says, “People like their chocolate chocolatey and their base chocolate smooth.” Which is why manufacturers are focusing on machinery that will help them produce better chocolate and achieve that smooth, melty texture consumers desire more and more in milk and dark chocolate. This not so much a change from the past but an aspiration—one that might possibly add another layer to how fine flavor chocolate is marketed with manufacturers talking about their specific roasting or conching times. (Conching is a texture and flavor process done by machine and is similar to kneading.)
Some, like Michael Recchiuti, think this can be overkill. “I think some manufacturers got distracted by the media,” he says. “The media has developed a kind of glossary for consumers and manufacturers to follow. The glossary includes kind of origins, beans, percentages, conching . . . these chocolate manufacturers put all this information out there. But I think people don’t even know what they’re talking about. You ask people, ‘What is conching to you?’ Why would you ask how long you conch your chocolate for? What does that really mean to you? If it were longer would it be better?”
Anne Weyns at Artisan du Chocolat in England, who processes her bonbons from chocolate liquor, seconds Michael. “I think in the end the fine chocolate industry can be a little bit snobby. If people go into a chocolate shop, they should not have to have a PhD in cocoa beans. They go there to buy something that they are going to enjoy eating. That is it. They want something nice. Something they can come back and buy again. It is gone too far into ‘this bean has been conched for this long.’ People don’t really care. They just want a bar or a bonbon that tastes good and is reasonably priced so they can come back and buy it again and again.”
But Steve De Vries does see the logic behind this information as he and other manufacturers are always passionately experimenting with those and other techniques and tricks to improve and retain the flavor. “Education is not limited to the consumer,” Steve says. “We are all learning and tasting what everybody is doing and it is just exciting to have so many people doing different things. That is going to improve the chocolate.”
Of course, not every manufacturer is after the same texture. Taza and Felchlin, for example, continue to have success with their minimally or un-conched chocolates. Some think that minimally or un-conched chocolate lacks complexity but Felchlin, which launched its first Grand Cru couverture in 1999, believes quality is not just in the texture but also in the combination of details that must be appreciated through attentive concentration. “Think about a classical concert or painting, the same applies to edible pleasure, we must hone our senses and consciously appreciate the experience,” argues Christian Aschwanden, Felchlin’s CEO. “This is why Grand Cru must be presented differently. Our effort focuses on this. Many consumers are surprised at their own perceptive abilities. The future existence of Grand Cru relies solely on the selective consumer who can recognize the exclusive value and is prepared to pay the additional cost and is constantly searching for the ultimate flavor adventure.”
Conching removes the vinegary acetic acid created by the fermentation process and affects the flavor of the chocolate (for better or worse is a matter of opinion as some flavor is lost but other flavors are developed). For example, Art Pollard left lots of acid in Amano’s Dos Rios bar—its strong orange flavor could not be sustained without it. While Taza does not conch at all, other manufacturers are finding ways to retain those acidic flavors while still conching. Anne Weyns at Artisan du Chocolat, who works with chocolate liquor, not beans, conches before she refines using a machine developed for the paint industry and has cut the conch time from around forty hours to a highly efficient and, in her opinion, taste-preserving half a day or even a few hours. In Peru, Dan Pearson of Marañón Chocolate found a procedure that could remove the acetic acid during fermenting and retain the fruit acid for flavor in the pure white cacao beans which can reduce the conching time to only fourteen hours.
As Dan and Anne note, all this also saves energy—a trend not lost on most manufacturers big and small. “Do you know what would happen if not just me but big companies could take those multimillion-dollar machines and run them sixty-five percent less?” Dan asks. “You could decrease the cost of Big Chocolate. You could give those farmers eight cents on the dollar. And they might even be able to send their kids to college.” A change that big would have to come from the top down in the industry to have any huge affect in the future, but Barry Callebaut is getting there in its work. “Some people think you still need to conch for thirty-six or forty-eight hours but that’s just not so,” says Richard Callebaut. “It depends on the flavor and what you’re looking for. Plus the designs of the conches are so much more efficient. These are the kinds of things that have changed but the rest of the process has remained the same. We still go through the same stages that we did thirty or forty years ago. It is just that the way you do it is much more efficient and the machinery is more modern and larger.”
In some ways, this is where the big guys have the advantage for the immediate future. That industrial-sized equipment at a Barry Callebaut or Nestlé can make a chocolate that can be sold at $4 a kilogram. But in Ecuador, according to Jeffrey Stern, who was a chocolatier at Stern Confections in Ecuador until 2014, even places that process thirty tons a day sell it at close to $6 a kilogram. “That means it’s costing them at least four dollars a kilogram to make it,” says Jeffrey. “They just can’t compete, even with lower labor costs. They just don’t have enough capital to develop the economy of scale to produce chocolate on such a massive level and at such a high quality.”
Angelo Agostoni seconds that thought, noting that ICAM continually invests in technology not only with the aim of more cost-effective and larger production runs, but also to make higher-quality chocolate even at a bigger company like his. “Consumers might say quality is paired with artisan or little chef, but in chocolate manufacture that is not true,” says Angelo. “Which is why we have built the Orsengio plant. Technology costs a lot of money, so yes, by definition if you want to rely on technology you need to have the critical mass that enables you to do so; otherwise you cannot afford a plant like ours. We need to work and grow as well as spend for the technological costs but we think better technology very crucial in this very tight market.”
Mott Green of Grenada Chocolate knew this well, which is why he never stopped investing in technology and was in fact working on new solar-powered machinery for cooling chocolate when he was electrocuted and died in 2013. “Chocolate-making equipment is expensive and for very small scale is very inefficient,” he said. “Making it on a small scale sounds very romantic but your equipment is running twenty-four hours a day and it’s very expensive to produce the chocolate. There is more labor involved and more energy involved and more space involved.” But that’s what Mott knew he needed to do to keep making “a better chocolate and a better texture” to meet what consumers expect. And what they are expecting, Mott said, is a chocolate “as creamy as possible, as close to a milk chocolate so it is mild and sweet.”
In the end, George Soriano of Sibö sums it up nicely: “The truth is we just keep trying to make the quality better and finer and keep the flavor where we want it to be.”
On paper, all these efforts appear to be paying off. Consumers are indeed buying more “premium chocolate Lianne Van den Bos, Euromonitor International, predicted in a presentation: Chocolate Strategy – Repositioning Indulgence To Remain Relevant In The Healthy Snacking Era, “In 2017, trying to change things for the better becoming increasingly important. Living in a conflict-ridden world, consumers – especially younger consumers – want to enrich lives and preserve the earth’s natural resources. In this environment, their expectations regarding brands are growing. Lessons can be learned from coffee’s revolutionary growth strategy which managed to turn a simple drink into a little luxury, a treat that fits in well with fast-paced lifestyles. In that sense chocolate has a role to play to position itself towards mental wellbeing, a moment of premium indulgence, as opposed to competing against healthier snacks with reduced calories. When selling premium chocolate, consumers need to be educated on premium ingredients, cocoa content and origin, something for which foodservice outlets are a great point of contact,” concludes van den Bos.
What started with Chloé Doutre-Roussel’s nightmare seems to be a dream coming true on the strength of small- and medium-size fine flavor manufacturers. So what’s the problem? Well, it starts with the fact that “premium chocolate” on paper may not be any more “fine” than the paper it’s packaged in.
The truth is, “premium chocolate” is whatever someone says it is.
Curtis Vreeland of Vreeland & Associates explains that for statistical data mining of sales receipts from International Resources, Inc. or Nielsen, “I use a definition of premium chocolate which has been around for several years: chocolate selling for greater than $8.00 a pound, with adjustments for gift chocolate that includes a lot of markup for packaging. Qualitative factors are: using better quality ingredients, better execution, upscale packaging, etcetera.” This seems a fair standard and, depending on what subjective criteria and data are used for premium chocolate sales by other market research firms, might even explain why Vreeland & Associates and Packaged Facts estimates for premium chocolate sales in the United States differ by more than $2 billion.
Yet while premium chocolate as defined in chocolate retailing costs more than $8.00 a pound, “fine” chocolate starts around $24.00 a pound at retail. This is why numbers like the ones Vreeland & Associates and especially Packaged Facts have for premium chocolate do not match up with those used throughout the fine chocolate industry. That number, offered many times without debate at Fine Chocolate Industry Association meetings, has been $5 and no more than $7 billion in sales worldwide for fine flavor chocolate. Packaged Facts estimated sales for premium chocolate in the United States alone at more than $5 billion. The discrepancy is astounding and can’t be completely explained away by saying “fine flavor chocolate” is only a percentage of the chocolates considered “premium chocolate.”
Why not? As many people in the fine flavor industry say, 80, 85, and up to 90 percent of what you read on the average chocolate package is “marketing” (or “lies” or “propaganda”). Remember: “premium chocolate” and “fine flavor chocolate” are whatever someone says they are. And there is no agency to expose the truth, no referee, no single voice for education. As of 2018 there is no Cup of Excellence program like in the coffee industry—something Volker Lehmann in Bolivia desperately wants—that could help motivate growers to invest in quality and usher in more transparency, quality, and choices for customers. The Fine Chocolate Industry Association’s Heirloom Cacao Preservation Initiative may help change that with the first of the Heirloom designations announced in 2014, but until that day, as Dan Pearson notes, the United States will have only minimum standards for chocolate: “In the United States, to be called milk chocolate, you only have to have ten percent chocolate liquor – it can be more than 75 percent sugar! For dark chocolate, it is 35 percent liquor and it can have milk solids and more than half of it can be sugar! All these people, including myself, who grow up saying we are addicted to chocolate? We are addicted to sugar.”
While minimum standards vary from country to country, it does not change the fact that for the most part, companies can call chocolate whatever they want after they meet those minimum standards. Sure, some information is verifiable, like nutritional information and percentage of cacao, but, as discussed in Part One, one 70% bar could have no added cocoa butter and another could have 20%, making it a lot less powerful flavor-wise. And even then percentage is no indicator of quality per se. Go into any store that sells a variety of chocolate and you will see a lot of high percentage chocolate marked “premium” and “fine.” The premium chocolate is three-and-a-half ounces for $2.99 and a Hershey bar of the same size is ninety-nine cents. But what is the difference? Not much, many argue, and they worry consumers are being fooled into thinking otherwise, which is why Angelo Agostoni, president of ICAM in Italy, could be speaking for many in the business when he says, “The only danger I see in the future of fine chocolate? There is too much marketing and hype.”
Art Pollard of Amano Chocolate would concur. “You have an immense number of companies who purport to have some of the finest chocolate in the world and you taste it and it is quite clearly made with average quality African beans,” he says. “The importance of truth in marketing is paramount.” Because it is marketing that is driving many of the decisions consumers make. As Christian Aschwanden, CEO of Felchlin says, “A poor quality cacao can be disguised by other dominant aromas. Marketing is sometimes more important than the flavor and quality of a product because the consumer is not in a position or doesn’t take the time to distinguish quality chocolate.” That’s one of the main reasons Joe Whinney of Theo Chocolate says: “I can’t really think of one major brand that hasn’t made some sort of enhanced claim. So that’s also why I think transparency is important. Products have to be three-dimensional in terms of the product quality, its price, and value proposition, and the impact that it is having on the community and the rest of the world. That’s where the future is.”
If that is where the future is, it cannot happen too soon for many fine flavor manufacturers. They worry about a backlash founded on their efforts to educate consumers and have them pay more for fine flavor chocolate that results in a lower demand for chocolate overall, not a higher demand for their fine flavor bars. Not that there isn’t a place for affordable step-up brands. There is a wide-open space between Cadbury Dairy Milk and a Zokoko fine flavor bar made from Volker Lehmann’s expertly harvested and processed 100 percent, single-origin, wild Bolivian cacao designated Heirloom by the HCP. Good chocolate for a good price: many manufacturers see this as a great way to grow the market from the bottom up, much as wine did in the last century.
In fact, while people in chocolate make analogies to everything from studio art to craft beer to olive oil to explain their hopes for the future of fine flavor chocolate, it is wine that is most often invoked. Wine drinkers worldwide have long moved beyond France, Italy, and California to appreciate the diversity of wine-producing regions and estates. Through years of tasting, education, and rating systems from publications, experts, and retail stores, wine drinkers have not only learned their favorite wine types and producers but also can ask for different types of wines by name, grape, or region, often in a range of prices. They also know that most wines will vary in flavor from year to year. Fine flavor manufacturers hope that the same thing will happen with their chocolate as consumers learn to slow down, taste, and appreciate chocolate.
“I think it is a lot like the education for drinking wine,” says Michelle Morgan, who has certainly seen Australian wines make big names for themselves at all price points. “Chocolate changes not just in terms of the batch that’s being made, but in terms of the crop changing each year as well. Consumers should stop expecting this monotone sameness like the big guys are trying to achieve. This is a crop that changes and has its own beauty in it. Enjoy it now because it may never taste like that again. Really, really value it. It is getting people to understand about that part and just please taste it. Just step back and try to forget everything else and taste it and see what you think.”
This gets back again to the battle cry for education as fine flavor manufacturers chase customers around the globe: “Taste! Treat chocolate as a food and understand the flavor and the story behind what you are eating!” People like Michael Recchiuti say this to the people who are just beginning to explore the world of fine flavor chocolate as well as those people who are—for whatever reason, educated chocoholics or not—members of what he calls the “Seventy Percent Club.”
“I don’t know why people feel that number is the number or anything above that is the number,” says Michael, who has removed cocoa percentages from all his chocolate bars and bonbons. “It’s taste. It’s flavor. It is like people who salt their food before they taste it. That really pisses me off. Just try it, taste it.”
Thomas Haas of Thomas Haas Chocolates in Canada seconds Michael when he calls everyone in the chocolate world “victims of marketing” when it comes down to information like percentages and origins—even when it comes to his own products. “Everybody uses it as a marketing tool,” he says. “We say this comes from an origin here or this comes from an origin there or this comes from a single plantation. In my opinion that doesn’t tell you anything. What I would be looking for, as a customer, is a chocolate that tastes great. What plantation it comes from doesn’t tell me anything. At the end of the day, as much as we do tastings and as much as we debate and as many suppliers we have come in to bring us samples, it comes down to one thing: Does it taste great or not? Anything else is more marketing than reality.”
Steve De Vries of De Vries Chocolate could not agree more. Now and in the future he just wants people to trust their mouths and taste different chocolates, then make the decision as to whether it’s worth it. But, he says, “They won’t. Ten percent will and ninety percent will just follow them. So you have to kind of go after that ten percent and then the other people will start following. But that can be madness if tastes change quickly.” It can also be madness for a consumer confronted with the sheer number of choices on the market. “The explosion of small manufacturers means a dizzying array of fine flavor options from around the world, each with its own taste and story,” Steve adds. “And that can just be confusing.”
This confusion is only compounded by the vast amount of information that these manufacturers offer about these origins and their chocolate—for both education and marketing purposes—making it harder and harder for consumers to choose and distinguish between brands as they explore. But no matter how much information manufacturers and chocolatiers put on their packaging, websites, and marketing materials about their chocolate—its origin, processing, ingredients, percentages, the people behind it all—they are essentially talking about the same thing. This has led to an even bigger quest for differentiation through inclusions and even the look of the chocolate itself.
“A lot of these chocolate makers—I taste the chocolate and they are so flavor-heavy that you are not getting to experience the chocolate,” says Michael Recchiuti. “They’re interested in the crazy combinations and different colors and shiny chocolate but they are not really interested in the taste. I’m hoping that the trend really kind of shifts into taste. I am preaching that when I talk to people getting into the business. You do not need to be the next trend or in the Seventy Percent Club.”
Off the record, some in the industry go even further than Michael. They call for a pullback—an actual reduction in the number of products, if not manufacturers—in the name of taste and stability. Whether this pullback will happen or is even necessary remains to be seen; and if it does happen, it will be driven by many factors beyond taste such as education, marketing, price, and supply of cacao. But a need for stability in flavor is one of the reasons that many fine flavor manufacturers, like winemakers, have turned to blends to satisfy their customers’ tastes now and for the future.
Since cacao, like wine grapes—even the bulk varieties—is subject to agricultural variation, sameness is often impossible unless a manufacturer can occasionally adjust for those variations with a lower quality bean to achieve uniformity. Steve De Vries recounts how he once got some incredible beans from Chuao and made some single-origin chocolate out of it. Later, he tasted a larger manufacturer’s Chuao. He could taste similarities but it was not quite as robust as his. He called the manufacturer and asked, “‘What do you do when you get a bean that is head-and-shoulders above the normal bean from that place? You have to step on it, don’t you?’ And they told me, ‘Yeah, if it is too good we have to push it down a little bit because if we put something out that is better than what we think we are able to do next year, we will have to deal with complaints next year.’ Could you imagine a wine vintner tasting the wine and saying that it is good but a little too good so let’s pour some water in there and step on that a little bit?”
Probably not, but it is clear that blending is a growing trend in the fine flavor industry, especially for manufacturers providing couverture to chefs and chocolatiers. Gary Guittard puts it all in perspective when he says, “Chocolate on a whole basis is blended beans. It is blended beans, and chocolate makers want to be very protective and secretive about those plans because some blends are very synergistic and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
At Guittard, Gary’s first experience of this trend was with the company’s Harmony blend. “We tasted a whole bunch of different blends and all of a sudden we tasted this blend and we went, ‘Wow!’ It just stood out over and above all of the other blends that we had put together,” he says. But even with a fine flavor blend, Gary notes, replication is not always possible: “We stopped making Harmony for a while because we couldn’t get some of the beans for the blend. But that gets to the reason people use beans in blends: sometimes these flavor beans aren’t always available or you can’t get them in the quality you need or perfectly fermented, for example, but then you can substitute something else without drastically changing the flavor of the blend.”
That’s exactly the reason Pierre Hermé has a close and exclusive relationship with Valrhona. While he says he will taste any chocolate—blended or single origin—sent to him, he remains exclusively devoted to his Valrhona blends. Valrhona delivers what he expects and they explore new directions together. “I am always curious and happy to discover new products and I have tasted many wonderful products,” says Pierre. “But I only work with Valrhona, since we have a unique relationship that gives me a lot of freedom for creativity. We collaborate, sometimes for years, on developing together a recipe that fits my needs. We work on the origin, the fermentation, the roasting, the conching—they have a strong know-how in their own field, I have one in mine, and we collaborate using our respective know-hows to get my couverture.”
For fine flavor chocolatiers and chefs like Hermé, consistency from a manufacturer is essential. Even an artisan like Michael Recchiuti in the United States, who has a similar relationship as Pierre Hermé with Valrhona (though not exclusive) and who embraces some flavor nuances and the differences from year to year, still needs a consistent blended product for his signature bonbons. Jorge Redmond of Chocolates El Rey in Venezuela, which makes blends for Michael, likens the blending process to what is done in perfume, wine making, and painting, and touts it as a growing part of El Rey’s business. “When we first started, we were making three types of formulations. An extra bitter, bitter, and milk,” says Jorge. “Then we found that Michael Recchiuti wanted a more fluid chocolate for his needs. As we learned this and other things from our customers, we became more professional in what we offered.” El Rey now offers six formulations and has not ruled out offering more or creating additional custom blends for its biggest customers—blends the customers expect to be consistent.
Simply put, small manufacturers may tout the fact that their single-origin bars will taste different every year but chefs and chocolatiers around the world need and expect uniformity for their products. As Mark Adriaenssens, head of R&D in the Americas for Barry Callebaut, notes, chefs and chocolatiers need a consistent couverture for their praline, ganache, and fillings: “They are playing with other flavors. They may feature single origins in pure bonbons or bars. But the power of that single origin is lost in the execution elsewhere and so is the benefit of using it at all.”
Chef Bart Van Cauwenberghe, who owns De Zwarte Vos in Deinze, Belgium, and serves as a Belgian Chocolate Ambassador for Barry Callebaut, actually goes one step further. He often gets asked for his opinion on new blend or flavor of chocolate by Barry Callebaut and has one answer: “I always say, ‘Please stop creating new flavors because the people are not used to that other flavor and you have already produced a new one. Why?’ I could have eighty different kinds of chocolate in my shop. I prefer to have twenty. We use blends and, sure, we could also use single-origin—most of the people who come into my shop, they want to taste something new. But I don’t have the time to rebalance the flavors and create new bonbons for all the different chocolates.”
The possibilities in blending are not lost on small manufacturers, either. David Castellan and Cynthia Leungat Soma constantly uses different origins in their bars and thinks it is really interesting to do what they call “intelligent blending.” They even name the blends so that consumers can identify them beyond the origin. David and Cynthia even name the blends so that consumers can identify them beyond the origin. Their award-winning Arcana is based on beans from Madagascar, Ecuador, and Venezuela origins. “A lot of people wouldn’t take a Porcelana from Venezuela and make a blend out of it. Most people just make a pure bar,” They say. “So we mess around that way.”Of course, this messing around is not just reserved for blends. As long as they know the approximate flavor profile and the quality of the processing, several chocolatiers and bakers working with chocolate plan on incorporating more origin beans and chocolate into their future work despite the variations. Roger and Andrea von Rotz own the five von Rotz Patisseries in Switzerland and are the exclusive Swiss confectioners for Marañón Chocolate’s Fortunato No. 4 from Peru; they plan on focusing collections on it even more in the future. “I am aware that due to seasonal and weather inconsistencies there can be only a limited quantity. But they guarantee that the quality is ensured,” Roger says. Since Gary Guittard approached Michael Recchiuti with single origin chocolates that Michael thought were fantastic, Michael has explored the flavors further on an educational level in his chocolates and his Chocolate Lab café. “When I told Valrhona I decided to go with the São Tomé single origin for my milk chocolate, they said it’s harder to control that on a consistency level as far as flavor profiles,” Michael recalls. “And I said, ‘I don’t really care.’ If it changes, I know it’s going to be good. It is just going to be different.”
This all adds to the diversity of flavor for manufacturers and chocolatiers to explore. “The point we are at now is we are learning what is possible, like painters,” says Steve De Vries. “We are still learning what’s possible with the primary colors, but I think blending is really going to be something, and some people are starting to do it now because you can make some complexity of flavor that is really interesting.”
So what’s the problem?
According to people like Chloé Doutre-Roussel, what Steve De Vries finds interesting is not resulting in more gratification for her as a consumer—she is finding less, not more, pleasure, despite the fine flavor revolution she has witnessed. “Globally, as a consumer, the world of fine chocolate is much more interesting and much bigger, but I don’t get the pleasure that I had three to five years ago,” she says. “Despite having more brands on the market, I’m not experiencing more pleasure. There are great new chocolate brands, but too many other newcomers are in a hurry to launch their products with no use of their brains, no research, no focus on quality—just marketing. This means that we, as consumers, have more choices but a harder time finding fine chocolate. And I’m not willing to spend my money on it, at least not at that price.”
That lack of a value proposition is also where fine flavor chocolate and wines remain separated: Today, people will pay hundreds of dollars for a bottle of wine but many of those same people flinch at $10 for a bar of chocolate. They might be willing to pay $100 a pound for the best bonbons because they reflect a level of artistic skill and vision, but consumers do not yet understand that an incredible amount of skill, vision, and work goes into producing fine quality chocolate itself. And unlike wine, chocolate may be something that people will always really find difficult to pay more money for because they see it as a childhood indulgence—a “treat.”
Frederick Schilling, who founded Dagoba in 2001 and sold it to Hershey’s in 2006, is similarly concerned. “I knew what was coming down the pipeline with all these small manufacturers. I didn’t know how these guys were going to survive. I say this not in a vicious way. I know how cash-intensive any company is, but especially chocolate. All these little companies—they all ask my opinion, and I say this is a lot of money, a lot of work.” Simply put, at some point, in addition to all the good that they do, businesses need to make money or they cannot last. Passion only gets them so far—and marketing may be just as important as quality when it comes to generating sales from one-on-one tastings to social media and beyond.
Mott Green agreed about the marketing concerns, and even posthumously, his words echo in the sentiments of many small manufacturers that devote so much time and energy to doing well by doing good. Mott knew his chocolate was good enough to command a higher price. But because of a lack of marketing and increased competition—and because Grenada Chocolate can sell only so many bars at the chocolate specialty shops where the retail price can be a much fairer $6 or $7—the company needs better marketing to compete with the big multinational brands and the older established names. “Very few people are willing to spend that much money on a chocolate bar,” he said. “Maybe the ones who are going to specialty shops, but not in higher-end supermarkets like Waitrose in the United Kingdom and Whole Foods in the United States. We need the high-end grocery market. But we basically find that over four dollars in the US and three pounds in the UK they just don’t really sell.” This is especially true in fine flavor-loving countries like Spain that are faced with deep economic problems. “Spain was the gateway to cocoa in Europe. There is a long tradition of quality chocolate, especially in the north where the climate is cooler, and historically, proximity to France has given us a more gourmet vision of the product,” says Ramon Morató, master confectioner and director of Barry Callebaut’s Spanish Chocolate Academy. “The current challenge in these times of economic crisis is to know how to maintain the quality level and prevent consumers from opting for lower-priced products.”
Still, many in the industry remain cautiously optimistic. “Whenever I get concerned about the chocolate market being too crowded, I turn to the wine aisle,” says John Kehoe who has spent two-plus decades in cocoa and chocolate, most recently at TCHO and now the Guittard Chocolate Company. “There are hundreds of labels. There are bottles for forty and eighty dollars and bottles for five dollars and everywhere in between. I see the strength of the chocolate segment in the middle of that range: the two-dollar-and-fifty-cent bar to maybe four dollars and there is a lot there. But exceptional chocolate takes exceptional effort throughout and that creates a more expensive bar. It has to be. But I just don’t know if the consumer market is there yet. I mean you’re going to have six-, eight-, ten-, and twelve-dollar chocolate bars. Can these be demanded? There are challenges, but I think we can if we make better chocolate, and if consumers dive deep and embrace quality and flavor and support it by spreading the word and telling people when they like a bar that this one is truly fantastic and is really worth it.”
Shawn Askinosie of Askinosie Chocolate agrees. In fact, in his graduation speech at Missouri State University, he refused to see a no-win scenario for the future and invoked Star Trek and the lesson of Captain Kirk defeating the Starfleet Academy leadership test, the Kobayashi Maru. He urged students to do what he and Kirk did: redefine the problem and instead of asking how much money can we make or are we making, ask a different question, namely how can we make a difference? A successful lawyer who came to chocolate as a second career, Shawn freely admitted in that speech that he thought he would be in profit or high-profit territory within a few years, but that as a chocolate maker he makes one-tenth what he made as a lawyer and has been forced to scale back. Now he asks a different question for the future: How can we make enough to do what we do at the highest quality, turn a profit, and most important, make a difference? “Is it measurable? Yes. Is it a standard definition of business? No. I redefined the question. Yes, I need to pay everyone including myself but I also started Chocolate University. I took thirteen lower-income high school students to Tanzania. One texted his mom and said, ‘This is the best day of my life.’ That is success because we redefined the question.”
But redefining the question still comes down to redefining the price consumers will pay, and Shawn hopes that is possible. “I think some day chocolate bars will be twenty dollars,” Shawn says. “I want to see the farmers get more for their beans and I want to see the consuming public ready and willing to pay for that premium product. There aren’t many premium anythings that you can buy for eight dollars. You’re not going to get the best bottle of wine. You’re not going to get the best bottle of olive oil. I don’t think you can buy the best bar of soap for eight dollars. But we have to produce the best chocolate that we can and the highest quality possible or we won’t survive and be permitted to do these other good things that we do.”
In the end, of course, it is the customers who pay the rent and keep fine flavor manufacturers from, as the French say, “putting the keys under the door.” As Christian Aschwanden of Felchlin, says, “Taste is personal and individual and in the end the consumer dictates what he wants.”
And what a growing number of those consumers want is form before flavor.
“That’s a miracle pill?” Westley’s friend asks, staring in disbelief.
“The chocolate coating makes it go down easier,” Miracle Max’s wife explains.
Well, of course it does. Miracle Max and billions of us know chocolate makes anything go down easier and “functional” chocolate—sold for its health benefits, to deliver the benefits of other ingredients, and modified to address dietary restrictions—shows every sign of remaining a growth area in the industry as a whole. In a more health-conscious world, knowing that chocolate possesses certain health benefits only increases its “good for you” allure. In terms of unmodified chocolate being good for you, the future seems bright for chocoholics: every few months another study appears touting cardiovascular, anti-aging, mood-enhancing, and other healthful benefits from eating chocolate, particularly dark chocolate. A Danish study published in BMJ Journal Heart in 2017 suggests that chocolate consumption may lower risk for atrial fibrillation or irregular heart beat that can lead to stroke, heart failure and other health issues.
Barry Callebaut definitely sees health facts being emphasized more and more both by manufacturers and consumers in the future and will continue to explore these options from a flavor perspective. “We have an innovation section where we try to think about what new things can we do with chocolate,” says Richard Callebaut. “We know chocolate has 400 flavor compounds. What can we do with them? We have our dark and light ACTICOA chocolate, where we retained up to eighty percent of the flavonols. That gives you many more antioxidants in your end chocolate.” These days, Barry Callebaut is hardly alone. For example, Roquette America launched a chocolate bar enhanced with a pea protein that boosts the nutrition without “changing the chocolate’s texture, taste, or processing conditions.” Meanwhile, TCHO takes a lighter approach, listing the myriad health benefits attributed to chocolate on its website and linking them to its TCHO-A-Day: a one-, two-, and three-month supply of eight-gram “doses” of chocolate packaged in what it calls a “drug” dispenser bottle similar to a vitamin bottle.
The fine flavor world has adjusted to the health needs of consumers in other ways, too. A hike in demand for lactose-free products prompted Barry Callebaut to create a 100 percent dairy-free alternative to milk chocolate in 2010. Across the board, sugar-free options are proliferating, as more shelf space is being claimed by high-cocoa-content dark chocolate to meet the chocolate needs of diabetics and those who eschew refined sugars. In general terms, since most dark chocolate is vegan, has no added sodium, and is gluten-free, it also appeals to the millions of people who need or prefer such products. An increasing number of fine flavor manufacturers like Bonnat, Domori, and Pacari, and chocolatiers from Laurier Dubeau at La Place Collection in Beijing to Anne Weyns at Artisan du Chocolat in England to Patrick Roger in Paris also offer sugar-free (with the sugar replaced by a sugar substitute) or 100% bars (with no added sweetener) or bonbons to satisfy not just dieters and diabetics but also those who prefer their chocolate that way.
Of course, while chocolate certainly revives many of us when we feel mostly dead, no one has found a way to make a pill as powerful as Miracle Max’s. But people are trying; chocolate is being used more and more to deliver benefits consumers seek from simple protein to calcium to probiotics/prebiotics. Consumer interest in this “functional chocolate,” which is enhanced with vitamins, compounds, and other ingredients or chemicals, is strong but remains off the radar for most in the fine flavor world for one reason: flavor.
“If you really want to know what everybody wants, it’s the same flavor profile with less calories. And we are studying that,” says Richard Callebaut. “But it is essential that it tastes good. People will not sacrifice taste to have less calories but if we could have less calories with the same good taste than that would be huge.” Angelo Agostoni, president of ICAM, would concur. He finds functional chocolate interesting but as long as it is “designed and purchased only because it’s good for you, it’s a short-lived product.”
So is it possible to make a chocolate that is highly functional and delicious? “That is the challenge and the question,” says Angelo. “But chocolate is mainly pleasure. If we want something good for us, take a pill or some medicine but not good chocolate.” On the other side of the world from ICAM in Australia, Michelle Morgan of Zokoko echoes Angelo’s thoughts. She says functional chocolate was on everyone’s radar a few years ago in Australia but she did not—and still does not—see it fitting with her brand. “If I want to add natural flavorings to a bonbon, I can,” she explains. “I’m not doing anything for health reasons, and I will never put on the box some kind of health claim. I am a believer that if I want more antioxidants I should be eating more fruits and veggies. Just have a healthier diet and then indulge in a piece of amazing chocolate.”
Roger von Rotz of von Rotz Patisseries in Switzerland calls functional chocolate and all experiments on chocolate to make it anything but great tasting “pseudo products that do not have anything to do with chocolate.” That’s exactly why Gary Guittard doesn’t see functional chocolate going very far in the flavor world, though he has had inquiries. “As far as chocolate with probiotics or vitamins, that’s trying to put chocolate into an arena where I just don’t know that most fine flavor people are willing to take it. We have had some customers who wanted to make a calcium-type product for women. But to deliver that in a large-scale way, you have distribution issues—plus, chocolate melts. There are far better ways to take supplements than in chocolate. Unless that particular supplement enhances the flavor and makes chocolate taste better, just like with ginger, then I don’t think it is going to work.”
“But,” Gary pauses and smiles, “maybe if you put Viagra in it or something, it would work.” (Whether Pfizer is working on that or not we could not confirm.)
Pierre Hermé sums up the feelings of most people in the fine flavor industry when it comes to functional chocolate: Pleasure must be the point of savoring fine flavor chocolate. “When I create a product, my only focus is pleasure, my pleasure, the pleasure of my customers.” He says, “If by accident, some of the ingredients in my recipe are ‘functional,’ then it’s great but I do not integrate them at all in the creative process.”
The problem is that with functional chocolate, form is the first criteria of choice, not flavor, pleasure, the creative process, or even quality. And perhaps no form of chocolate stirs more emotions than raw chocolate.
Like all raw food, raw chocolate has its supporters and critics, but perhaps because it is chocolate, passions on both sides run hot. Raw food eaters are thrilled to have chocolate to enjoy and tout the holistic benefits and high nutrient and antioxidant value of raw cacao. They see it as more nutritional than traditional chocolate and believe that the rawness brings out the natural qualities of the fruit. Meanwhile, critics dismiss it as a fad or, as Patrick Roger says, a “California thing.” (Raw food is most commonly associated with the western United States, but there are now more than a dozen raw chocolate companies on the east coast of the United States alone.) Some question whether raw chocolate is even raw, calling it a “lie” based on a belief that the beans have been fermented and dried and are merely unroasted and unprocessed. (In all fairness, the raw chocolate manufacturers we spoke to also believe that some raw chocolate is indeed not raw and feel just as annoyed as the critics about this packaging deception. Moreover, a small number of manufacturers are being transparent about this, producing chocolate that is labeled unroasted or “virgin” but not raw.)
But what the critics mostly question is raw chocolate’s safety. Raw food proponents believe cooking food at high temperatures diminishes its nutrients, and basic science is on their side: heating fresh food can destroy some nutritional content. That’s why the maximum heat allowed for cooking by any branch of the raw food movement is 118 degrees Fahrenheit, well below the higher heats required for conventional drying, roasting, and conching cocoa beans. Traditional fermentation alone can reach heats of 125 degrees Fahrenheit, so raw chocolate must not be fermented and processed conventionally, which is what has its critics concerned.
For their part, raw supporters do not dispute that unconventionally fermented and unroasted cacao can host bacteria, fungi, and yeasts indigenous to the tropics, and they do see traditional fermentation and drying as natural processes but ones that nonetheless reduce nutritional value. And ultimately, raw manufacturers also claim that general safety concerns are unfounded; their kill steps that compensate for lower-temperature processing eliminate the same bacteria, fungi, and yeasts as the conventional methods. In truth, there are no regulations in place to prove otherwise; no government requires any chocolate manufacturer to follow specific chocolate safety standards. But still raw chocolate raises concerns for the future, particularly among the most established chocolate manufacturers. For instance, Richard Callebaut of Barry Callebaut would not be surprised if the FDA in the United States issued some kind of warning about salmonella in raw chocolate in the near future as it did years ago with raw or undercooked eggs.
In fact, off the record, what the most vehement critics of raw chocolate worry most about is that raw chocolate may actually kill someone and, in turn, discredit the industry. If an outbreak of a food-borne illness related to raw chocolate were to happen, the reaction against chocolate in general could cost farmers and manufacturers their livelihoods. Critics point to the E. coli outbreak traced to organic spinach and the listeria outbreak from cantaloupe in the United States and the impact they had on those industries. Illnesses have so far been rare in chocolate, but when a Hershey’s plant in Canada was shut down in 2006 because of salmonella—an outbreak eventually tied to soy lecithin, not the cocoa products—there were reverberations throughout the industry. An outbreak at a small bean-to-bar manufacturer—raw or otherwise—could, as David Castellan of Soma states, “ruin it for everyone.”
To raw manufacturers and their proponents, this is pure hyperbole: Any food, and thus any chocolate, not just raw chocolate, can have safety issues. But unless any steps are taken, concerns about safety with raw chocolate will remain a war of words with raw chocolate manufacturers and consumers standing by their processes and critics continuing to question whether raw chocolate is safe at all—especially without the widespread testing that most traditional chocolate companies have in place. A company as big as Mars may have four levels of validation to ensure that no bacteria survives the processing, and even many of the smallest fine flavor manufacturers send their fully heated cooked chocolate out for safety analysis. Many raw manufacturers do, too, but not enough to allay the concerns of some like Gary Guittard, who notes, “Chocolate comes from the jungle. It is left out in the open. It is susceptible to birds. Raw is taking a big chance in regard to some of those issues. Some people are using the whole bean, shell and all, and I think there are real dangers in doing that. And I think you might have some rheology issues with raw chocolate because there’s a lot of moisture in it. Suffice it to say we have some real issues with raw. There are things that can be done that can mitigate some of this of course, but I am not sure they are being done.”
The reality is there is only one way for raw chocolate to be guaranteed safe from the ground up: complete transparency of the entire process from tree to shipping to bar, and 100 percent quality control throughout that chain—something that is difficult even for traditional direct-trade manufacturers at origin. That’s why fine flavor manufacturers like Art Pollard of Amano will not manufacture raw chocolate. Simply put, they do not believe it can be safely manufactured. “I think there is a spot for raw chocolate,” says Art. “But I think it’s best left to the homemade people.”
Joe Whinney of Theo Chocolate concurs but sees value on the nutritional side. He loves raw food and thinks raw chocolate is interesting and can have merit: “My grandmother would boil cabbage until it was white—I know that it is true the more that you cook something the more nutritional value is lost. So I think what consumers are asking for is something more nutritious.” Still, Theo Chocolate in Seattle, Washington—a seemingly ideal market to launch a raw bar—has not gone in that direction. “I’m skeptical of the set standard that you don’t go over 120 degrees when it comes to chocolate,” Joe continues. “That’s really hard to do in processing a good chocolate regardless of the nutritional value you lose. What I would like to see is a little bit more intelligence and a little less blunt label of ‘raw.’ Let’s look at what the nutritional value is and how we measure that against the processes we use. I think this may get more refined as the raw chocolate movement gets larger.”
But even as safety concerns are being addressed, the biggest problem with raw chocolate for many fine flavor manufacturers is that they just do not like the taste of it. Michael Recchiuti recalls tasting a line of raw chocolates and thinking some of them were kind of cool. But, he adds, they had “a lot of tannins and a lot of acid and they were really funky. So I asked the manufacturer, ‘How can you make that part better?’ And he said. ‘Can you do that with raw chocolate?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’”
That unknown is why Gary Guittard echoes Michael when he says, “For me it comes down to flavor and is the flavor there? If it tasted really, really good I would probably be more concerned about it for our business. You can intellectualize all you want about nutrition but where the rubber meets the road is: how does it taste?” David Castellan of Soma agrees: “People see ‘raw chocolate’ and they think it is better for them. There’s a whole world of people who are interested in that sort of thing. All the people who like raw chocolate go to farmers’ markets and health stores to get it and think it is really good and that is how chocolate is supposed to taste. But it’s this terrible, terrible- tasting product with no roasting involved. Meanwhile, here I am roasting and spending all sorts of money on roasting equipment.”
Of course, David admits, the people buying raw chocolate are not necessarily the people who would want to buy a bar of Chuao. “They have a different idea of what they want to eat,” he says. “They aren’t interested in chocolate in the same way that I am. At the same time, it would be better if people understood the process a little bit more. I’d like to explain to people who like raw chocolate what happens during the roasting in the complexities and nuances that they’re missing.” In fact, one of Soma’s most popular items, called Old School, often gets confused with raw chocolate. “We take the nibs and we just grind them in the melanger with sugar; that makes a paste that is quite crumbly and not refined it all. There is no refining or conching, but we do roast it. So some people look at that and think it must compare to raw but it is really just an unrefined chocolate.”
Yes, raw chocolate is even more unrefined than that “Old School” creation, but an increasing number of raw manufacturers are working hard to challenge and change these absolute perceptions of raw. Vanessa Barg of Gnosis Chocolate in New York City knows raw chocolate is and can be so much more. She appreciates that many people in the fine flavor chocolate business looking at raw chocolate from the outside in still think like David and the others, but to her and a growing number of manufacturers what is really “old school” is what and where raw chocolate was five years ago and thinking nothing has changed.
“The biggest misconception of raw chocolate is that things are the same as they were when it first started. The word ‘raw’ calls to mind something that is not elegant—something that is just thrown together. Maybe because a few years ago that was true,” Vanessa says. “But raw has evolved just like the industry as a whole has evolved. It has tapped into this entrepreneurial spirit that has drawn so many wonderful people to chocolate. Raw is a play on process and it is exciting to play with flavor and the different possibilities within fermentation and roasting. It may be a simple product by name but the work that goes into making great raw chocolate is just as complex as making any great chocolate. Raw may be unrefined but it can still be elegant—and delicious.”
When Gnosis started in 2008, this declaration would have been impossible; it was the only raw chocolate company Vanessa knew about and she wasn’t far from wrong. That did not last long—raw manufacturers and raw chocolate products started to appear widely within two years—yet few raw manufacturers were taking the path she chose, namely to explore the broader world of chocolate and flavor in order to produce a flavorful raw chocolate. With a background in health and nutrition, Vanessa believed in the benefits of raw foods, but recalling her passion for the culinary arts, she found the idea of food without flavor appalling. Yet there was not much to work with when she launched: There were only two sources of raw liquor and few exploring the possibilities of doing more with flavor. So she did. Within a year of opening Gnosis, she had started attending Fine Chocolate Industry Association meetings (eventually becoming a Founding Circle member of its Heirloom Cacao Preservation Initiative). She even went to work with François Pralus in France, who, despite not quite understanding what raw was all about, welcomed her, improved her appreciation of fine flavor chocolate as a whole, and helped her develop a raw liquor from Madagascar beans.
No one else was doing all that in 2009—no one else in raw chocolate, at least. It was all about raw first then, and Vanessa acknowledges that this continues to contribute to the lingering perception of raw as flavorless. “I’ll never forget a few years ago when a company called and wanted to buy some liquor from me,” Vanessa recalls. “I listed all the liquors I had including the Madagascar from Pralus. I asked him what flavor he wanted and he said he did not care what it tasted like or if it was truly raw. He just wanted to make raw chocolate.” Sigh.
Today, flavor is a growing part of the raw equation—a big and quick step for a form of chocolate that has been around for less than a decade. Gnosis is hardly the only raw chocolate member of the Fine Chocolate Industry Association or the only raw chocolate manufacturer being transparent about its processes and exercising the same strong, if not stronger, safety protocols as traditional chocolate manufacturers. Like Gnosis, these raw manufacturers tout not only the health and nutritional benefits of their chocolate but also the same things about their chocolate that fine flavor manufacturers do: origin, direct sourcing, quality beans, integrity, and more.
Gnosis and others may face an uphill battle with some critics, but several fine flavor manufacturers have responded to Vanessa Barg and provided her with lots of help and advice, and worked with her to create the cocoa products she needs to make great raw chocolate, including the late Mott Green at Grenada Chocolate and Frederick Schilling at Big Tree Farms. Others in the greater fine flavor industry—notably those who manufacture at origin—have responded to the increasing demand for raw chocolate, relishing the challenge to get rid of the bitterness and acidity of raw beans and still gain flavor without the heat of traditional processes. Pacari in Ecuador has and continues to produce raw chocolate that is well received by a wide audience. Pacari can also put some additional safety guarantees in place as it controls the entire process at origin.
But no other fine flavor manufacturer has ventured into raw with the focus, dedication, and eye to the future as Big Tree Farms in Bali. Before it opened its landmark bean-to-bar bamboo chocolate factory in Southeast Asia in 2011, Big Tree Farms had already turned to raw from a value-added perspective. “Obviously, the more you process a product, the more value there is to it,” says Big Tree Farms partner Frederick Schilling. “We started by doing some powder and butter pressing and found the niche that would maximize our efforts: the raw food market. We became pioneers for a cold-process powder and butter. By doing it in a cold-process manner, we preserve a much higher nutrient content. And we can’t produce enough to meet demand.”
When its bamboo factory was up and running, the first bar Big Tree produced was a cold-processed, unroasted raw chocolate sweetened with the company’s coconut sugar. “It is so good,” says Frederick. “Look, I’m a chocolate snob. I admit it. Most of the chocolates on the market I cannot eat. In fact, I’m kind of bored with chocolate, to be honest with you, and that’s why I had to do something new. But what is great about the stuff we’re making is that it is not your quintessential chocolate flavor. There is a whole different flavor—a very warm flavor, a very soothing flavor . . . very different. I love it.”
Vanessa Barg of Gnosis would agree, of course, and her goal for the future of raw chocolate is no different from Frederick’s and indeed all the fine flavor manufacturers we spoke to: maintain her company’s integrity, educate consumers about world of fine flavor, and build the market for fine flavor chocolate as a whole. Her love for raw chocolate may remain exceptional in the near future. Certainly more consumers and manufacturers will unite behind David Castellan’s sentiment that “people have been using fire since man has been around so I don’t know why we need to stop now.” But Gnosis is expanding to meet demand and grow its product line and flavor profile. Hundreds of stores devote considerable shelf space to her chocolate from the obvious candidates (Whole Foods and health and nutrition stores) to the surprising (Hy-Vee grocery stores in the Midwestern United States). The bars sell for fine flavor prices too: $6.99 each. Simply put, raw chocolate is evolving in many ways, and while it will always be a niche in fine flavor chocolate and the industry as a whole, the promise is there and it shows no signs of slowing down.
But while Vanessa and others are making a fine and flavorful future for raw, organic chocolate, neither she nor Frederick Schilling’s cold process—not even David Castellan’s proper fire—could raise the flavor bar for many certified organic beans.
Most fine flavor manufacturers have nothing against organic beans in principle. Organic certification is a less tangled web than fair trade: The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) provides a market guarantee for integrity of all organic claims, and the Organic Guarantee System (OGS) unites the organic world through a common system of standards, verification, and market identity. Now that the United States and European Union organic standards are reciprocal, organic certification is well on its way to a more universal meaning on millions of packages worldwide. There are some problems on the ground—for example, organic certificates can sometimes be “bought” in corrupted countries. But overall there is less controversy surrounding organic certification. The certification is more transparent than fair trade and it is good for the environment.
Despite all this, it is almost impossible to get a clear grasp on just how much organic cocoa is out there. By most counts, though, it still commands a very small share of the total cocoa market—less than .5 percent of total production according to the ICCO. The Organic Monitor research study commissioned by Fairtrade International estimated that the organic cacao market was only expected to grow 2 to 5 percent, with the major importers in North America and Europe, like United Cocoa Processor, Dagoba Chocolate (a division of Hershey’s), Pronatec, and Barry Callebaut, accounting for most of the purchasing.
The problem is not demand then, but supply, especially the supply of organic fine flavor beans. This might sound strange given that more than 80 percent of certified-organic cocoa comes from Latin America, Madagascar, and Tanzania—regions known or developing a reputation for fine flavor. So why is supply, particularly fine flavor supply, not growing in line with consumer demand? The answers are—as usual when it comes to chocolate—a little messy, but for most people it comes down to two familiar words: farmers and flavor.
Like fair trade-certified beans, farmers are not paid much of a premium for organic beans—about 10 to 15 percent on average, though the highest quality can command up to 50 percent for their fine flavor profile, according to Curtis Vreeland, researcher for Vreeland & Associates. And then the question is, like premiums paid for fair trade beans, how much of that reaches the farmer? “The problem is this theory that the consumer pays a premium for organic and that somehow trickles down to the farmers and their workers,” says George Soriano of Sibö Chocolates in Costa Rica. “But we know that works in theory, not in practice. It takes a lot of effort to produce organic on a larger scale. Farmers have to figure out what kind of fertilizers they can use and then source them and bring them to the farm. That’s expensive.”
Expensive not only in terms of certification costs but also time and immediate impact on those farmers’ livelihoods. To get organic certification, farmers must stop growing their cacao using any inorganic pesticides and fertilizers for three years, complying with a complex set of standards (check out the USDA website to get a sense of the head-spinning conditions). Then they must complete a massive amount of paperwork. Only then can they pay for the privilege of certification, which can run more than $10,000 per year. In addition, as reported by ConfectionaryNews.com, there is the growing problem that more than half of the organic cocoa grown on certified farms may be sold as conventional cocoa and not at a premium. “Double certification” on farms cannot alone explain the disparity: “Big names in the chocolate industry have made honorable commitments to buy certified cocoa by 2020, but right now many firms are ducking out of paying premiums at the expense of cocoa farmers, some of the poorest people on the planet. Unless the industry steps up to buy the cocoa at a certified premium, farmers will be discouraged to invest in good farming practices to boost yields—and that’s bad news for the quality and global supply.”
With small family farms growing more than 90 percent of the cacao in the world, the reality is that most farmers cannot afford the process of organic certification anyway, and unlike fair trade there is less support from NGOs and other groups to help farmers get it. It should not be surprising then that some farmers who choose to grow cacao at all, choose not to certify. In the end, though, most small cacao farmers are doing little environmental damage because they can’t afford the fertilizers and pesticides even if they want to use them. Jorge Redmond of Chocolates El Rey speaks for many in the industry when he says: “In essence all cacao in Venezuela is organic because the growers cannot afford the chemicals.” Like many manufacturers, El Rey wants to create more organic products, but for now they simply try to educate consumers that most of their cacao is what some in the industry call “de facto organic.”
But even if more farms do get organic certification and supply increases in the future, consumers should not expect a corresponding amount of organic fine flavor chocolate to hit the shelves. One might think organic chocolate would look and taste the same as or even better than conventional chocolate, but simply put, like fair trade, organic certification has nothing to do with flavor: Organic does not mean better; it just means organic.
Richard Callebaut calls this perceived connection to quality and flavor a “big misunderstanding” among consumers when it comes to certification. Mark Adriaenssens, Barry Callebaut’s head of R&D in the Americas, builds on Richard’s response to explain one reason most certifications don’t work when it comes to flavor and cacao: The certifiers don’t come from the world of cocoa and their standards don’t reflect the complexity of how it is produced. “Rainforest Alliance comes from banana plantations. UTZ and fair trade come from coffee. And we struggle to translate this to cacao farmers,” says Mark. “Small cocoa farmers are not comparable to big banana plantations. Look at organic cacao. We know that very few pesticides are used on these farms. So does organic add the value? Not if there is no quality behind it and nothing in certification is about a better flavor or better quality cacao. And organic is often just not good. We had to refuse half the lots when we first started with organic cocoa beans. It was not a sustainable situation. We had to train organic farmers how to do good fermentation and drying. It is better now. We know we can do better.”
As a result, Barry Callebaut is developing its own programs in places like Tanzania for organic production, in which it controls the entire process. Of course, a multinational manufacturer like Barry Callebaut has the money and people to invest in and support those large-scale organic endeavors. No wonder most certified organic farms, fine flavor or otherwise, are the large farms and plantations that make up the smallest part of the cacao industry. Small farms that are certified organic are often part of cooperatives, and as previously discussed, many of those cooperatives often mix beans and/or ferment them poorly, producing a poor-quality product.
“We often can’t get the right flavor from some of the specialty certified beans,” says Gary Guittard, who wants to do more organic blends. “It is limiting in terms of the flavor that we can deliver with it because you don’t have a lot of the types that are attainable and organic.” Frank Homann of Xoco in Honduras calls organic “desirable from a policy standpoint” but immediately states, “Organic cocoa is not the same as fine or flavor cocoa.” Xoco is supporting organic growing methods and starting a certification program for its growers, but states “there still isn’t evidence between flavor and the growing inputs.”
Angelo Agostoni of ICAM in Italy sums it up most succinctly for those in the fine flavor world: “Yes, organic. Yes, fair trade. But first and foremost good chocolate.”
In coffee, the rise of fair trade and organic certifications have gradually improved quality and flavor of the beans over the course of a generation, largely because of the technical support offered to growers from the industry. This included “cupping” programs that introduced farmers to making coffee from their beans and understanding how what they did on the farm level affected the flavor of those beans, which is exactly where many bean-to-bar makers have just arrived in the world of cacao and are pushing to move faster for the future. In fact, the difficulty in getting good quality organic beans was one of the main reasons TCHO in Berkeley, California started its TCHOSource program. TCHO knew it couldn’t be an organic chocolate company that wanted to change the world and do good by promising a high-quality product without a high-quality, consistent cacao. That’s why as it invested in the TCHOSource program to engage deeply with farmers about flavor and help them understand that the highest value of their organic product is in its flavor not how many kilos it is.
But even with quality improving on the ground, TCHO has deeper concerns about organic in the future beyond quality: “If organic is not done responsibly then it can be less of a good thing than the word ‘organic’ implies,” says Brad Kintzer, Chief Chocolate Maker at TCHO. “We need to look at everything holistically at the same time that we look at quality and flavor. For example, we are creating systems for composting on organic farms to reduce waste and put it back in nutrient deprived soils. If a farmer growing organically does not use a smart composting system to compensate for the fertilizers they can no longer use, they are going to see a reduction in their yields. If they are not using some kind of creative pest management program, they are going to see reduction in their yields. If the yields drop, it is not only a risk that they will stop growing organically but it can also lead to farmers clearing valuable forests to grow more crops or cattle to make up the difference. At the end of the day, this might be worse for the environment than careful use of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides. The key is for all farmers to have access to sound technical advice and understand how flavor and value go hand-in-hand.”
These are just some of the reasons manufacturers, even if they grow or use organic beans, find the whole organic movement sort of overblown.
Patrick Roger calls organic “a complete joke,” and although he buys organic and fair trade products, he does not advertise this fact because there are just too many certifications to keep track of, and because of just how bad some of it tastes, which would actually turn off his customers. “Today, especially in Paris, people are willing to pay more to have organic . . . because very often, it is the Parisians who have the notion of the beautiful and the good. But not long ago, I bought a piece of organic chocolate, and it was disgusting,” Patrick says. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that all organic chocolate is gross. But the label in my shop for my customers means maybe two or three more people will buy the chocolates. It has little value to me.”
“Organic used to mean that there was a farmer behind it who cared,” said Mott Green of Grenada Chocolate in 2012 (Grenada is a 100 percent certified-organic cooperative). “Now it means what the US government or the European Union says it is. Only the large industrial factory farms are the ones who can easily afford and complete the level of paperwork required to certify organic or anything else.” Felix Inderbitzin, Felchlin’s cacao sourcer, feels the same way: “Every big company is now searching for a certification of some kind. For a small company like Felchlin, or even smaller manufacturers, it’s complicated to get all the certificates. There are hundreds of them. Working to get the right maintenance on the trees and the right plan in place in the fields and making sure everything is protected... that’s more or less how we are behind the sustainability of cocoa and how we help the farmers.”
As Gail Ambrosius, of Gail Ambrosius Chocolatier, states, “I believe Fair Trade and Organic are great in theory. However, Fair Trade certification is costly and doesn’t always offer the farmers that much more in terms of payment for their beans. Organic certified chocolate is not a guarantee of quality or fine flavor, I would rather use a fine flavored chocolate that doesn’t have paperwork to back it up than a chocolate that does have paperwork but does not taste great.”
Todd Masonis of Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco, thinks quality outweighs certifications. “Third party certifications allow farmers to attach a premium to the price of their cacao if it meets those certification standards, but none of those standards include a stipulation for quality. At the end of the day, the price still fluctuates with the market price—even with a premium attached—and farmers are left without an incentive to produce better cacao. We believe that improving quality is a more sustainable means of increasing the price that producers can charge for their product, and how effectively they can drive more capital into their lives, farms, and community. That’s why we set our own quality standards and work with smallholder producers, cooperatives, and companies to meet them. We pay as much as two times the world market price (and sometimes more) for the beans, providing a premium between seven and seventeen times greater than the Fairtrade standard of $200 per tonne.”
Truth is, Mott, and Felix are all right: No certification is going to do more for farmers than increasing yield and helping them get double the world market price for great beans, grown and processed well. If those beans are organic, the premiums could be quite high, but for now those fine flavor beans remain a distinct minority when it comes to organic.
But things are improving. Angelo Agostoni is pleased that the yield and quality of the organic beans ICAM uses have increased steadily. “In the early days,” he says, “quality was not the most important thing, so the customer would buy because it was organic and supposedly good for the environment or growers. Quality has now matched the claims. But I am not one of the ideologues. I don’t believe that if you live on organic food you will live forever or solve the world’s problems. But organic farming has proven to give very good results. Our experience is that well-managed organic plantations—just because the organic certifications require the farmer to do more work on the plantations—may result in better yields than conventional plantations that are treated with pesticides or standard conventional treatment.” Angelo cites The Green Cane sugar cane project, which in its thirty-year history in organic farming has improved yields and financial return on its sugar cane worldwide for farmers, as an example of how this might work long-term in cacao.
Short-term, this is certainly happening at certified organic cacao processors and manufacturers who work at origin like Grenada Chocolate and Mindo Chocolate in Ecuador. For Grenada Chocolate, the organic point of difference will always be connected to what the late Mott Green wanted his cooperative to be: “the first ‘organic gastronomic’ manufacturer.” As Mott told us: “We’ve come to a place in Grenada where we have the best cocoa in the world and certified it. If we have one special niche, it would be our ethical side and this very pure alternative to all the bogus fair trade-certified stuff. People can come right here and talk to a farmer and see for themselves. We have that kind of transparency.”
Santiago Peralta, whose Pacari Chocolate in Ecuador has long been certified organic (as well as kosher), has gone beyond organic and certified as biodynamic in 2012 through Demeter International—a process that took five years to complete. Biodynamic agriculture takes sustainability and organic farming and manufacturing at origin to another level by considering the farm holistically from soil to plants to insects and animals and is widely regarded as the highest grade of organic farming in the world. Santiago also sees it benefitting farmers in the long run, even if buyers for their beans change, and hopes that this fact and his success will help other chocolate manufacturers see biodynamic agriculture as worth the extra time, effort, and cost: “The nice thing about being biodynamic is we have seen productivity go up. It is very precise and the results command a price and deliver quality. This is already happening in wine. The most expensive wine in the world [Romanée-Conti in France] is biodynamic and many of the top-rated wines are biodynamic. Because it is not just environmental, it affects the flavor. After five years, this is really working. I can show it. I know it is not easy to become biodynamic and even harder to be certified, but I hope people keep going in that direction, especially if it helps people understand why they should pay more for their chocolate and help the farmers.”
But even as organic quality improves and, as Santiago hopes, biodynamic certifications grow in number, it does not mean manufacturers and chocolatiers will be able to or want to create the 100 percent organic chocolate bars and bonbons that consumers demand—even those who work at origin. That’s often impossible and not even desirable when you consider the other inputs. George Soriano and Julio Fernandez of Sibö Chocolates in Costa Rica source chocolate from FINMAC but must deal with the fact that there is no certified organic milk in Costa Rica; they would need to import that. They prefer to support the local economy and use Costa Rican milk instead.
Madécasse Chocolate, which manufactures in Madagascar, is facing the same dilemma as it goes for organic certification at farm level since, no matter how much organic cacao they can get, no certified organic sugar is available in Madagascar. As a result, when it comes to the question of organic, Madécasse does as much as it can in the short-term and targets a more ideal scenario for the future. Short-term, Madécasse has sponsored the organic certification of all cocoa farmer partners by working with the Ecocert program. Long-term, the goal is to have completely certified chocolate bars with local organic sugar and other ingredients by partnering, for example, with a local sugar supplier to obtain organic certification and another to make cocoa butter from organic cocoa beans, thus keeping as much production value as possible in Madagascar. “We strongly believe in organic farming and are proud to have helped the cocoa farmers achieve this milestone,” Madécasse co-founder Brett Beach says. “As for other ingredients, our first goal is always to look at sourcing in Madagascar. We’d really like to create organic certified supply chains wherever possible and not source elsewhere. It’s frustrating at times because we already know that the cultivation of most crops in Madagascar takes place in organic conditions; it’s just not certified. But creating local supply chains takes time, investment, and lots of patience. Long-term change doesn’t happen overnight and one hard lesson we’ve learned as a small but ambitious company is that we can’t tackle all projects at once.”
Manufacturers not at origin, like ICAM, can also be restricted in their development of new products because of the limited availability anywhere of quality certified- organic and fair trade products. For example, ICAM developed dark chocolate bars with dried sour cherries for a private label, what Angelo calls “a perfect marriage of flavors,” and hoped to develop more products like it. But there were only two sources of organic certified cherries worldwide with the flavor profile the company needed. “In the end,” Angelo says. “We were forced to buy an X-ray machine, as the quality control for foreign bodies was horrible.” As a result, ICAM has switched its focus to developing tasting squares and Neapolitans as opposed to filled products.
All this messiness begs the question: How will consumers understand this, when consumers usually follow the herd when it comes to certifications? The answer is once again education—helping consumers understand that they are going to have to engage the companies that market products and know what their values are before they dismiss them for not having a stamp on their wrapper.
In 2003, David Castellan and Cynthia Leung of Soma couldn’t find brokers to sell them fair trade and organic beans. Now their inbox is filled with people pushing certified beans, and others constantly send samples. Ironically, after learning more about the fair trade and organic systems, they have less interest in those kinds of beans for the future and takes the time to address any consumer concerns, not through their website, but directly one-on-one. “Our solution is basically to put as much info on the label as possible. Let’s say I want to make a Haitian and Madagascar blend. The Madagascar is going to be organic and the Haitian is not. That leaves me in a weird place with those consumers because I can’t call it an organic bar but a lot of it is organic, including the sugar. That’s going to be confusing to those consumers who want all organic, so you’re going to have to let them decide. And education is the best way.”
In fact, consumers may already be getting there. Anne Weyns of Artisan du Chocolat says her customers in England are starting to view all certifications with more “realism.” As a result, she has actually seen demand for organic decline, not just because of the premium price it commands. She thinks the future lies in issues of sustainability and in more cocoa-growing countries processing beans and capturing a higher proportion of the value chain. This is even true in less-developed markets. George Soriano of Sibö reports an undercurrent among younger consumers in Costa Rica, especially those who work in the business world, who understand that part of the story and who have now become anti-organic and anti-certification. “They don’t want to believe it. They don’t want to support it,” says George. “They are very conscious of greenwashing in general and organic greenwashing specifically, and say they would prefer not to even worry about organic—that it doesn’t add any value to them at all. What is important to them is the flavor.”
In Australia, where Rainforest Alliance, fair trade, and organic products are all very popular, Michelle Morgan of Zokoko sees the same thing happening. She does not make an organic chocolate and thinks people are coming around to understanding why: organic chocolate doesn’t taste that good despite what they’ve heard. “Consumers are starting to ask questions, and if I can answer them and they are satisfied that what we are doing is okay by their standards, we can go beyond certifications. That’s why raising awareness is key. Because it comes down to flavor and what is certified is not necessarily good, I cannot support and I cannot be part of that system. I am not just going to go out and buy a bean because it has got that sticker on it. In the end, I need beans that have been cared for properly. I need to know that the growers are getting fair return. I have to sell a chocolate that I am happy with from go to whoa.”
“Go to whoa” is the wonderful Australian expression for beginning to end—one that is particularly appropriate for where we are both in this part of our journey and the book as a whole. And while the consumer has dictated a lot of what has been covered in this part, the next part is where the consumers’ pleasure remains paramount to the fine flavor industry even as their likes and requests do not. Adapting to trends and cultures is one thing, but fine flavor manufacturers and chocolatiers see themselves as the driving forces now and into the future. Pierre Hermé says it as straightforwardly as anyone: “I do not follow what my customers like or ask for. My own desires and inspiration shape my range of products.”
Hermé’s Parisian counterpart, Patrick Roger, would agree but clarifies the relationship further: “In my shop, the primary client is me. I am the one who must guarantee the quality of the work. I dictate the taste of the chocolate, not the clients. However, it is the clients who inspire me. It is a love story.”