the July cacao snail trail
link love: why scale doesn't always make sense, ultra-processed love, decolonising chocolate, and on luxury
Stay small vs scale bigger
The tagline for Guy Raz’s podcast, How I Built This, is “interviews the world’s best-known entrepreneurs to learn how they built their iconic brands. In each episode, founders reveal deep, intimate moments of doubt and failure, and share insights on their eventual success.”
When I was new to making chocolate and even later when Map Chocolate was growing, I clung to these stories, so when I saw this recent title on his Substack newsletter, I had to learn more. In craft chocolate “scaling bigger” has been the top topic since Scharffen Berger. In this episode he interviews the well-known and wildly successful pastry chef Dominque Ansel.
The best thing I’ve ever read about chocolate, that wasn’t about chocolate. Cacao is not just an ingredient in the candy aisle, and IMHO, the world’s best, most creative chocolate makers understand and respect cacao for what it is: an amazing food. As I read this piece I thought of how it applies so easily to chocolate—and also, the tech bio-food trend to “make chocolate that doesn’t contain chocolate.”
I came across a brave piece on decolonizing chocolate, where the author said what many of you may recognize as the longtime bean to bar maker’s “education through chocolate approach” to get someone’s attention.
My approach is to basically bait people with delicious chocolate and then switch to talking about these issues.
The issues are of course, supply chain isssues, trade issues, commodification of food and the role of slavery in the past and present system. I think this piece is brave, namely because the craft/specialty chocolate industry is not unified in its definition of these issues, which makes them much harder to discuss, and ultimately, solve.
Finally, food writer and author Alicia Kennedy wrote this, which I found in the piece above, and am glad to have found it. I think this will resonate with many of you.
There’s no reason why chocolate—all chocolate—shouldn’t be understood as a luxury, with diverse expressions of cacao terroir named, respected, discussed. But that only happens in the smallest of forums, and it’s mocked in the general culture to care about such things as chocolate, or coffee, or sugar. I’ve said it before, but people who would generally claim to care about matters of social justice or decolonization turn the other way when it comes to the commodities upon which their days and pleasures are built. They would prefer the land be exploited somewhere else rather than understand most of what they eat as a luxury, to be regarded as preciously as the August tomato or the wildly priced truffle tasting menu at a fine-dining restaurant.