November 16, 2022 • 35 mins
Remember the Mast Brothers scandal? Think you are eating sustainable, small batch chocolate? It's way more complicated than that. Plus: when three idealists try to tackle the evils of Big Chocolate, they realize treacherous roads, nails and bullets are just the beginning of their problems.
Want some of this truly bean to bar chocolate? Kaleidoscope has joined forces with Luisa Abram and Stettler Chocolate to make a special box to go along with this very podcast. Just visit: www.stettler-chocolate.com to order your wild chocolate today.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
All right, Adrian, We're at the corner of Columbus, staring
at the storefront, and I've brought you here because I
know you were on the scene in Brooklyn circa two
thousand seven. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. I'm in
New York with Adrian Anderson, the ultimate Brooklyn food Maymon.
Adrian has been working with chefs and food media around
(00:32):
New York for years, both making the food and making
it look beautiful. I was just getting out of restaurants
and starting to work as a food stylist. It was
maybe still living in Williamsburg, maybe Bushwick around that time.
That's what I was hoping for. Adrian co owned the
studio where all the food magazine shop and she did
(00:54):
a lot of the styling. So when I wanted someone
to walk me through the ultimate cautionary tale in world
of craft chocolate, a tail that has a lot to
do with the looks and appearances, but bygone Brooklyn era,
I knew wh would ask. I feel like we were
at the beginning or kind of the early stages of
farm to table, and I think that we were still
(01:15):
in this era of discovery and excitement about sourcing and
honesty and authenticity in food, and in that like budding
good future suddenly appears a new choppolate maker, Rygan Williamsburg.
The Mask Brothers. Yeah, do you remember when they first
(01:37):
came onto your radar? I can't pinpoint the exact moment.
It was more of a sort of a creeping light
leak at the periphery of your consciousness. Stores that had
the cool food at the time started carrying masts and
it was really noticeable because the design the rappers was
(02:00):
so good. It really was. Every bar looks like it
was wrapped in beautiful, old fashioned wallpaper with minimal words.
In an era when most chocolate bars were still heavy
on the bling, these bars seemed handmade and real, and
the food world gobbled them up. How do you make
absolutely incredible Valentine's Day chocolate? Well, here at the Masked
(02:23):
Brothers chocolate factory, they start with organic CACW beans, the
Mass Brothers. It's very artsy, fancy. Just as important as
that artsy packaging of the bars was the packaging of
the brothers themselves, Rick and Michael Mast, two young guys
with bushy red beards and Victorian clothing, slinging burlap sacks
(02:44):
of cocaw beans for the eager cameras. Mass Brothers chocolate
in Brooklyn. Rick, your place is a chocolate in urvana. Basically,
I love it. What makes you guys so different? Bot
making chocolate from scratch, all in house. We're bringing in
beans from all around all over the world. Right, So
like Brooklyn itself, it's a chocolate bar that's made up
of things from all around the world. So today we're
(03:06):
gonna show you how we make our Brooklyn blend. I
love the showt T. The aesthetic was ubiquitous at the time.
It was inescapable if you were, yeah, the bearded Brooklyn
bro selling, selling cheese or slicking cocktails. Suddenly, the Masks
had fawning coverage in the New York Times and bond appetite,
(03:28):
new shops in London and l a and a global
spotlight as America's breakout Kraft chocolate maker. Their glass walled
Williamsburg factory, where you could watch real live hipsters making chocolate,
became a tourist mecca. But there was a story. There
was that big story. I'm sure you know what it was.
I don't. I don't remember. Yes, that's why I'm here.
Some people in the food world, the chocolate world are
(03:50):
calling them frauds, the Milli Vanilli of chocolate, which is
a very strong thing to say. They were re melting
other kinds of chocolate into their chocolate bars, especially in
the early days when they were claiming they were being
too bar chocolate alloys. That's just going against the purity
the nature of the very earnest looks in the Big
Beard's essentially, a blogger for the website Dallas food dot
(04:17):
org broke the story that would bring the Mass Brothers down.
During their rise to fame, when they were the poster
beards for authenticity, they weren't actually making some of their
own chocolate. They were buying it from other companies, melting
it down, pouring it into their own molds, then wrapping
it up in old timey paper. At first, the Masks
(04:38):
denied everything, but eventually they are forced to acknowledge that
in their early years they'd been re melters. They claim
they've gone straight long ago, but the damage was done.
The shops disappeared, the factory shuttered, and the Masks themselves
faded away. That felt the end after that, like the
(05:01):
expossa had come out. They had been mocked relentlessly. Everything
closed down. It just it felt like it was officially over,
and so we all thought. But now here we are.
Look up at the storefront and tell me what I
see that We've got a hand painted window that says
(05:24):
masked Markets established, and there's a bunch of people inside.
It looks like the two thousand and eleven Brooklyn aesthetic
is alive and well. Yes, the masts are back, selling
chocolate and coffee and housewares and body soaps in a
(05:46):
squeaky clean space that could double as a Williams Sonoma.
The remelters have reformed, but don't be too quick to
blame the masts re melting style over substance. For all
the controversy in the world of big Chocolate, it that's
just business as usual. But to understand just how bad
it gets, we're going to have to head into the
(06:07):
belly of the beast. From Kaleidoscope and I Heeart podcasts.
This is Obsessions Wild Chocolate. I'm Roman Jacobson, Chapter four,
Big Bad Chocolate. All right, so let's actually let's turn
(06:48):
to We are old foods. Here, we are our whole foods.
Whole foods in Brooklyn right on on the planet one
of them. I'm with Clay Gordon, the creator and moderator
of the Chocolate Life dot com, which is the world's
biggest online community for chocolate fans. Clay teaches chocolate appreciation classes,
he consults with chocolate companies. He wrote A Great Guy
(07:10):
to Chocolate, and he was on the scene when the
masts had their big run. We all wanted them to
succeed right because they were m bringing bad chocolate, to
prefer from cheap industrial chocolate into craft chocolate, and um.
They were the people who were the gateway. People came
(07:32):
to them right and they were the introduction. This was
during that strange stretch of the two thousands when chocolate
suddenly became virtuous instead of a guilty treat. It pivoted
into a worldly earnest, possibly even healthy luxury. The candy
aisles exploded with snazzy bars advertising their high cocow percentage,
(07:52):
socially responsible business practices, and exotic cocau surces. Of course,
the first chocolate makers to do such bars really were
tiny operations that walk the walk, but it didn't take
long before they were joined in the virtuous section by
big chocolate. The handful of giant corporations that dominate the
chocolate business. But to look at the shelves and whole foods,
(08:14):
you'd never know it. It's really really hard to understand
what it is we have presented here. So, for example,
there's a brand called Lilies, So Lili's is known for
sugar free chocolate. When most people look at a bar
of Lilies, they'll go, oh, it's fair trade, right right.
The other thing that's really important to know is that
(08:36):
the corporate parent of Lilies is Hershey Harsh Company. Yes,
Lilies is owned by Hershey, and it should be known
that Hershey is a name defendant in a lawsuit having
to do with um knowingly profiting from illegal labor in
West Africa. Chocolate, as you may or may not know,
(09:02):
has some serious issues. U S senators shared Brown and
Ron Wyden, arguing that there is evidence the Ivory Coast
relies on forced child labor to harvest coco instead of
attending school. These children so through cocoa beans on a plantation.
The Washington Post reported in June that more than two
million children were engaged in the practice on West African
(09:25):
cocoa farms. The big chocolate companies don't actually own cacao farms.
They are many links away at the other end of
the supply chain, and this makes it difficult to tell
where the coco originated. So their argument is that, hey,
we're just buying these beans from cargular whoever. The reality
is they got a pretty dark They have accepted responsibility,
(09:47):
many of them by signing Hrican Angle Protocol. They know
that these are issues. In a wave of news stories
exposed the shocking amount of child trafficking and slavery in
the Chocolate Trade Act in two thousand one, the US
Congress responded, led by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Elliott Angle.
Together they introduced the idea of slapping a label on
(10:09):
chocolate products indicating whether or not the product was free
of child slave labor. We need a better commitment, a
stronger commitment from the chocolate industry worldwide. That's Tom Harkin.
Families need to know that when they buy chocolate in
whatever form, that a lot of that's being produced by
(10:29):
what is really an essence, child slavery. To no one's surprise,
the industry freaked out. Chocolate is a one billion dollar
business and a child slavery logo splashed across every candy bar.
Wouldn't exactly be great for sales. Big Talcola said, you
know what, we don't need you to enact loss. We
will take care of it ourselves. The problem ourselves, and
(10:53):
every time their self imposed deadline approach, they kicked the
cocoa pot down the road and they're five years. In
two thousand five, Big Chocolate promised to get child labor
out of the supply chain by two thousand ten. In
two thousand ten, they said they could do it. They
said that they couldn't even trace where most of their
coco comes from. The problem is that coco is a
(11:18):
commodity bought and sold by the shipload by traders in
New York and London, then stored in giant warehouses until
some company buys it. Between the farmer who grows it
and the chocolate bar on the supermarket shelf, it can
change hands a dozen times. It's nearly impossible to trace
that path. Not that some companies aren't trying, all right,
(11:39):
So now you're playing a Tony's chacolon um. They sold
over a hundred million dollars in chocolate. Tony's is a
Dutch company founded twenty years ago. With a singular mission
to eradicate slavery from the chocolate supply chain. Tony's groovy
Piece of Love packaging gives them this Ben and Jerry's vibe.
(11:59):
But there is a key difference. So Tony's is not
a chocolate maker. Tony's is a marketing company, right. They
produce chocolate bars from chocolate which is manufactured by someone else.
So the chocolate is manufactured for them by Barry Calibrats,
biggest biggest chocolate company in the world. That's Barry Calibo,
the goliath of chocolate makers, with more than sixty production
(12:21):
facilities around the globe and eight billion dollars in annual sales.
To their credit, Tony's purchases all their beings from seven
cooperatives in West Africa that they ensure are free of
slave labor, and they pay a premium to do that.
But the fact that the largest chocolate maker in the
world is making all of their chocolate for them makes
things complicated. The cocoa butter for this bar is probably
(12:45):
produced in the Calibut factory in West Africa. And why
is that a problem? Well, Calibut is one of the
name defendants in the trafficking victims protection reauthorization at lawsuit,
and so can we say that they're actually working to
eradicate slavery in the entire chocolate supply chain. They're trying,
(13:06):
for sure, but due to its ties to Barry call About,
Tony's was removed from an important list of slavery chocolate companies.
And Tony's isn't the only indie brand with ties to
Big Chocolate. Clay picked up another bar I want. I
had some history with chocolate up. These guys have been
around forever, so that was like the first serious dark
(13:27):
chocolate I started buying in like thees. Part of this
is looking at labels, so when you buy chocolate products,
you can be sure your purchase supports a better future
for coco farmers in their families. So chocolate love Very
kel about Choco them too, Yes, I didn't know that.
And so what they're doing is this claim about sustainable, social,
(13:48):
and ethical is based entirely on what Very kell About
is claiming that they're doing on the farm. So they're
they bary calibut, They're like, you're sustainable and ethical? Right?
He kept going other brands that you might see Justin's. Yeah,
for sure. Also Penetrate owned by Hormle Foods, the Endangered
Species chocolate company. They don't make chocolate. They are a
(14:11):
marketing company. The chocolate is made for them by another company.
Does anybody on the shelf make their own chocolate? I
believe well, I believe well theo they're the only ones.
By the time Clay had gone to the whole shelf,
it was clear that what the Mass brothers had done
it was just standard practice in the weird world of chocolate,
(14:32):
and Clay says, the chicanery goes all the way to
the top. Support you to know the Persha Hershi does
not manufacture chocolate at all at all anymore. They are
a candy company, not a chocolate company, and so the
chocolate for them. If you go to if you actually
go to Pershey, Pennsylvania, you will not find chocolate manufacturing anymore. Um.
They buy their chocolate in from big producers, car gil
(14:53):
companies like that, big producers. Um. When you go to
Hershey Park and you're like, ye, they're not They're not
making chocolate. That's also if this makes you want to
break free from the chocolate empire completely, you're not alone.
I just felt inherently like there was just something really
messed up with the system itself. But don't join the
(15:16):
resistance instead, and I wanted to build an alternative system.
Rad shotgun with a rebel commander on a risky mission.
After the break, Hey everyone, I want to taste of
(15:44):
some real wild chocolate. Delicious, nutritious and free of preservatives
or moral conundrums. We got you covered. Kaleidoscope has joined
forces with Louisa Abram and Statler Chocolate to make a
special box to go along with this very podcast. Now
you can say uful flavors from the banks of the
Amazon without having to fight off jaguars and anakondas. Just
(16:05):
visit www dot Stettler dash Chocolate dot com to order
your wild Chocolate today link in the show notes. So
what's the lifespan on one of these trucks doing doing
(16:28):
this kind of work? You managed to keep it going infinited,
Infinited with the right mechanic. I'm with Emily Stone and
Diane Coy. Emily is the founder of Uncommon Cacao, which
acts as a matchmaker for five thousand small farmers in
twelve countries and hundreds of being to bar chocolate makers
in the US. And Europe. Diane is the new managing
(16:48):
director of the Belize Business. She's a Kechi Maya who
grew up in the area and spent time as a
kid harvesting cocao with her parents. We're riding in a
rusty thirty three year old Ford f two fifty through
the back roads of Belie, buying kakao from farmers. So
everything we're seeing as my as part of the Maya
Mountains or yeah, everything here this is sort of the
(17:08):
southern tip and then extends up towards Kyo. Really beautiful.
How many communities are resourcing kakao from that vand UM
tent to eat twenty eight communities in the Biomos. In
the late two thousand's, Emily was living in Boston working
on the campaign to pressure Hershey to address its child
slavery problem. But the more she watched big chocolates say
(17:30):
all the right things, the more she realized the system
was never going to change from within. There's no reason
for chocolate to be causing poverty. Um. It is the
leftover inheritance of colonialism and of a world in which
slavery was legal. So Emily decided to help build a
(17:52):
new system Her vision was to act as a matchmaker
for small farms and being to bar chocolate makers, to
cut out those twelve layers of intermediaries and deliver more
money to the farmers and better beans to the chocolate makers.
And she knew the place to start was the Americas,
which had the old varieties of cacao that the high
(18:14):
end chocolate community craved and no system for getting it
to market in good condition. In two thousand ten, she
moved to Belize and started talking to farmers. They told
her they needed an easier way to sell their beings
at a better price. She said, got it, So she
bought a beat up truck and offered to pick up
their beings right at the farm. Then she built a
professional fermentation station which would help her charge more for
(18:37):
these improved beings. Within a few years, farmers were getting
twice the price for their coca and My Mountain Beings
had become famous. But police alone was a drop in
the bucket. If she really wanted to build a more
just chocolate industry, she needed to expand, and she knew
where to go. I was hearing from people and police,
you know. Oh yeah, my cousins in Guatemala they have
(18:58):
like have you ever been to Guatemalad? And I had
it good over there, and then I get the bus
and you know, it was just kind of like asking her.
I'm like, okay, how did I get from here to here?
Anytime I got to the next bus station and everyone's
looking at me, like, who the f are you? Someone
like asked me. They're like, what do you here? I'm
here to you know, I'm here to look at cacao.
(19:20):
And all of a sudden they all were like cocaw.
I was like, yeah, they've got we have a lot
of cacao. It's like, oh great, That's what I'm here for.
And literally, as the minibus was like making its way
up the mountain, we were stopping at every single person
on the bus as cacao, farm and student. She's meeting
everyone in the community and learning how important they were
(19:42):
to the history of chocolate. They were kept chi Maya
direct descendants of the people who had introduced chocolate to
Europe when they sign a friendly delegation to the Spanish
court bearing beans from these very hillsides. Emily had stumbled
into the heart of chocolate, an unbroken lineage going back
of years, but that didn't make their situation any easier.
(20:04):
Their market were um coyotes, which are basically intermediaries that
drive around these back roads with a stack of cash
and a handgun and they buy and a scale and
they buy whatever the farmers have to sell, whether that's corn, beans, cardamom, chili, cinnamon, cocao, allspice. Um,
(20:25):
there's no transparency around where that coca is going. There's
no technical assistance, and um there's no fermentation. It's all
washed cocao. So yeah, these producers were left without a market.
This was her dream scenario. The cocow varieties turned out
to be excellent old ones, but the cocao wasn't being
fermented at all. The farmers were just washing the pulp
(20:47):
off as soon as they opened the pods, drying the beans,
and selling them as fast as possible. The delicious flavors
that emerge with fermentation were never being given a chance
to develop, and it was all due to the dysfunctional market.
The coyotes were going to pay the same super low
price no matter what. So Emily jumped on the opportunity.
She moved to Guatemala, taught the farmers how to ferment
(21:08):
and drive properly bought the cacao for twice the going
rate and sold it directly to her growing list of
being too bar clients. But the coyotes did not take
this lying down. It's been a huge challenge for locally.
I mean it's been there've been security issues they've been
so it has what kind of like what what kind
of challenge or what kind of security? There were physical
(21:32):
threats made to association members. The battle with the coyotes
came to a head after the government arranged to build
a new fermentation and drawing center for the farmers Association.
Emily wasn't directly involved, but she'd promised to buy the cacao,
which was a key to the deal. But one local
(21:53):
coyote was particularly unhappy about losing his turf, and when
the government representatives came to sign the paper or work,
they met a most unwelcome welcoming committee. Basically, this disgruntled
guy and his family surrounded the building where this signing
was happening, armed with machetes and threatened that if they
signed it like there would be violence, and so they
(22:16):
left without signing. The project never happens. The bad blood
continued for a couple of years, and the farmers warned
Emily and her team not to visit the coyote, and
sort of his family members were like, you know, if
those people come, it's not it's not going to be good.
But the fermentation center got built in the neighboring community,
(22:37):
and once it became clear to all the farmers how
much better the new system was, they made it very
clear to the coyote that the times they were changing.
We have found that over time there's there is a
circle of trust and security that is established by the
farmers themselves, and that the consequences for anyone who interferes
(23:00):
will be high. Since then, Guatemala has become a prized
source of cocao in the craft chocolate world. But that
doesn't mean it's an easy business. Bullets, razors, nails, cement,
you name it, it's been found in a cocao bag.
And sometimes Emily finds herself thinking more like Walter White
than Willy Wanka. So I don't like guns, and I've
(23:22):
never wanted us to have gotten to me. The idea
of having a gun owned by the company out in
the company vehicle, someone from the company, you know, having
the ability to use a gun is terrifying. But Guatemala
is one of the poorest and most dangerous countries in
the world, and a shipping container of cacao is worth
tens of thousands of dollars um. There have been instances
(23:44):
of coffee containers being robbed, um, you know, violently in Guatemala,
and so obviously want to ensure that our cocao does
not get stolen on its way to the port for export.
Uh So, yeah, we've got We've always got guys with
guns following our containers. I hope by now it's abundantly
(24:06):
clear that making great chocolate from responsibly sourced beans is really,
really hard, even when you're not dealing with guns and charlatan's.
Sometimes you could do everything right and still fail. I
thought this was gonna taste amazing, and this was like
gonna be like the like the gold of the forest,
(24:31):
just asked Louisa Abraham, the young Brazilian chocolate maker who
began working with the Santo Daimi ayahuasca cult in the Amazon.
Louisa fell in love with the people. She paid fair
prices for their cocao. She did everything right. It ended
up being so crappy. It was just horrible what to
do when you've just made the worst chocolate in the world.
(24:52):
After the break, I I had fallen in love with
(25:21):
all the story, with all like the like it's so poetic,
like crossing Brazil to go to the forest, go deep
into the forest to get the wild cacao savage um
and and then to bring it back and to make chocolate.
It was just so enchanting for me. After meeting the
(25:43):
Sciento dim a cow collectors on the Peruce River, Louisa
Abraham devoted herself to making chocolate with the wild cocaw
of the Amazon. I want to do something with a purpose.
I want to impact others life. I want to like
believe my mark on this. So she and her dad
bought twenty kilos of cocao for the co op, stuffed
(26:05):
it into their extra luggage, and headed back to South Paula.
She built a micro chocolate factory in her parents utility closet,
and she roasted the beans in her tiny oven and
blew off the shells with a hair dryer and ground
them into a silky paste in her mini roller and
made her very first batch of wild Brazilian chocolate. And
when it had cooled She lifted a piece in her hand,
(26:26):
placed it on her tongue, closed her eyes, and that
the essence of the Amazon wash over her, and everything
tasted so awful for me. It was just so funky taste,
so like ammonia, and and so like unnatural. She ran
it by some others to make sure it wasn't just her.
(26:47):
I gave it to my chefs and to my colleagues
too to try, and they were like mocking of me,
like you went all the way too could to get
this piece of you know, like naturally. Louisa assumed that
she was the problem, and I was like, okay, maybe
I am the one doing it, doing something different. So
(27:07):
I changed the rulest profile. I changed, like the how
I was. I changed even I even my sugar. I changed.
I changed everything, and nothing would work. For the next
three years, she kept making chocolate with the paruce beans
because she was determined to make it work, but she
just couldn't get the taste dry. And while she managed
(27:30):
to get the chocolate into stores around Brazil on the
strength of the Wild Cocows Argent story, nobody ever reordered.
So what do you do when you put everything on
the line to become a great chocolate maker, and you
find yourself making terrible chocolate, Well you need a goog,
someone who could bind deep expertise with almost spiritual insight.
(27:50):
So Louisa summoned up her courage and sent a bar
to our old friend Mark Christian. It was a qualified disaster.
We don't need to get into all the particular details
of flaws. They were manifold, you know. Yep, her bar
sucked and he told her so. But hang on, there
was a shiny silver lining. You can see through the
(28:13):
beans right, No matter how poorly they're prepped, whatever their
post harvest is and so forth, the d NA, the
backbone of those seeds is still there. And what struck
me about that cacao and that bar she made It
was good enough that I thought this was the ultimate
(28:36):
dark milk chocolate, potentially without any dairy whatsoever. That's how
much it was cream puffing the oral chamber. Sorry, if
you've never had your oral chamber cream puffed, you might
not be familiar with the experience. But in the world
of chocolate, or at least the world of Mark Christian,
that's a good thing. Um, all that you know, earthen
(29:01):
milk dairy cream, and who doesn't like cream? I mean,
you know, you know, everybody likes cream. Everybody likes mama. Right,
So it was great, but it was masked. I mean,
you you had you could get the cream, but you
were getting a lot of other detritus with it, like
(29:23):
what you were getting the basics, such as um, cardboard, chalk,
maybe even the black board itself was throwing. It was
all there. In other words, it's not you and it's
not your beans either. They seem kind of great, but
(29:43):
what's up with that fermentation? I told them there's something
there in that valley. You don't let it go, you know,
Let's get this right. Mark's recommendation was fix that fermentation,
get rid of all that funky ammonia, and you might
have something really special on your hands. So how do
you fix that? Well, remember Harvey kit Tell's character in
(30:06):
pulp fiction, the Cleaner. I saw problems. You need that
guy for cacao. It's funny. I almost feel guilty for
showing up and be like, seriously, this is what you
guys do. And he exists. Dan o'darty lives in Hawaii,
but he spends most of his time zipping around the
planet saving Cacal farmers from their own mistakes. Mark told
(30:27):
Louisa that Dan could make her problems go away. So
Louisa invited Dan to her factory and showed him the
cruise beans right away from the aroma, but also the
very dark, almost black, and the color. I knew that
there were problems. I mean, over from Kao has this
funky you know barn ardi. Um. I mean I describe
it as you know, somewhat manure, you know, like like
(30:50):
like cow manure smells um, I mean it tastes rotten.
So he started with some questions. How often do you
harvest the trees? What level of ripeness do you select?
What is the lag time between cutting a fruit from
the tree opening it? Is there a delay between opening
it and putting it into a box to ferment? How
often do you turn it? How long do you ferment it?
(31:13):
And how do you dry it? And and there's even
more substeps, and in Perus, the answer to pretty much
every one of those questions was wrong. These boats are
going up and down the river and collecting whole pods.
Some guys would take their pods, collect them in the
forest and put them on the river banks and they
just roast in the sun. Not good. Basically, it was
(31:36):
all amiss. The ayahuasca cult was picking overripe pods, and
then they were waiting too long to open the pods,
and then they were over fermenting the seeds. And Dan
had to break the news to them. You know, you
have to be gentle when you tell people. I mean, essentially,
what you've been doing all this time is wrong. We're
going to change pretty much every step. Every step. Pick
(31:57):
the pods earlier, open them right away, get those beans
in the fermentation boxes, unplugged the holes in the bottoms
of the boxes so they can drain, turn the piles
every day, keep them covered with banana leaves. But they
did it all, and when the new beans were ready,
Louisa tried not to get her hopes up. She just
made her chocolate like always. Then. I remember when I
(32:19):
first cat the chocolate in my mouth, it was like
it was like a drug. Oh it was amazing. I mean,
has like straight up dried blueberry notes like I had.
People tasted. They didn't I didn't prime them with anything,
(32:40):
and they were like, oh my god, it tastes like
you round dried blueberries into it. Finally, Louisa had a
fantastic new chocolate on her hands, and her company took off.
She added three other chocolates to her line, each coming
from a different Amazonian community with its own wild cocoutries,
and as it turned out, she had dialed her skills
just in time, because the kind of opportunity every Beamed
(33:04):
Bar chocolate maker dreams of was about to come her way,
and he was going to take everything She had to
pull it off. Next week on Obsessions Wild Chocolate, Man,
you must have been furious at a lot of people.
(33:25):
I had a little It was a sectional rage and
a pure rage. I would you know, with a gun
in my hands, that would have killed some people maybe, yeah,
Vulcar Layman. After years of dodging bullet after bullet in
the jungle, he was about to take one right in
(33:47):
the heart. Wild Chocolate is a Kaleidoscope production with I
Heart Podcasts, posted and reported by me Row Jacobson and
produced by Shane McKeon at Nice Marmat Media, Edited by
Kate Osborne and Mangesh haut A Kudor, sound design and
mixing by Soundboard. Original music composition by Spencer Stevenson a
(34:11):
k a Botton production help from Baheeny Shorty from My Heart.
Our executive producers are Katrina Norvelle and Nikki Etre. Special
thanks to Laura Mayor Costas, lnos Ozwalash and Aaron Kaufman,
Will Pearson, codel Burn, Bob Pittman, Daria Daniel and the
team at Stetler who are helping us make a very
special chocolate of our own. That's right, We're working with
(34:34):
Louisa at others to protect the rainforest and make delicious
Amazonian chocolate. Visit www dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com
to taste it for yourself. That's www Dot Stetler dash
Chocolate dot com. And if you want to hear more
of this type of content, nothing is more important to
the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews.
(34:57):
Please spread the love wherever you listen.
All right, Adrian, We're at the corner of Columbus, staring
at the storefront, and I've brought you here because I
know you were on the scene in Brooklyn circa two
thousand seven. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. I'm in
New York with Adrian Anderson, the ultimate Brooklyn food Maymon.
Adrian has been working with chefs and food media around
(00:32):
New York for years, both making the food and making
it look beautiful. I was just getting out of restaurants
and starting to work as a food stylist. It was
maybe still living in Williamsburg, maybe Bushwick around that time.
That's what I was hoping for. Adrian co owned the
studio where all the food magazine shop and she did
(00:54):
a lot of the styling. So when I wanted someone
to walk me through the ultimate cautionary tale in world
of craft chocolate, a tail that has a lot to
do with the looks and appearances, but bygone Brooklyn era,
I knew wh would ask. I feel like we were
at the beginning or kind of the early stages of
farm to table, and I think that we were still
(01:15):
in this era of discovery and excitement about sourcing and
honesty and authenticity in food, and in that like budding
good future suddenly appears a new choppolate maker, Rygan Williamsburg.
The Mask Brothers. Yeah, do you remember when they first
(01:37):
came onto your radar? I can't pinpoint the exact moment.
It was more of a sort of a creeping light
leak at the periphery of your consciousness. Stores that had
the cool food at the time started carrying masts and
it was really noticeable because the design the rappers was
(02:00):
so good. It really was. Every bar looks like it
was wrapped in beautiful, old fashioned wallpaper with minimal words.
In an era when most chocolate bars were still heavy
on the bling, these bars seemed handmade and real, and
the food world gobbled them up. How do you make
absolutely incredible Valentine's Day chocolate? Well, here at the Masked
(02:23):
Brothers chocolate factory, they start with organic CACW beans, the
Mass Brothers. It's very artsy, fancy. Just as important as
that artsy packaging of the bars was the packaging of
the brothers themselves, Rick and Michael Mast, two young guys
with bushy red beards and Victorian clothing, slinging burlap sacks
(02:44):
of cocaw beans for the eager cameras. Mass Brothers chocolate
in Brooklyn. Rick, your place is a chocolate in urvana. Basically,
I love it. What makes you guys so different? Bot
making chocolate from scratch, all in house. We're bringing in
beans from all around all over the world. Right, So
like Brooklyn itself, it's a chocolate bar that's made up
of things from all around the world. So today we're
(03:06):
gonna show you how we make our Brooklyn blend. I
love the showt T. The aesthetic was ubiquitous at the time.
It was inescapable if you were, yeah, the bearded Brooklyn
bro selling, selling cheese or slicking cocktails. Suddenly, the Masks
had fawning coverage in the New York Times and bond appetite,
(03:28):
new shops in London and l a and a global
spotlight as America's breakout Kraft chocolate maker. Their glass walled
Williamsburg factory, where you could watch real live hipsters making chocolate,
became a tourist mecca. But there was a story. There
was that big story. I'm sure you know what it was.
I don't. I don't remember. Yes, that's why I'm here.
Some people in the food world, the chocolate world are
(03:50):
calling them frauds, the Milli Vanilli of chocolate, which is
a very strong thing to say. They were re melting
other kinds of chocolate into their chocolate bars, especially in
the early days when they were claiming they were being
too bar chocolate alloys. That's just going against the purity
the nature of the very earnest looks in the Big
Beard's essentially, a blogger for the website Dallas food dot
(04:17):
org broke the story that would bring the Mass Brothers down.
During their rise to fame, when they were the poster
beards for authenticity, they weren't actually making some of their
own chocolate. They were buying it from other companies, melting
it down, pouring it into their own molds, then wrapping
it up in old timey paper. At first, the Masks
(04:38):
denied everything, but eventually they are forced to acknowledge that
in their early years they'd been re melters. They claim
they've gone straight long ago, but the damage was done.
The shops disappeared, the factory shuttered, and the Masks themselves
faded away. That felt the end after that, like the
(05:01):
expossa had come out. They had been mocked relentlessly. Everything
closed down. It just it felt like it was officially over,
and so we all thought. But now here we are.
Look up at the storefront and tell me what I
see that We've got a hand painted window that says
(05:24):
masked Markets established, and there's a bunch of people inside.
It looks like the two thousand and eleven Brooklyn aesthetic
is alive and well. Yes, the masts are back, selling
chocolate and coffee and housewares and body soaps in a
(05:46):
squeaky clean space that could double as a Williams Sonoma.
The remelters have reformed, but don't be too quick to
blame the masts re melting style over substance. For all
the controversy in the world of big Chocolate, it that's
just business as usual. But to understand just how bad
it gets, we're going to have to head into the
(06:07):
belly of the beast. From Kaleidoscope and I Heeart podcasts.
This is Obsessions Wild Chocolate. I'm Roman Jacobson, Chapter four,
Big Bad Chocolate. All right, so let's actually let's turn
(06:48):
to We are old foods. Here, we are our whole foods.
Whole foods in Brooklyn right on on the planet one
of them. I'm with Clay Gordon, the creator and moderator
of the Chocolate Life dot com, which is the world's
biggest online community for chocolate fans. Clay teaches chocolate appreciation classes,
he consults with chocolate companies. He wrote A Great Guy
(07:10):
to Chocolate, and he was on the scene when the
masts had their big run. We all wanted them to
succeed right because they were m bringing bad chocolate, to
prefer from cheap industrial chocolate into craft chocolate, and um.
They were the people who were the gateway. People came
(07:32):
to them right and they were the introduction. This was
during that strange stretch of the two thousands when chocolate
suddenly became virtuous instead of a guilty treat. It pivoted
into a worldly earnest, possibly even healthy luxury. The candy
aisles exploded with snazzy bars advertising their high cocow percentage,
(07:52):
socially responsible business practices, and exotic cocau surces. Of course,
the first chocolate makers to do such bars really were
tiny operations that walk the walk, but it didn't take
long before they were joined in the virtuous section by
big chocolate. The handful of giant corporations that dominate the
chocolate business. But to look at the shelves and whole foods,
(08:14):
you'd never know it. It's really really hard to understand
what it is we have presented here. So, for example,
there's a brand called Lilies, So Lili's is known for
sugar free chocolate. When most people look at a bar
of Lilies, they'll go, oh, it's fair trade, right right.
The other thing that's really important to know is that
(08:36):
the corporate parent of Lilies is Hershey Harsh Company. Yes,
Lilies is owned by Hershey, and it should be known
that Hershey is a name defendant in a lawsuit having
to do with um knowingly profiting from illegal labor in
West Africa. Chocolate, as you may or may not know,
(09:02):
has some serious issues. U S senators shared Brown and
Ron Wyden, arguing that there is evidence the Ivory Coast
relies on forced child labor to harvest coco instead of
attending school. These children so through cocoa beans on a plantation.
The Washington Post reported in June that more than two
million children were engaged in the practice on West African
(09:25):
cocoa farms. The big chocolate companies don't actually own cacao farms.
They are many links away at the other end of
the supply chain, and this makes it difficult to tell
where the coco originated. So their argument is that, hey,
we're just buying these beans from cargular whoever. The reality
is they got a pretty dark They have accepted responsibility,
(09:47):
many of them by signing Hrican Angle Protocol. They know
that these are issues. In a wave of news stories
exposed the shocking amount of child trafficking and slavery in
the Chocolate Trade Act in two thousand one, the US
Congress responded, led by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Elliott Angle.
Together they introduced the idea of slapping a label on
(10:09):
chocolate products indicating whether or not the product was free
of child slave labor. We need a better commitment, a
stronger commitment from the chocolate industry worldwide. That's Tom Harkin.
Families need to know that when they buy chocolate in
whatever form, that a lot of that's being produced by
(10:29):
what is really an essence, child slavery. To no one's surprise,
the industry freaked out. Chocolate is a one billion dollar
business and a child slavery logo splashed across every candy bar.
Wouldn't exactly be great for sales. Big Talcola said, you
know what, we don't need you to enact loss. We
will take care of it ourselves. The problem ourselves, and
(10:53):
every time their self imposed deadline approach, they kicked the
cocoa pot down the road and they're five years. In
two thousand five, Big Chocolate promised to get child labor
out of the supply chain by two thousand ten. In
two thousand ten, they said they could do it. They
said that they couldn't even trace where most of their
coco comes from. The problem is that coco is a
(11:18):
commodity bought and sold by the shipload by traders in
New York and London, then stored in giant warehouses until
some company buys it. Between the farmer who grows it
and the chocolate bar on the supermarket shelf, it can
change hands a dozen times. It's nearly impossible to trace
that path. Not that some companies aren't trying, all right,
(11:39):
So now you're playing a Tony's chacolon um. They sold
over a hundred million dollars in chocolate. Tony's is a
Dutch company founded twenty years ago. With a singular mission
to eradicate slavery from the chocolate supply chain. Tony's groovy
Piece of Love packaging gives them this Ben and Jerry's vibe.
(11:59):
But there is a key difference. So Tony's is not
a chocolate maker. Tony's is a marketing company, right. They
produce chocolate bars from chocolate which is manufactured by someone else.
So the chocolate is manufactured for them by Barry Calibrats,
biggest biggest chocolate company in the world. That's Barry Calibo,
the goliath of chocolate makers, with more than sixty production
(12:21):
facilities around the globe and eight billion dollars in annual sales.
To their credit, Tony's purchases all their beings from seven
cooperatives in West Africa that they ensure are free of
slave labor, and they pay a premium to do that.
But the fact that the largest chocolate maker in the
world is making all of their chocolate for them makes
things complicated. The cocoa butter for this bar is probably
(12:45):
produced in the Calibut factory in West Africa. And why
is that a problem? Well, Calibut is one of the
name defendants in the trafficking victims protection reauthorization at lawsuit,
and so can we say that they're actually working to
eradicate slavery in the entire chocolate supply chain. They're trying,
(13:06):
for sure, but due to its ties to Barry call About,
Tony's was removed from an important list of slavery chocolate companies.
And Tony's isn't the only indie brand with ties to
Big Chocolate. Clay picked up another bar I want. I
had some history with chocolate up. These guys have been
around forever, so that was like the first serious dark
(13:27):
chocolate I started buying in like thees. Part of this
is looking at labels, so when you buy chocolate products,
you can be sure your purchase supports a better future
for coco farmers in their families. So chocolate love Very
kel about Choco them too, Yes, I didn't know that.
And so what they're doing is this claim about sustainable, social,
(13:48):
and ethical is based entirely on what Very kell About
is claiming that they're doing on the farm. So they're
they bary calibut, They're like, you're sustainable and ethical? Right?
He kept going other brands that you might see Justin's. Yeah,
for sure. Also Penetrate owned by Hormle Foods, the Endangered
Species chocolate company. They don't make chocolate. They are a
(14:11):
marketing company. The chocolate is made for them by another company.
Does anybody on the shelf make their own chocolate? I
believe well, I believe well theo they're the only ones.
By the time Clay had gone to the whole shelf,
it was clear that what the Mass brothers had done
it was just standard practice in the weird world of chocolate,
(14:32):
and Clay says, the chicanery goes all the way to
the top. Support you to know the Persha Hershi does
not manufacture chocolate at all at all anymore. They are
a candy company, not a chocolate company, and so the
chocolate for them. If you go to if you actually
go to Pershey, Pennsylvania, you will not find chocolate manufacturing anymore. Um.
They buy their chocolate in from big producers, car gil
(14:53):
companies like that, big producers. Um. When you go to
Hershey Park and you're like, ye, they're not They're not
making chocolate. That's also if this makes you want to
break free from the chocolate empire completely, you're not alone.
I just felt inherently like there was just something really
messed up with the system itself. But don't join the
(15:16):
resistance instead, and I wanted to build an alternative system.
Rad shotgun with a rebel commander on a risky mission.
After the break, Hey everyone, I want to taste of
(15:44):
some real wild chocolate. Delicious, nutritious and free of preservatives
or moral conundrums. We got you covered. Kaleidoscope has joined
forces with Louisa Abram and Statler Chocolate to make a
special box to go along with this very podcast. Now
you can say uful flavors from the banks of the
Amazon without having to fight off jaguars and anakondas. Just
(16:05):
visit www dot Stettler dash Chocolate dot com to order
your wild Chocolate today link in the show notes. So
what's the lifespan on one of these trucks doing doing
(16:28):
this kind of work? You managed to keep it going infinited,
Infinited with the right mechanic. I'm with Emily Stone and
Diane Coy. Emily is the founder of Uncommon Cacao, which
acts as a matchmaker for five thousand small farmers in
twelve countries and hundreds of being to bar chocolate makers
in the US. And Europe. Diane is the new managing
(16:48):
director of the Belize Business. She's a Kechi Maya who
grew up in the area and spent time as a
kid harvesting cocao with her parents. We're riding in a
rusty thirty three year old Ford f two fifty through
the back roads of Belie, buying kakao from farmers. So
everything we're seeing as my as part of the Maya
Mountains or yeah, everything here this is sort of the
(17:08):
southern tip and then extends up towards Kyo. Really beautiful.
How many communities are resourcing kakao from that vand UM
tent to eat twenty eight communities in the Biomos. In
the late two thousand's, Emily was living in Boston working
on the campaign to pressure Hershey to address its child
slavery problem. But the more she watched big chocolates say
(17:30):
all the right things, the more she realized the system
was never going to change from within. There's no reason
for chocolate to be causing poverty. Um. It is the
leftover inheritance of colonialism and of a world in which
slavery was legal. So Emily decided to help build a
(17:52):
new system Her vision was to act as a matchmaker
for small farms and being to bar chocolate makers, to
cut out those twelve layers of intermediaries and deliver more
money to the farmers and better beans to the chocolate makers.
And she knew the place to start was the Americas,
which had the old varieties of cacao that the high
(18:14):
end chocolate community craved and no system for getting it
to market in good condition. In two thousand ten, she
moved to Belize and started talking to farmers. They told
her they needed an easier way to sell their beings
at a better price. She said, got it, So she
bought a beat up truck and offered to pick up
their beings right at the farm. Then she built a
professional fermentation station which would help her charge more for
(18:37):
these improved beings. Within a few years, farmers were getting
twice the price for their coca and My Mountain Beings
had become famous. But police alone was a drop in
the bucket. If she really wanted to build a more
just chocolate industry, she needed to expand, and she knew
where to go. I was hearing from people and police,
you know. Oh yeah, my cousins in Guatemala they have
(18:58):
like have you ever been to Guatemalad? And I had
it good over there, and then I get the bus
and you know, it was just kind of like asking her.
I'm like, okay, how did I get from here to here?
Anytime I got to the next bus station and everyone's
looking at me, like, who the f are you? Someone
like asked me. They're like, what do you here? I'm
here to you know, I'm here to look at cacao.
(19:20):
And all of a sudden they all were like cocaw.
I was like, yeah, they've got we have a lot
of cacao. It's like, oh great, That's what I'm here for.
And literally, as the minibus was like making its way
up the mountain, we were stopping at every single person
on the bus as cacao, farm and student. She's meeting
everyone in the community and learning how important they were
(19:42):
to the history of chocolate. They were kept chi Maya
direct descendants of the people who had introduced chocolate to
Europe when they sign a friendly delegation to the Spanish
court bearing beans from these very hillsides. Emily had stumbled
into the heart of chocolate, an unbroken lineage going back
of years, but that didn't make their situation any easier.
(20:04):
Their market were um coyotes, which are basically intermediaries that
drive around these back roads with a stack of cash
and a handgun and they buy and a scale and
they buy whatever the farmers have to sell, whether that's corn, beans, cardamom, chili, cinnamon, cocao, allspice. Um,
(20:25):
there's no transparency around where that coca is going. There's
no technical assistance, and um there's no fermentation. It's all
washed cocao. So yeah, these producers were left without a market.
This was her dream scenario. The cocow varieties turned out
to be excellent old ones, but the cocao wasn't being
fermented at all. The farmers were just washing the pulp
(20:47):
off as soon as they opened the pods, drying the beans,
and selling them as fast as possible. The delicious flavors
that emerge with fermentation were never being given a chance
to develop, and it was all due to the dysfunctional market.
The coyotes were going to pay the same super low
price no matter what. So Emily jumped on the opportunity.
She moved to Guatemala, taught the farmers how to ferment
(21:08):
and drive properly bought the cacao for twice the going
rate and sold it directly to her growing list of
being too bar clients. But the coyotes did not take
this lying down. It's been a huge challenge for locally.
I mean it's been there've been security issues they've been
so it has what kind of like what what kind
of challenge or what kind of security? There were physical
(21:32):
threats made to association members. The battle with the coyotes
came to a head after the government arranged to build
a new fermentation and drawing center for the farmers Association.
Emily wasn't directly involved, but she'd promised to buy the cacao,
which was a key to the deal. But one local
(21:53):
coyote was particularly unhappy about losing his turf, and when
the government representatives came to sign the paper or work,
they met a most unwelcome welcoming committee. Basically, this disgruntled
guy and his family surrounded the building where this signing
was happening, armed with machetes and threatened that if they
signed it like there would be violence, and so they
(22:16):
left without signing. The project never happens. The bad blood
continued for a couple of years, and the farmers warned
Emily and her team not to visit the coyote, and
sort of his family members were like, you know, if
those people come, it's not it's not going to be good.
But the fermentation center got built in the neighboring community,
(22:37):
and once it became clear to all the farmers how
much better the new system was, they made it very
clear to the coyote that the times they were changing.
We have found that over time there's there is a
circle of trust and security that is established by the
farmers themselves, and that the consequences for anyone who interferes
(23:00):
will be high. Since then, Guatemala has become a prized
source of cocao in the craft chocolate world. But that
doesn't mean it's an easy business. Bullets, razors, nails, cement,
you name it, it's been found in a cocao bag.
And sometimes Emily finds herself thinking more like Walter White
than Willy Wanka. So I don't like guns, and I've
(23:22):
never wanted us to have gotten to me. The idea
of having a gun owned by the company out in
the company vehicle, someone from the company, you know, having
the ability to use a gun is terrifying. But Guatemala
is one of the poorest and most dangerous countries in
the world, and a shipping container of cacao is worth
tens of thousands of dollars um. There have been instances
(23:44):
of coffee containers being robbed, um, you know, violently in Guatemala,
and so obviously want to ensure that our cocao does
not get stolen on its way to the port for export.
Uh So, yeah, we've got We've always got guys with
guns following our containers. I hope by now it's abundantly
(24:06):
clear that making great chocolate from responsibly sourced beans is really,
really hard, even when you're not dealing with guns and charlatan's.
Sometimes you could do everything right and still fail. I
thought this was gonna taste amazing, and this was like
gonna be like the like the gold of the forest,
(24:31):
just asked Louisa Abraham, the young Brazilian chocolate maker who
began working with the Santo Daimi ayahuasca cult in the Amazon.
Louisa fell in love with the people. She paid fair
prices for their cocao. She did everything right. It ended
up being so crappy. It was just horrible what to
do when you've just made the worst chocolate in the world.
(24:52):
After the break, I I had fallen in love with
(25:21):
all the story, with all like the like it's so poetic,
like crossing Brazil to go to the forest, go deep
into the forest to get the wild cacao savage um
and and then to bring it back and to make chocolate.
It was just so enchanting for me. After meeting the
(25:43):
Sciento dim a cow collectors on the Peruce River, Louisa
Abraham devoted herself to making chocolate with the wild cocaw
of the Amazon. I want to do something with a purpose.
I want to impact others life. I want to like
believe my mark on this. So she and her dad
bought twenty kilos of cocao for the co op, stuffed
(26:05):
it into their extra luggage, and headed back to South Paula.
She built a micro chocolate factory in her parents utility closet,
and she roasted the beans in her tiny oven and
blew off the shells with a hair dryer and ground
them into a silky paste in her mini roller and
made her very first batch of wild Brazilian chocolate. And
when it had cooled She lifted a piece in her hand,
(26:26):
placed it on her tongue, closed her eyes, and that
the essence of the Amazon wash over her, and everything
tasted so awful for me. It was just so funky taste,
so like ammonia, and and so like unnatural. She ran
it by some others to make sure it wasn't just her.
(26:47):
I gave it to my chefs and to my colleagues
too to try, and they were like mocking of me,
like you went all the way too could to get
this piece of you know, like naturally. Louisa assumed that
she was the problem, and I was like, okay, maybe
I am the one doing it, doing something different. So
(27:07):
I changed the rulest profile. I changed, like the how
I was. I changed even I even my sugar. I changed.
I changed everything, and nothing would work. For the next
three years, she kept making chocolate with the paruce beans
because she was determined to make it work, but she
just couldn't get the taste dry. And while she managed
(27:30):
to get the chocolate into stores around Brazil on the
strength of the Wild Cocows Argent story, nobody ever reordered.
So what do you do when you put everything on
the line to become a great chocolate maker, and you
find yourself making terrible chocolate, Well you need a goog,
someone who could bind deep expertise with almost spiritual insight.
(27:50):
So Louisa summoned up her courage and sent a bar
to our old friend Mark Christian. It was a qualified disaster.
We don't need to get into all the particular details
of flaws. They were manifold, you know. Yep, her bar
sucked and he told her so. But hang on, there
was a shiny silver lining. You can see through the
(28:13):
beans right, No matter how poorly they're prepped, whatever their
post harvest is and so forth, the d NA, the
backbone of those seeds is still there. And what struck
me about that cacao and that bar she made It
was good enough that I thought this was the ultimate
(28:36):
dark milk chocolate, potentially without any dairy whatsoever. That's how
much it was cream puffing the oral chamber. Sorry, if
you've never had your oral chamber cream puffed, you might
not be familiar with the experience. But in the world
of chocolate, or at least the world of Mark Christian,
that's a good thing. Um, all that you know, earthen
(29:01):
milk dairy cream, and who doesn't like cream? I mean,
you know, you know, everybody likes cream. Everybody likes mama. Right,
So it was great, but it was masked. I mean,
you you had you could get the cream, but you
were getting a lot of other detritus with it, like
(29:23):
what you were getting the basics, such as um, cardboard, chalk,
maybe even the black board itself was throwing. It was
all there. In other words, it's not you and it's
not your beans either. They seem kind of great, but
(29:43):
what's up with that fermentation? I told them there's something
there in that valley. You don't let it go, you know,
Let's get this right. Mark's recommendation was fix that fermentation,
get rid of all that funky ammonia, and you might
have something really special on your hands. So how do
you fix that? Well, remember Harvey kit Tell's character in
(30:06):
pulp fiction, the Cleaner. I saw problems. You need that
guy for cacao. It's funny. I almost feel guilty for
showing up and be like, seriously, this is what you
guys do. And he exists. Dan o'darty lives in Hawaii,
but he spends most of his time zipping around the
planet saving Cacal farmers from their own mistakes. Mark told
(30:27):
Louisa that Dan could make her problems go away. So
Louisa invited Dan to her factory and showed him the
cruise beans right away from the aroma, but also the
very dark, almost black, and the color. I knew that
there were problems. I mean, over from Kao has this
funky you know barn ardi. Um. I mean I describe
it as you know, somewhat manure, you know, like like
(30:50):
like cow manure smells um, I mean it tastes rotten.
So he started with some questions. How often do you
harvest the trees? What level of ripeness do you select?
What is the lag time between cutting a fruit from
the tree opening it? Is there a delay between opening
it and putting it into a box to ferment? How
often do you turn it? How long do you ferment it?
(31:13):
And how do you dry it? And and there's even
more substeps, and in Perus, the answer to pretty much
every one of those questions was wrong. These boats are
going up and down the river and collecting whole pods.
Some guys would take their pods, collect them in the
forest and put them on the river banks and they
just roast in the sun. Not good. Basically, it was
(31:36):
all amiss. The ayahuasca cult was picking overripe pods, and
then they were waiting too long to open the pods,
and then they were over fermenting the seeds. And Dan
had to break the news to them. You know, you
have to be gentle when you tell people. I mean, essentially,
what you've been doing all this time is wrong. We're
going to change pretty much every step. Every step. Pick
(31:57):
the pods earlier, open them right away, get those beans
in the fermentation boxes, unplugged the holes in the bottoms
of the boxes so they can drain, turn the piles
every day, keep them covered with banana leaves. But they
did it all, and when the new beans were ready,
Louisa tried not to get her hopes up. She just
made her chocolate like always. Then. I remember when I
(32:19):
first cat the chocolate in my mouth, it was like
it was like a drug. Oh it was amazing. I mean,
has like straight up dried blueberry notes like I had.
People tasted. They didn't I didn't prime them with anything,
(32:40):
and they were like, oh my god, it tastes like
you round dried blueberries into it. Finally, Louisa had a
fantastic new chocolate on her hands, and her company took off.
She added three other chocolates to her line, each coming
from a different Amazonian community with its own wild cocoutries,
and as it turned out, she had dialed her skills
just in time, because the kind of opportunity every Beamed
(33:04):
Bar chocolate maker dreams of was about to come her way,
and he was going to take everything She had to
pull it off. Next week on Obsessions Wild Chocolate, Man,
you must have been furious at a lot of people.
(33:25):
I had a little It was a sectional rage and
a pure rage. I would you know, with a gun
in my hands, that would have killed some people maybe, yeah,
Vulcar Layman. After years of dodging bullet after bullet in
the jungle, he was about to take one right in
(33:47):
the heart. Wild Chocolate is a Kaleidoscope production with I
Heart Podcasts, posted and reported by me Row Jacobson and
produced by Shane McKeon at Nice Marmat Media, Edited by
Kate Osborne and Mangesh haut A Kudor, sound design and
mixing by Soundboard. Original music composition by Spencer Stevenson a
(34:11):
k a Botton production help from Baheeny Shorty from My Heart.
Our executive producers are Katrina Norvelle and Nikki Etre. Special
thanks to Laura Mayor Costas, lnos Ozwalash and Aaron Kaufman,
Will Pearson, codel Burn, Bob Pittman, Daria Daniel and the
team at Stetler who are helping us make a very
special chocolate of our own. That's right, We're working with
(34:34):
Louisa at others to protect the rainforest and make delicious
Amazonian chocolate. Visit www dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com
to taste it for yourself. That's www Dot Stetler dash
Chocolate dot com. And if you want to hear more
of this type of content, nothing is more important to
the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews.
(34:57):
Please spread the love wherever you listen.
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