But, of course, the results are decidedly fine.
Michael Recchiuti’s PEPs, or Peppermint Thins, might be shaped a bit like Junior Mints and come in a green and white box, but his version features a fondant of organic Willamette Valley peppermint and a shell of his 64% custom-blended semisweet chocolate. Anne Weyns is not putting popping candies in her palets d’or but coats the popping candies in chocolate and then uses them as the base of her Space Dust UFOs—chocolate molded in the shape of a UFO that melts and explodes the moment you put it in your mouth. And the rochers Patrick Roger offers? They do come in milk chocolate, have a somewhat grainy praline that includes hazelnuts, and feature a rough exterior similar to the gold foil-wrapped Ferrero Rochers from Italy (rocher is French for rock, and not an unfamiliar term in chocolate making). But no one could mistake Patrick’s cube-shaped rochers for the other in a look or taste test.
So why these products, and why place them at the start of this final part of our fine flavor journey? Are we sending a message about the future? “Watch out, Cadbury, and heads up, Hershey’s, the chocolatiers are coming—upscale is going down market!” Hardly. But it cannot be too surprising that creations like fine flavor Junior Mints, popping UFOs, and ritzy rochers are top of mind for some chocolatiers when contemplating the future. The worldwide chocolate market may continue to grow in spite of global economic turbulence, but times are still tough, and, especially in major chocolate-consuming regions like Western Europe and the United States, every segment of the market is looking to create deeper connections to its customers—to become part of everyday life, not an occasional indulgence. As the Wall Street Journal reported in “Breeding a Nation of Chocoholics,” middle-of-the-road multinational bonbon brands like Godiva are already aggressively adapting, creating new packaging such as individually wrapped bite-size pieces, and pushing hard into supermarkets in order to make their chocolates everyday snacks.
For the fine flavor chocolate industry, this is good news; with broader exposure to more midmarket brands like Godiva, Lindt, and Ghirardelli, consumers will appreciate a greater range of chocolate and be educated up one level from candy.
And let’s face it, a little playfulness and comforting familiarity go a long way to welcome new customers, remind current ones to have some fun, and delight everyone. Anne certainly sees her UFOs, gold-wrapped coins, and similar products in her store as a blow against the “snobbism” that pervades some of her fine flavor chocolatier world. Michael freely calls himself a “Junior Mint freak” and admits he created his PEPs, as well as his upscale peanut butter cups and s’mores, because he loves the junk food and candy he grew up with. And certainly Patrick Roger is no stranger to using chocolate as vehicle for both playful performance art and the preservation of the past. Look at the giant endangered species sculptures created out of chocolate that have decorated his shop windows: penguins, polar bears, elephants, and gorillas, oh my.
After a devastating fire in 2015, we haven’t had a chance to visit with Patrick at work in his factory – we have high hopes for him that the renovation is complete by 2017. In spring 2014 on our last visit, we found Patrick busy hand-carving reclining lions from a solid bar of chocolate seven meters long. On a previous visit in 2011, he was carving hippos to replace the gorillas he carved the year before. Those gorillas, hippos, lions, and every creature Patrick carves take almost a year to finish before claiming their place in the windows as literal gateways to his bonbons—a lighthearted and sometimes ferocious welcome with deeper resonance connecting past and future. “My customers always have the impression that when they come to my shops, they are tasting the taste of their childhood,” Patrick says, noting this connection is deliberate and profound and hopefully extends to today’s children as well. “Children eat like us. The mistake is to not give them chocolate to eat. I understand that it is a question of money, but that’s not really the point. My daughters heard music when they were in their mother’s womb to appreciate music at the earliest of ages. Now the taste buds form between zero and five years, right?”
France has a “culture of taste,” Patrick argues—a much deeper cultural connection to flavor than, say, the United States or developing countries. But he knows the world has changed and he sees his chocolates as part of a future that reclaims and preserves that French tradition by understanding the importance of taking a homemade approach. “The goal is to rediscover the excellence of taste again, on a cultural level,” he says. “Look at the cooking that is done today—the premade mixes . . . thirty years ago, premade mixes did not exist here. We mix everything from scratch here and thanks to some of my colleagues and me, we are getting back to this type of cultural taste.”
Like Patrick, Anne Weyns is interested in fine chocolate products that connect not only to childhood but also more broadly to family, flavor, and future—a way to step up to more sophisticated tastes and reach back to happier times. “I don’t think it is just the taste of the children but the taste of the parents,” Anne says. “Most of our customers are adults, but they have kids, and we just did not have a range for children because we didn’t think that parents would actually want that. But the more that we produced products like the UFOs, the more people were really into them. Now, whether people are actually buying them as nostalgic treats for themselves or they are actually giving them to their children I do not know. It could be a bit of both. Still, we just cannot produce enough. It is just something that is a little bit fun and different. People like to be surprised and reminded of when they were growing up.”
But don’t let this aura of childhood innocence fool you. While these products may be playful they can be just as difficult—even more difficult—to create as a traditional bonbon recipe. For example, from creating test batches to ensuring some kind of shelf life without the use of preservatives found in Junior Mints, Michael Recchiuti spent nine months perfecting his PEPs. That Junior Mint may be far removed from Patrick Roger’s “culture of taste,” but Michael sees some similarity in reclaiming the true origins of the candy he loves: “I think the initial take on the Junior Mint and peanut butter cup were pretty damned good. Somebody made it on a small scale and then the big companies just built machinery to make it happen and replaced everything with hydrogenated fats, but they were good ideas.
In fact, Michael could be speaking for many chocolatiers when he talks about the philosophy behind the creation of those PEPs. “Anytime something becomes trendy, I go back,” he continues. “When I got started I was really sort of into the herb and tea infusion and different flavors. And then it got to the point where everybody was just trying to be weirder than the other. And so I just kind of shifted because I thought I don’t really want to be a part of that, and I started making things I like.”
Chasing good ideas, making what they like, and delighting their customers: three things that united every chocolatier we spoke to about his or her current work. Chocolatiers may be in very different parts of the world, sell to different audiences, enjoy different ingredients, and use different origins and custom blends of chocolate, but whether talking about the creative process, customers, packaging, or building a business, they are unified in their passion for delivering quality and flavor, and in the pursuit of ideas on their own terms.
Gail Ambrosius feels that way as well, “I think customers are becoming more adventurous with their preferences. Customers are seeking out higher percentages, asking about new origins, asking where I have traveled to try new chocolates. I think the customers are in tune with food trends such as buying local, knowing the farmers, the same interest holds true for their chocolate. When I develop a new recipe, I always start with my chocolate. I taste and focus on the flavors, textures, the feeling I get. I then taste again and again writing down my flavor notes. Then I think about what would complement these flavors or set them off with contrasting flavors. Then I start experimenting and bring in my staff to taste and critic and start over again.” But she knows the ultimate critics are her customers who make their decision with their wallet.
Not because these chocolatiers want to be stars, though. They just want their chocolates and bonbons (and the experience of eating them) to be the best they can be. We may not know their faces, but their names—usually on the door—and presentations command a premium. They guarantee quality, luxury, and a singular human vision behind every bite. First and foremost, all are deeply connected to education about and the preservation of taste. In this way, they embody the spirit described by Michael Ruhlman in The Making of a Chef: “The chef hadn’t used the potato as a basis for displaying flashy, flamboyant skills but had placed his skills in the service of the potato.” Fine flavor chocolatiers are in the service of the flavor of chocolate and never lose touch with that flavor and all it is capable of conveying.
Of course, most chocolatiers know they need a little flash, flamboyance, and fun to stay motivated and survive. They also know they must balance their artistic and flavorful pursuits with the continued production of the bonbons and other treats their customers expect to find and have grown to love. Whether watching over those creations, traveling the world to discover new pairings, or simply taking their love of Junior Mints to the highest level, fine flavor chocolatiers are all deeply aware of the “stage” they work on and the importance of taste in every performance.
Kate Weiser, Kate Weiser Chocolate, agrees saying “Over the past 4 years I’ve been open, I’ve seen much more adventurous selections happening. 80% of my collection consists of very familiar flavors which are typically the fan favorites, but lately the 20% unconventional flavors have been selling off the charts! As far as developing new products based on that, we are always exploring new way of creating edible works of art for that perfect and unexpected gift. Key Lime Pie and Raspberry are always fan favorites, but our Strawberry Basil and Buttery Popcorn are developing a cult following as well.”
How far he and fine flavor chocolate have come in a generation.
Bart relishes the opportunities to do cooking shows around the world as part of his work as a Belgian Chocolate Ambassador for Barry Callebaut. And he is careful to use the word “cooking” to describe what he does. That’s because Bart knows it is essential for his craft and its future that chocolate be understood and explored as a fresh food connected to and capable of being paired with almost any other food, be it an herb or spice, fruit or vegetable, tea or coffee, heirloom tomato, goat cheese, foie gras . . . Bart has explored all of these combinations and more at his two-decades old shop, De Zwarte Vos, in Deinze, about an hour north of Brussels. But he says his real search for taste and all its future possibilities started when he prepared to teach his first cooking classes years ago.
“I read every cookbook searching for ingredients. I spoke to professors,” Bart says. “I spoke to guys who make spices and herbs and asked for coriander, and when the guy said, ‘What kind of coriander do you want?’ I had no idea what he meant. He said he had more than thirty different corianders. He had 700 different types of pepper. I devoted all my spare time to researching these flavors. Today, all my classes are built around these flavors and how to create nice, balanced chocolates and other dishes with chocolate. That is what we must do for the future. Today, we just eat. We just do, instead of thinking about what we are doing, creating, and eating.”
Bart then explains how he puts together “tasting boxes” of bonbons and other ingredients for classes like the one in Scotland, urging the audience to rethink what they know and explore different possibilities. “What if I say to you, ‘Béarnaise sauce—what is that sauce?’ you answer, ‘it’s creamy with some spice and tarragon.’ Now why not put that in a bonbon where first comes the cream, then the spice, and then the tarragon finishes. That’s how a recipe delights and surprises. But you must be giving them an experience, so I have to think about texture, too. If I give you a chocolate mousse as big as a beer glass, you will take two or three bites and be full. But you’re not full; you’re bored. So what if a few spoonfuls down I put another layer where it’s crunchy? And what if there’s another layer after that? That’s exciting. You want to keep tasting. Not eat, taste.”
If Bart’s passion for taste and craftsmanship sound decidedly chef-like, his confession of where he wants to go next will come as no surprise: He wants to take chocolate beyond the bonbon, cakes, and pastry and open a restaurant—all with chocolate. “I’ll make fish with chocolate. I’ll make cheese with chocolate. I want to take chocolate out of the dessert corner,” Bart says. “When people taste my fish with chocolate they don’t say ‘What is this?’ They say, ‘That is really nice. That is delicious.’ Maybe I give them a dish with smoked trout. What? Why not? Why not connect the flavors? Chocolate can go there. It is a vehicle for more flavors. Chocolate can go with fish, so then put spaghetti in the dessert. Have you ever boiled spaghetti in apple juice? Why not? The spaghetti has no flavor of its own. Spaghetti with the flavor of apples and then cinnamon ice cream on top of it . . . believe me, everybody will understand. Everybody will like it.”
Patrick Roger does. He used a similar pasta analogy when he talked about the form his chocolate takes as the vehicle for taste: “It is like pasta. You have shells, spaghetti, macaroni—it’s the same recipe, but not the same taste.”
Michael Recchiuti explains this expansive versatility further by comparing it to a passion he shares with Bart: drumming. “You sometimes need restraint as a drummer,” Michael says. “You have to hit very lightly in orchestral music, but when you’re playing rock and roll you can kind of just get there and jump in it. I apply the orchestral philosophy to making chocolate. I’m using really good chocolate so I want people to taste it. Maybe if I bought really crappy chocolate and bad beans I would mask it with alcohol and all kinds of crazy flavors. But I’m using good chocolate, so let’s just find great ways to taste it. That’s what Patrick Roger does. His whole style is high-acid great chocolate. Guys like that know how to pay attention to the sensitivity of your chocolates.”
And Michael is helping his customers dial in, too. The possibilities for education on a broader scale are not lost on him. “We can actually make things for people like vertical tastings and walk them through it,” he adds. “We can taste a particular Madagascar chocolate in three different formats but keep all of them true to the chocolate so there’s no disruption. There might even be a sorbet or an ice cream. These kinds of tastings are very effective. People really get it.”
Alexandra Clark of BonBonBon Chocolate is a proponent of offering variety, saying, “It’s all about trust - as our customers have learned to trust our skill and the skills of other artisan chocolatiers, they are more comfortable with the unfamiliar, the fun, the whimsical and weird. Which we love! This is also why we are so dependent on each other - one bad experience at a tiny, artisan shop in Connecticut might mean that that same customer won’t be looking for our craft as a souvenir from Detroit. One of the complements that we are always receiving from customers is that they like our approach because the chocolates are “not too sweet”, this has been a dependable trend that we have been able to continue to build our offerings around.”
Thomas Haas of Thomas Haas Chocolates in Vancouver certainly understands this drive for new and deeper experiences that put flavor before flash. “What I always look for in food is a good experience,” he says. “What I don’t look for is excitement that disappoints me.” And what disappoints Thomas, who gained a rich appreciation for cooking as Daniel Boulud’s pastry chef in New York City and has made chocolates for some of the finest hotels in the world? “I can rarely give my customers the best of the best because the moment it is made, it starts aging,” he answers.
Given that almost all small and craft chocolatiers make their bonbons fresh with cream and other perishable ingredients, their bonbons have shelf lives of about two or three weeks and should be stored in a cool place (but always eaten at room temperature). No wonder Thomas Haas thinks it is harder for most chocolatiers to provide freshness and turnaround than to come up with new recipes. “If you have good ingredients and a recipe that works, and if you’re not out to lunch when you mix it, then you shouldn’t screw it up,” Thomas says. “I know how amazing it is when we make our chocolates today and I can just put them out in the store where there are boxes lined up to be filled, and I know that people are going to buy them and have them that night and it can’t be any better. For me being able to provide that more and more and more consistently would be the goal I would like to achieve over and over.”
Pursuing the ability to preserve this freshness in order to build a bigger customer base in the mass market has Anne Weyns of Artisan du Chocolat chanting “chill, baby, chill” to her local supermarkets. That’s because supermarket candy aisles—where almost all chocolate is found—are hardly cool and their bins are barely covered. Without the preservatives and stabilizers added to most shelf-stable box chocolates, fresh chocolates would go there to die, and there aren’t any alternatives—a fact Anne finds curious: “Most other categories have an alternative premium-equivalent in chilled. Take soups. You still have canned soup but you also have hot soup, frozen soup, and fresh chilled soup in the refrigerated area. Those are sold at a premium. The only two categories that have never done that are boxed chocolates and baby food. Which is strange because you would think those are two things people really care about.”
But Anne thinks that as customers demand fresh alternatives to shelf-stable supermarket chocolates, one of the more interesting future developments will be the movement of boxed chocolates and bonbons in the mass market from their usual shelf space in the candy aisle to the chilled space of desserts. She believes this is now possible because customers in London—and indeed worldwide—continue to be educated about fine flavor chocolate and understand more about chocolate as a food. As a result, they are getting used to the idea that the shelf life should be shorter. “Fifteen years ago in the UK there were not many chocolate shops, so people could not really understand,” says Anne, who along with Paul Young, William Curley, Rococo, and others, ushered in a huge chocolatier quality wave in London. “Now they understand that if they go to a small shop, they get chocolates that are fresh. If they go to a supermarket, they don’t.”
Anne, who has two Artisan du Chocolat shops in London, four in the Middle East and sells through Selfridges and Brown Thomas stores, has already discussed this change with retailers, like Waitrose, in the United Kingdom but there are hurdles both logistical (the stores would need to replace something that is currently refrigerated and selling, add in new refrigerators, or move boxed chocolates next to desserts) and territorial (the chocolate buyer doesn’t buy chilled products and the chilled-products buyer doesn’t have shelf space—and just try to get them to work together). Fresh chocolates almost need to be a new category unto themselves.
Up until now, progress has been slow, especially as the bigger brands with the most marketing money in Europe like Lindt and Godiva are content with their shelf space and placement. Only a few stores in Belgium and France have tried the fresh alternative. “Retailers also worry that people won’t understand what these chocolates are,” Anne adds. “With chilled space being at a premium people generally don’t take a lot of risk... certainly not until there is a more positive economy, as retailers in recession tend to stick to categories already established.”
Nonetheless, Anne believes change is inevitable. “We are still confident it is a natural evolution. It is just a matter of the right time, right people, right circumstances. If supermarkets can have sushi, there is no reason they cannot have boxed chocolates that could last up to a month. I think Waitrose is about to launch a range of truffles made with cream and fresh ingredients that has a shelf life of six weeks, which is much, much less than the usual six months to a year. And we can get around this by offering them seasonal products in mid-November that by end of December will be gone—that have shorter shelf lives of maybe four to six weeks, so not the freshest but still fresh enough.”
“Fresh enough” may work to expand the bonbon market in established flavor-consuming regions like Western Europe, but freshness overall is working for chocolatiers in establishing new markets for the future. In China, “fresh enough” chocolate would be more than most people have ever had access to, let alone appreciated. This is what Laurier Dubeau and his partner Polly Lo faced when they launched La Place Collection in Beijing in 2005. Beijing may be an international city, but it is still what Laurier calls “a big village where people sit in the corner and eat noodles and wonder how come our chocolate is so expensive because I can buy a bowl of noodles for the cost of one piece.” In fact, when La Place opened, its customers couldn’t find any fresh dairy products, so why would they desire something with fresh cream?
But Laurier and Polly still felt freshness would be key in winning over customers. And things did change quickly as customers became very, very curious. Today, Laurier says, “I will tell them I’m doing a chocolate with thyme, banana, and walnut and they act surprised but then try it. And they might like it or not but they will try it.”
What about shelf-stable multinational brands like Nestlé that are in China, or Godiva, with its aggressive Chinese expansion? “We don’t see them as competitors,” says Laurier. “They help create awareness of chocolate. People will buy their chocolate and they will start to enjoy more chocolate so it’s good for everybody. After that they start to compare just like wine. They try the Belgian chocolate companies that are here like Leonidas and Valentino. These are not fine flavor companies, but here they look like premium chocolate. If they like it, they come to us and can compare, and they like ours better and say, ‘Wow, this is really fresh,’ and ask questions. That’s when we can explain to them that it is fresher and that we don’t import it and that the shelf life is shorter and we take care of the chocolate. . . . They are starting to learn more of the difference.”
Freshness is even top of mind for chocolatiers in flavor-growing but less-established flavor-consuming regions like Costa Rica, where George Soriano and Julio Fernandez of Sibö Chocolates see it as a valuable point of difference in educating and establishing their market. “Things don’t move as quickly in Costa Rica,” George says. “We get awards here for being innovative, but Julio and I know that we are just innovative here. People are not really used to eating fresh chocolates and fresh bonbons here. They are used to eating Lindt or a Whitman’s Sampler and throwing away half of them because they don’t like them. Ours are all interesting and different to them.”
Of course, that same freshness also makes Sibö’s bonbons, like many other fine flavor bonbons, unexportable. But George and Julio have turned this into an advantage. By leveraging their local position and tapping into regional tastes by using fresh ingredients that are largely indigenous, familiar, and appealing to Costa Ricans, they are producing chocolates in a way mass-market brands, and even many fine flavor chocolatiers, never could.
“One of the advantages of our chocolate and bonbon business is we are here on the ground at the origin of cacao production. That opens us up to the possibility of working with exceptional cacao produced at a very low volume and also gives us access to a lot of fresh tropical ingredients that we can incorporate into our bonbons and other confections,” George says, pointing out that they work directly with farmers on both coasts and organic spice and fruit producers. “We can work closely with suppliers to help us create different lines of chocolate and involve them in our creative process. We can even go as far as to select genetics on a single farm for a special batch just to see how that turns out without making a great investment. That keeps the business fun and fresh, and tied to the place of origin, in this case Costa Rica.
Many chocolatiers can only dream of having Sibö’s access to the freshest ingredients and chocolate, but others in cacao-growing regions are living the dream: A trend is slowly developing with small chocolatiers popping up in flavor-growing regions. But one thing still remains true from the jungles of Costa Rica to the streets of Beijing to the boulevards of Paris: regardless of their access and approach to ingredients, the chocolates being made are always reflective of the tastes and stories of the chocolatiers behind them.
And rightly so. Fine flavor chocolatiers worldwide have different types of customers, different palates, and are at different stages in their careers as artists and chefs. There may be similar tastes in every shop, but any idea of there being one future for particular ingredients, flavor combinations, textures, or shapes is rubbish. What is certain is that each chocolatier has a zeal for chocolate—many getting exclusives and custom blends from manufacturers, choosing beans themselves, and touting the beans’ origins on their websites, a trend that is only growing. And they have a shared fanaticism for finding and understanding the ingredients that go into their bonbons.
For some more established chocolatiers, the terroir of their homeland offers only so much, especially when the chocolate comes from places far away. For example, Patrick Roger is happy to snip herbs from his garden but says, “You need to explore and go further afield to find different flavors and not stick with just one for everything you do.” That’s why his pursuit of the best takes him to Corsica for oranges, to Ethiopia for coffee, and to Delhi for lemon. The latter is for a bonbon aptly named Delhi, which features an essence of basil and lemon in its almost caramel-like ganache and was the other bonbon Patrick pointed to when asked to talk about the future.
In Turin, Italy, Guido Gobino also believes the “best ingredients are found in places that are far from home,” and he loves to find and then combine them with his chocolate recipes for flavor and originality. His creative process makes him sound more like a marketing scientist than an artist or chef, but that is what it takes to achieve the best result: “After putting the new prescription to the tasting panel and various laboratory tests, I check the product’s characteristics and decide whether to proceed with production.”
What Guido describes is as true in Costa Rica and China, where there are few competitors, as it is in Paris and Brussels, where there are thousands. Despite varied business models and experience, fine flavor chocolatiers have the same attitudes
toward creativity but work within clearly defined limits of personal preference and the bonbon itself. They take deep pride in what they make, and they want to share the story and process behind it, which is why almost every chocolatier wants you to taste while you talk to them. There’s no better, or more delicious, way to understand where they are coming from and where they are going.
For example, George Soriano and Julio Fernandez of Sibö Chocolate in Costa Rica chose a dark milk chocolate bar flavored with coffee and cardamom and a dark chocolate-coated caramel infused with fresh ginger and coconut as their examples of where they are now and where they are going. The former reflects George and Julio’s heritage (both are half Middle Eastern and like cardamom in their coffee) and the latter their country’s culture of taste. “We call it the Costa Rican because it puts together all of the flavors that make up Costa Rican culture,” says George. “Caramel based on sugar brought by the Spanish, ginger introduced by Chinese immigrants who came to build the railroad, and coconut milk from Afro-Caribbean cuisine, as many of the people on the coast are immigrants from Jamaica. Then it’s covered in a dark chocolate shell with the cacao that comes from the indigenous pre-Colombian tradition in Costa Rica. The way that the flavors play together creates something new.”
Of course, as George and Julio noted before, things move slower in Costa Rica, so a caramel, no matter how fresh, is hardly going to be the bonbon of the future most chocolatiers in the rest of the fine flavor world point to . . . or is it? For Anne Weyns at Artisan du Chocolat in chocolate-mad London, it is all about the salted caramel—a product she introduced in 2002. She calls the caramel “deceptively simple” with its chocolate shell filled with a liquid caramel that has added butter and sea salt. She also appreciates its adaptability. “We’ve done lots of extensions of it, like a salted caramel with fig and spices for Christmas,” says Anne. “As a single product it reflects my sensibility and has been by far the most successful product we’ve ever done.”
Meanwhile, half a world away in China, where customers have little bonbon exposure and would seem to be open to any possibility, salted caramels would be unique. Yet Laurier Dubeau of La Place Collection in Beijing does not and will not do one for the exact same reason Anne and George and Julio do: because he does only what he loves and believes is within his customers’ culture of taste. “I don’t do a lot of caramels and fondant because personally I don’t like it. I do not add any more sugar to our chocolate. If it is too sweet, they won’t eat it. Even if I do milk chocolate sometimes I find it is too sweet, so I add dark chocolate to make it less so.”
Laurier struggles to pinpoint his bonbon of the future, because everything moves so fast in China. Given its size, Beijing alone could end up a slightly smaller version of fine-chocolate-mad Japan, where Pierre Hermé remains a legend, Dandelion Chocolate has opened a factory and Hironobu Tsujiguchi’s Le Chocolat de H packs customers in. According to Laurier: “Tastes are changing quickly and the Chinese are very curious about the world. The local customers who buy our chocolates appreciate them for the freshness and non-sugary texture and non-artificial taste. They love everything spicy. But everything is new to them. The raspberry peppercorn is something new to them. We are trying to use different kinds of teas and herbs. We just keep it natural and simple and go from there.”
Given the speed at which things are moving in China and locals’ willingness to try new flavors, Laurier thinks he could soon hear clamoring for bacon and wasabi chocolates from young people who want to try something new and adventurous. Whether he will indulge these flights of flavor fancy depends on his taste. Likewise, Thomas Haas of Thomas Haas Chocolates dismisses innovation for its own sake or shock value: “Do I want the future to be aerated ganaches or caramel and sea salt, which everybody does now? No. Do I think I am the person that people will look up in fifty years as the guy who changed the world? No. But if they say this is the guy who always made good chocolate? That would make me more proud.
“We just do what we love and what we think our customers will love. I’m kind of a traditionalist and classic in many ways in how we approach things. We spark it up on our dark chocolate ganache with food pairings, but we are very aware that so many—too many—chocolatiers are candy makers where it doesn’t look, smell, or taste like chocolate anymore. If you want to be different for the sake of being different then, well, I just have no patience or taste for wasabi and mustard seeds and stuff like that. I’m sorry, it is not me.”
Thomas does relish a flavor challenge but only if it appeals to him, and he gets his inspiration for future directions from whatever is around him. “Sometimes I think, ‘It is spring so what do we think of?’ Sometimes I’ll ask around and try to inspire the staff so that they can think about it. Sometimes we think about flavors from the past or our childhood. Sometimes I will ask a customer,” Thomas says, acknowledging that querying customers has its perils but still can lead to a new challenge or idea. “A customer will say, ‘You know it is fall and I’m thinking of pecan pie.’ And I will roll my eyes because that is what everybody out there does. You hear crème brûlée and lemon pie. . . . So I am thinking okay, how can I make something with that stuff and make it taste like good chocolate? What I’m thinking is vanilla and then pecan pies are kind of chocolatey but gooey so we can create a caramel with chocolate in it, add vanilla and have it bitter but also sweet with a little honey and then add small bits of caramelized pecans. Then, we try it, and if any of the people tasting it think it tastes like pecan pie and like it, then we are on the right track. That is part of the process in creating for the future.”
In Perugia, Italy, Paul De Bondt and Cecilia Iacobelli of Cioccolato Originale Cecilia e Paul might agree. While they say their best product is “the one they have not invented yet,” one of their favorite bonbons is one that a customer asked for, and the public cannot get. De Bondt has embraced the trend of creating exclusive custom chocolates for local clients using local ingredients. They created two for the Donnafugata Winery in Sicily, using its signature dessert wine Ben Ryé—one with ground almonds and figs that have been soaked in the wine and covered in a bittersweet chocolate shell, and the other made from a gelatin of Ben Ryé with a white chocolate ganache, also in a bittersweet chocolate shell.
Roger von Rotz, owner of the von Rotz Patisseries in Switzerland, is not surprised at this closer connection between customers and chocolatiers. He thinks the future of flavor is founded on the trust between the two, especially if the customer is another artisan. “As a chocolatier, I see myself as a guardian of cocoa culture, who offers the chocolate lover the chance to find the real and noble chocolates,” Roger says. “I have found that I can work with all kinds of colors, fruits, spices, wine, liquors, and original couvertures—some more noticeable, others more traditional—and in these areas there is a huge variety of aromas and tastes, which are outstanding for premium chocolate. Depending on individual flavors, those customers can take a sensory journey with me through the world of flavors, from which they will come back with excitement. So consciously or unconsciously, everything in my head is about finding new tastes and creations that my customers don’t already know.”
But Roger cautions that he too will not experiment with what he calls “impossible variations.” By this he means trendy ingredients that have everything to do with sales and nothing to do with his “joy and experience” and that spoil the taste of the chocolate. Roger’s creations include some based on wild honey and another on tobacco, both of which inspire him and will help make his “flavor frame a little wider.” He knows there will always be “chocolate lovers who are passionate about special pralines and lovers who are passionate about traditional chocolate. Chocolate will always be a taste thing! Our challenge in the future will be to show people the way that honors the culture of fine flavor cocoa.”
This is exactly why even chocolatiers with the most playful or rebellious outward personalities like Michael Recchiuti, Patrick Roger, and Bart Van Cauwenberghe caution restraint when pursuing certain flights of fancy and flavor profiles.
“You have to think of it as a business you are trying to sustain,” Michael says. “How many times are customers going to eat that blow-your-head-off bar? How long is it going to sit on a counter or in a cupboard after the first bites? You want people to buy your chocolate a lot. It is fascinating how many of the bean-to-bar things are happening in addition to the trend of people making rogue chocolates and those who are really into the kind of odd flavors like chilies and bacon. And that’s fun and kind of edgy but for me it is: what are people really going to come back to and enjoy on a consistent basis?”
In this way, Michael, like Roger von Rotz and many others, feels that people aren’t being true to chocolate. “I taste the chocolate and they are so flavor-heavy that you are not getting to experience the chocolate. They’re interested in the different colors and shiny chocolate but they are not really interested in the taste,” Michael says. He is especially disappointed when this happens with flavor combinations he likes, such as lavender, which he often finds too overwhelming: “We steep ours for less time because it has to be a whisper of lavender, not like we are hitting you over the head with a lavender shovel. That comes from restraint.”
While he is now focusing back on his signature chocolates, Michael allows himself to be a little less restrained in some of his pursuits. He has been playing with highly perishable products like water truffles that last only a day or two. “The reality is water allows the full flavor of the chocolate to come through. They have a chewier texture. It is almost like there is gum in them,” he says. “The minute you add any kind of fat you start suppressing the flavor, but if you do it with water it is immediately perishable, so we add fat and suppress the flavor for texture and shelf life and unctuousness.”
The balance between innovation and restraint Michael seeks is exactly what Bart Van Cauwenberghe of De Zwarte Vos in Belgium thinks is most important in any future creations. “To shock people is really easy,” he says. “To do chocolate with chili or pepper? People try it and say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s fantastic.’ But if you are thinking about money long-term it is not good. Sometimes it’s nice to shock people a little bit but if you can create nice balance in chocolate and whatever you do in life, in love, in food, whatever, then you are a happy man. That’s the yin and the yang.”
Bart honors this yin and yang in his own work by offering his customers a classic line (creams and nuts with familiar textures) and a trend line (flowers and spices or herbs and unusual textures). For his trend line, Bart has worked with foie gras, the tonka bean from Brazil, jasmine flowers, roses and raspberries, honey and rosemary, cardamom and orange . . . he works with flavors that compete with each other and flavors that complement each other. He understands Michael Recchiuti’s desire to work with water, not just for the flavor of the chocolate but because figuring that out will help him figure out how to put olives or tomatoes in his chocolate. Bart also plays with texture to heighten the whole experience. For his Quattro, which riffs on the classic flavor of amaretto, the bonbon has four layers, all with amaretto, but each with a different texture to change the sensory experience. Bart designed a bonbon with chamomile and mint so the mint oil evaporates on your tongue and “you feel it when you breathe.”
“That’s how you play with flavors and textures so you can smell and even hear it as well as taste it. You have to think about all this, and that makes it so exciting,” Bart says. “But I always say to people you have to taste first. Because if you just bite twice and then swallow you will never get it.” This is one of the main reasons Bart does not label the bonbons in his signature Degustation Box: “People say, ‘It is so nice but it is such a shame that we don’t know what is inside.’ But if I tell you and you know what’s inside—that you have chocolate with vanilla or chocolate with hazelnut and chocolate with rosemary—what stays in the box? The rosemary. The one you never tasted before.
“I have to change your taste buds. That’s why I put nothing on the top of the Degustation Box. I want people to degustate, not consummate.”
In the end, all the chocolatiers we spoke with know that playing with this knowledge is not dangerous like fire but does carry responsibilities for the future. All have a deep respect for tradition and little patience for trendy flavor combinations unless they honor that tradition. They also share a disdain for fussy presentations, preferring layered and deceptively simple tastes. This preference made Patrick Roger question himself. “I went to visit a colleague of mine and I found that I could no longer eat my chocolates,” Patrick says. “I preferred his chocolates that were simpler. I felt like Picasso. Picasso was a troubled man, right? I can be like that, too. What you find in art is very similar to what you find in taste.
“People love herbal infusions, but people also love those glass houses that are going up in places all over Paris. I live in a three-hundred-year-old house, made out of mud and wood. I know the glass house is more advanced, but still. But if there is something to see or taste, I will find it. There are very few people who have this attitude and who want to live like I do. And it is the same way with taste.” That’s why Patrick says he doesn’t “search” for new recipes like those glass houses: “I might plan for, we’ll say, two minutes, but I already know exactly what the taste will be—it’s like kissing someone. It’s another love story. Today, each person has his or her own vision of love. And taste is exactly the same way. That is how I am going to construct it. That is exactly what I am looking for in taste.”
But almost as soon as a chocolatier like Patrick constructs a vision, chances are someone else is right behind him, or worse, watching closely. As competitors copy looks and flavors fast, leading fine flavor chocolatiers repeatedly need to innovate with new products and to develop and maintain their signature looks. How far can they actually go without compromise?
Is it any wonder then that most fine flavor chocolatiers think about their boxes and presentations in the same way? They want them to convey the same promise as Tiffany’s: I will deliver on what you expect. In fact, for walk-in customers, especially in Europe, the store itself is like a giant box, conveying the vision of the brand and selling the bonbons and bars on display. All of this attention to detail is essential to maintaining distinctiveness in a world where imitation runs rampant and where even at close distance, the products look remarkably the same to most customers. European chocolatiers like Patrick Roger often carefully combine distinctive consistency and an element of surprise: Patrick has been using the same box since he opened and each store looks like a Patrick Roger and features the same products, but is different in its layout and has its own distinctive chocolate sculpture in the window.
But while distinctiveness in packaging is important to chocolatiers, innovation in that packaging is not top of mind for the future. Neither is environmentalism, largely because it has little value to the customer. In fact, Thomas Haas of Thomas Haas Chocolates was one of the few who mentioned packaging as he was working on a method of layering so that he does not need boxes inside a box to protect and present his chocolate. He also had some strong words for himself and his fellow chocolatiers: “We are all in the business hypocrites and I am one of them,” he says. “We may be the only business out of 150 out here that has a full-on recycling program in everything that we do and we compost. But we still are always offering bags and giftwrapping and beautifully wrapped chocolate bars. This is hypocritical. I don’t know how to deal with it. It is a part of our creativity, of course, but it is a shortcoming.”
That said, packaging innovation is not top of mind with chocolate manufacturers either. Fine flavor companies spend just as much time considering the look and production of the wrappers for their bars as chocolatiers do with their boxes. And there has been lots of innovation on the environmental (recycled and reused as well as indigenous materials) and economic (both in terms of efficiency and local production) side in recent years. Yet most still use the familiar paper or cardboard wrapper with foil or plastic wrapping inside.
Some of this is based on cost and some on the fact that the chocolate itself demands so much of the manufacturers’ time that there is no room to innovate. But for a food that is to be tasted and savored, only Chloé Doutre-Roussel presented something truly different: zip bags. “I think it is one of the most respectful ways to sell the chocolate because it protects it not only before—much more than the foil paper—but after,” says Chloé. “It could last for up to two months once it was opened, though no chocolate should last for two months. When used properly, it really works perfectly. No chocolatiers use this maybe because it is not a very sexy packaging. I tried to make it less ugly, but it is highly functional.”
But as discussed previously, when it comes to fine flavor chocolate, consumers are much more into form over function, how things look, and are often swayed by marketing. And when it comes to chocolate, and sales in general, there are always people who choose marketing and presentation over content and substance. Like the manufacturers, many chocolatiers see that as a problem for the future if fine flavor chocolatiers do not keep up and cannot match the marketing dollars. As Michael Recchiuti notes, “I’ve seen a lot of product where the boxes were good but the product was bad—and the reverse. That’s always been a great disappointment for me just as far as people producing things and either it looks gorgeous and they don’t follow through or is the most amazing product and the packaging doesn’t reflect that. It’s a disconnect.”
Michael does understand, however, that packaging can be essential to representing the brand, the story of the chocolates inside, and the personality of the person who made them. Once his first line of chocolates was set years ago, he spent more time thinking about the box, the paper stock, design, and embossing than anything else. The result was lasting and profoundly personal. “A lot of our chocolates are about my story and my history in the pastry and food industry,” he says. “The designer got ahold of all my old recipe books from the late 1970s and 1980s with all these coffee stains on them and scribbles and lines and drawings and letters to friends and thoughts and processes. He then scanned all of them and he came up with the idea to use them as a background on our boxes. He chose things that meant something to me and also looked great. We created a font based on it. It looks like how I think.”
Roger von Rotz of von Rotz Patisseries in Switzerland also knows the game is changing with the appearance of new chocolates and chocolatiers: “This is not comparable to the past. Today, every chocolatier has to establish and maintain their own brand. We have been lucky but we know we must always be a work in progress. We are developing and changing very fast. This is sometimes hard. We redesigned in 2009 and now we are evolving in different ways. The aromas and tastes in the fruit and spice selections will develop just as spirits and wine did. We will realize mini chocolate collections with our exclusive chocolates. The ganache will get even softer and the chocolates will get flatter.”
But Roger knows there is only so much he can do with taste and packaging and still maintain a distinctive yet traditional business: “Chocolate is still very traditional so there is only so much you can do before you go off brand. I think the cover/design of the place and the packaging helps with the perception of the quality of the product. We must make our products desirable to our customers, but if you design a product with earthy colors like we do, then it sometimes needs a little sales discussion to help sell the product. So there is no such thing as a bad future; you just have to adjust!”
From Beijing, Laurier Dubeau and Polly Lo of La Place Collection would concur, but for them packaging is building a future that they can adjust from. They also needed to make different decisions from those of chocolatiers in more established flavor-consuming cities. For example, at first their Chinese customers only believed chocolate that is made in Belgium or France was good. How then to differentiate La Place and still be what the customer wanted? As Laurier explains: “Some of the customers come and they say that we are not a real Belgian company or real French company and then they won’t buy it. They want to see ‘Made in Belgium’ or ‘Made in France’ on the box. They want to give a gift and they don’t want it to look like it’s made in China. So we did a little research and talked about how we should go about making the chocolate and packaging. We decided not to do packaging toward Chinese tastes but do it like European packaging because chocolate is not a Chinese product. So that is why we never chose a Chinese name for the company. Customers think our name is better. And now they also know they cannot find our chocolate anywhere else.”
Laurier and Polly also learned quickly that there are different types of customers in China: some who just go for the “glitz and glamour” and just want the big box and the packaging as a gift, and some who appreciate the chocolate and what they are doing. “They know we are not a mass-production company. They know we’re trying to do the best quality possible and that’s why they appreciate it,” says Laurier. “That is not the perception of China anywhere. The perception is that the Chinese like mass production just like they produce mass production.” In fact, to get closer to these customers who want to taste and explore for themselves spontaneously and not just buy a gift, La Place want to expand further into retail from the Internet. But when they do, Laurier and Polly will continue to listen to their customers both in terms of what kind of chocolate they want and what kind of packaging they want—a packaging version of what De Bondt did for the winery in Sicily—and then expand that to other customers as well. “They give us ideas of what they want and what the market may be interested in,” says Laurier, “so we try to create something new out of that.”
A process like this is, of course, only possible when the market is less saturated with competitors, as is the case in Costa Rica. In fact, George Soriano and Julio Fernandez of Sibö Chocolate are hoping to be less different in the future and create new businesses like their own and expand the market. They are willing to share everything they are doing in the hopes that they can inspire other chocolatiers to explore the possibilities of fine flavor but not simply imitate them. “Now that we have shown people what we can do with Costa Rican chocolate, we are willing to share that with other chocolate makers and chocolatiers so that we can help them source their own Costa Rican chocolate to make their bonbons,” says George. “We want Central America and Costa Rica to be known for chocolates. We want people to say, ‘Oh, Costa Rica—there is great coffee there and some great chocolate.’ We’ve shown people that they can do it; now let’s help them do it and give them what we did not have.” That said, Julio adds, “we will always be a little step ahead of them but we will help them because their success means more success for us, too.”
In Paris, Patrick Roger would admire this. He always shares his thoughts with manufacturers and chocolatiers from around the world. But the idea of listening to customers at all in the creative process as Laurier Dubeau and Polly Lo do is anathema to him.
Patrick believes process is not important to the customers—only the chocolate is. “The primary customer is me. I’m the one who controls their taste preferences. I am the dictator of taste. A customer is only unsatisfied if [a chocolate] is not well made. If someone makes a mistake it can upset only me. As soon as I know that a mistake has been made, that chocolate cannot appear in my shop. We can’t fail. It’s unacceptable. Customers are going to judge you the same way as when they buy a car or a house—with each bite, the customer is going to size you up. At my shop in Sceaux, there are 700 customers a day at Christmas who are buying my little chocolates. All the ingredients are listed, but this doesn’t mean anything to them. I have the refined palate that I pass on to them. I am the one who must guarantee the quality of my work.”
This devotion to providing customers with an experience that speaks to them and their desires is shared by most chocolatiers, especially those like Patrick who sell mostly to customers from their city. “Our clients are the people who live here. It’s not like people just come to have a little bite of chocolate and then never come back,” Patrick adds. “We are more than what you find in the big brand names in Paris. If a tourist buys a Fauchon chocolate, for example, in Tokyo or New York, he forgets about it. My shop doesn’t work like that.” In fact, Patrick opened his first international shop in what might be called ground zero for bonbons: in Brussels right next to the legendary Marcolini, and is one among 2,000 chocolate shops. But wherever he goes, Patrick expects the same reception: “In the future, I don’t know if we will open shops in New York or Tokyo, but if we do, we will have the same clients there that we have in Paris. So there is no difference in clientele, no matter where the shop is. That is how it works. My clients couldn’t care less about Fauchon chocolates once they have come to my store. Behind that business, they are all capitalists. They are all just financers. With us, it is a question of love and seduction.”
Love and seduction are essential in markets where competition is fierce and imitators abound. Anne Weyns of Artisan du Chocolat in London understands what this means for her company as much as it does for a Patrick Roger. “I think what customers are looking for are products that reflect my sensibility and my inspiration,” says Anne, which is why she expects her UFOs to remain a signature product for the future. “But everybody is sort of roughly offering the same thing and customers look for products and experiences that they cannot find anywhere else. Unfortunately, within the chocolate industry, because flavors and shapes and so on are fairly easily copied, people set up like Patrick Roger and just do something like him. The number of people who have copied Patrick Roger’s semicircle with very bright colors and caramel . . . could you not come up with anything else? It is a form of flattery, I know, but still. People seem happier to just pick ideas from the bonbons that work and mash them together. Unless you manage your own point of difference people will copy, especially anything that can be done very quickly.”
Bart Van Cauwenberghe of De Zwarte Vos in Belgium sums it up this way: “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to a restaurant and had goat cheese on the salad. Do you know how many cheeses there are in the world? Why is everybody working with the same goat cheese? How are you making people curious?”
Michael Recchiuti would agree but draws a contrast between inspiration and mimicry: “I started at a farmers’ market and the farmers would come up to me and say, ‘I’ve got three cases of lemon verbena that nobody wants. Can you do anything with them?’ So I started exploring, doing the herbs and infused chocolates. I wasn’t the first one. There were already people in Europe doing that and mushroom chocolates and all kinds of goofy stuff based on their region. If they are in Provence, they use lavender. In Brittany, salty caramels have been there forever as something you just put salt on. If they think that I created it, they are wrong. It is all inspired by someone else. We are all just interpreting. But what I’ve been seeing lately is people mimicking what I do and I want people to just kind of take their own direction.”
And given the limited range of manufacturers providing chocolate—95 percent of chocolatiers buy their chocolate from chocolate manufacturers—differentiation can be difficult no matter the direction, especially when dealing with the well-educated consumers. According to Anne, most sophisticated customers in the United Kingdom are now so into chocolate that they have gone beyond considering cocoa content and even origin to the manufacturer to understand the differences: “If they see a ‘Madagascar 64%’ bar at a small chocolate shop, they know its probably Valrhona Manjari, so it is actually quite difficult to differentiate yourself.”
Few chocolatiers, however, profess any intense desire or overarching plans for going bean to bonbon completely, if at all; it is just too expensive and not worth the trouble. Better to work closely with chocolate manufacturers who can do that work for you, and if and when you are big enough, even create custom blends.
Problem is, shops like Artisan du Chocolat are not big enough, so Anne found a mid-step that gives her a point of difference for the immediate future, at least: She works from “liquor” (unsweetened ground cocoa beans). “We don’t take beans and we don’t take finished chocolate,” says Anne. “Producing from liquor widens us to a completely different supply base. We work with some large chocolate-producing companies that might have a couple of tons of really interesting liquor, which they would not make the most of by blending. For example, one company has a couple of tons of cocoa from Haiti and Vietnam and they think they can make better use of it than blending it. So they call me and say, ‘We have a limited amount of this and do you want some?’ It’s quite an unusual situation. This has given us a clear point of difference and has widened our suppliers to include processing companies and cooperatives in local cocoa-growing countries.”
This kind of difference can prove essential when there are not only several wonderful fine flavor chocolatiers competing for customers in the same area but also plenty more watching, ready to produce knockoffs. Thomas Haas can relate. His fresh fruit chocolates have been his signature product for years—a technique and style easily copied by others. So Thomas is always searching for different possibilities without sacrificing his integrity as a chef and artist.
Of course, innovating within the traditional bonbon form won’t always work out. For example, at one point Thomas realized that all his chocolate bars were listed by percentages and the customers loved them. He made replicas of those in miniature chocolate squares with the cocoa percentages included on them so a customer could experience and understand the difference between a 75% and a 67%. The result? According to Thomas, “We got the whole line done and we printed in cocoa butter the tiny little number for the percentage and we got them all ready . . . and, oh my God, it did not sell. It was too boring. But the chocolate bar sells! It didn’t make any sense. But that was the reality, and I don’t want to be boring.”
Boring is bad, but repetition is inevitable for chocolatiers who must balance their pursuit of new directions with the expectations of their customers. For example, the first products Michael Recchiuti released when he and his wife, Jacky, moved from Vermont to San Francisco—eight chocolates, sliced pears marinated in lime juice and coated in chocolate, and a bag of orange peel—are still around because they sell really well. Thomas Haas understands this well, which is why he says he is always changing but in increments: “It is a silent move. We have to be sensitive when we implement—both to customers and cost. Say I have six new flavors, but I can’t afford to have more than thirty flavors and I don’t have space for all the new ones. If we take this, this, and this away? I guarantee you I will have so many people knocking on my door and complaining that I can’t take it off because that’s their favorite. So we are very sensitive when we say this is our standard program and we’ve got to keep this going so we make it a little more contemporary or a little bit finer and then slowly implement it. And sometimes we bite the bullet and take it away—something like the pear and replace it with peach. Hopefully that and throwing ideas around keeps the creative juices flowing.”
Hopefully, indeed. Because as Charles Bukowski said....
Just don’t tell Patrick Roger he’s changed.
“My mother always says, ‘He hasn’t changed. He’s still just as annoying!’” Patrick says, imitating the voice of his mom. “Nothing has changed. Even when I opened in Paris, we just balanced out the pricing so that every chocolate had about the same price, even if they had different ingredients inside. We have more shops now, but my philosophy has still not changed. When I bought my first shop, I was the same way that I am now. We are who we are.”
Okay, maybe “change” is the wrong word to use when describing Patrick Roger. Perhaps “evolved” is better. Whether that evolution involves the incorporation of new ingredients, new locations, or even new technologies, Patrick and his fellow chocolatiers remain who they are and taste is always paramount. But as we have seen throughout this book, many things have changed and are changing in the world of fine flavor chocolate.
As Patrick argues, pointing to changes coming to his laboratoire and the industry in general, “Technology will change but only as it leads to better taste—we must always be searching to create this orgasmic feeling. In fact, we will be able to create tastes that are more complex. Currently, we are only able to make the interior first and then the exterior around it, or we can make a mold and then put the interior inside. In the near future, we will be able to make both the interior and the exterior at the same time, or we will be able to make the exterior, and then the interior inside. We will practically be able to put a solid into a liquid.”
But Patrick is concerned that all this may come at a cost beyond money: “What is going to happen is that we are going to push this technology to its breaking point. Soon there will be new technologies that will completely wreak havoc on the texture and the taste of chocolate. We are pretty much already at the point of ruining the texture of chocolate. In the future, the texture of chocolate will be a catastrophe.”
Call that what you will, but that’s evolution or change no one can believe in.
Nevertheless, most chocolatiers are optimistic as they try to keep pace and maintain a realistic view of their business. Consider what Laurier Dubeau says about his work at La Place Collection in Beijing: “We didn’t go into this business to make money. If we wanted to make money we would just have a normal job somewhere else at a big company and make much more money than we do now. We do this because we like it. We like interaction with the customers, and we love to talk about chocolate with them and to see them appreciate the new flavors that they never associated with chocolate. This is a great experience and there is a big future for fine chocolate.”
And Gail Ambrosius concurs, “There has been an explosion of fine flavored chocolatiers in the past few years, which is great, it elevates us all, there is plenty of chocolate making for everyone. I think it is a great profession, we share our love and joy of chocolate, and people support that.
And it is a future that looks to include a growing number of women. At the manufacturing level, chocolate making is hands-on and all about using big machinery; women like Michelle Morgan of Zokoko or Chloé Doutre-Roussel remain exceptional. But that seems to be changing. At one Ecole Chocolat bean-to-bar class, all the registrants but one were female. On the chocolatier side, things have already changed. Maybe it’s because the costs of opening a chocolate laboratory are high but much, much less than opening a chocolate factory. Maybe it’s a natural evolution from the world of the pastry chef where women have been dominating the ranks in recent years. Maybe it’s the small-scale appeal and the bonbon’s existence at the intersection of art, cooking, and commerce. Whatever it is, women like Anne Weyns at Artisan du Chocolat are taking their places in the fine flavor chocolatier universe. Just look at the United States. Fran Bigelow of Fran’s Chocolates in Seattle led the charge decades ago with her legendary Gold Bars and gray salt caramels. A few notable women followed suit. In the past decade, dozens of female chocolatiers have made names for themselves across the world. As one of many examples, in 2018, Kate Weiser’s Carl the Snowman made Oprah Winfrey’s annual list of “Favorite Things.”
But Patrick Roger is right that some things defy change: the work it takes to create a fine flavor chocolate. “To make a chocolate, it must go through twenty or twenty-five manipulations—we have to touch it twenty or twenty-five times!” Patrick says. “My hard work brought me everything that I have today. I am someone who is constantly evolving and discovering things, based on where I am from. It’s not simple. The most beautiful thing for me is still the smell of chocolate, and when it comes down to it, that is hard work.
“But in the future, for example in France, people don’t want to work hard anymore. People are so lazy! The French don’t feel like working. Economically, we have to find some solutions. . . it is impossible for me to abandon all the herbs, the zests, and the juices that I put into my chocolates. So in the future, the question for me is how will I be able to continue to work? How will I be able to cultivate in the gardens? These days, I tell myself that if I have the means to do my work, I am happy. The problem is that for me, the future is not a luxury. The only luxury in my work is the handiwork. In the end, it is a labor of love.”
Michael Recchiuti shares the sentiment that chocolate is a really hard business. “It is grueling,” he says. “It is physically demanding. There is a huge learning curve. The equipment is really expensive. The packaging is really expensive. Even if you have a ton of cash, can it be successful? I don’t know. I think you really have to be passionate about it. I think one of the problems I’ve been having is that a lot of people approach me and really want me to tutor them and give them ideas about chocolate so they can start their own company. That’s fine. People did that for me and so I’m trying to pay that forward. But then you get the people who just look at it as a widget. They have money and they have business savvy and have backers and they have never touched chocolate and have no intention of making it and they’re just going to hire a French chef or something like that. That is really disappointing. You’ve got to be in it. Or just don’t do it. You might make money but . . . at what cost?”
Thomas Haas waxes philosophical: “Growth . . . cannot be the only thing that drives you. If that is what drives me, then I have forgotten where I’m coming from. There is no way that I can be as good as we want to be if we multiply the business every year and just keep on growing, because we are not in the commodity business where we press a button and a T-shirt comes out. I am amazed at businesses that have those models. But no matter who they are, they lack flexibility and the sensitivity to details that we have. We believe that we are not going to get bigger, just better.”
And better, not bigger, often means saying no or yes on one’s own terms. For example, an airline came to Bart Van Cauwenberghe of De Zwarte Vos in Belgium and said, “Every customer that flies with us, we will give them two chocolates. Can you pack them separately?” Bart said no. He understood what they wanted and why they needed to do it, but he decided that’s not what his brand was about. That, he felt, was for the big brands like Leonidas.
Or consider what happened when Recchiuti Confections went to the Fancy Food Show, where in Michael’s words, “There was so much novelty jump-on-the-bandwagon chocolate it was very strange. We put together a very simple, funky booth and did no sampling. We decided it was going to be that if you know us, we can finally meet you and maybe you can come and see the factory. We are not after everyone, just that one or two percent that might have a store in Michigan that is super passionate about chocolate. We will sell to them. We are not going to sell to anyone else. My wife is stricter than me about that. If we have not heard of you, she will say, ‘Let me see your store.’ And then she will say, ‘Nah’ because they sell wind chimes and stuffed bears and chocolates in the corner. They are nice people and they mean well but it is not what we are connecting to with our brand. Do you really want to commit to selling your product to someone that is not your customer base?”
Thomas Haas once provided chocolates for 70 percent of the Four Seasons hotels and fifteen to twenty Ritz-Carlton hotels: 20,000 to 30,000 chocolates a week shipped to hotels from Maui to Texas to New York to Boston from his small chocolate kitchen in a light industrial area of Vancouver. But when his neighbors came knocking on the door, everything shifted. First, he sold to them informally out of the shop. Then the lines grew and on Valentine’s Day and Christmas would extend around the block. Soon enough, Thomas had a decision to make: hotels or neighbors. He chose the local customers, built a factory in an up-and-coming area, and put a little boutique patisserie in the front, creating what Thomas calls “a chocolate shop with a little cappuccino bar.” When that retail part of the business became a huge success, he dumped all his hotel clients except for Boston.
“We spend ten percent of our day saying no to ninety percent of the business that comes through the door, guaranteed,” says Thomas. “‘We would like to open a wholesale account.’ ‘We would like you to ship chocolate sauce.’ ‘We would like you to make this.’ And then the restaurant calls and the hotel calls and we say, ‘No, that’s not what we are.’ That’s not who I am. I know the business works as it works.”
And business for these fine flavor chocolatiers is crazy and messy and delicious just like the world of fine flavor chocolate as a whole. It is a tasty puzzle not unlike the constantly changing pieces of brown butcher paper Michael Recchiuti puts up on the walls of his factory, filling them with words and images of where he wants to go. “My staff says, ‘Can we take them down?’ And I say, ‘No, I haven’t gotten them fully out of my head yet. I leave the paper there and it kind of tortures me because I know the process isn’t right yet.”
But when the flavor is right, the process is in place, and the chocolate is ready, it’s time for the three words everyone has been waiting for:
“Here, taste this.”