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