Why We Didn't Know About Craft Chocolate - Part One of Three!

So we have a small confession to make…

We take our food seriously – and more so the eating of it.

• We read menus in advance.
• We do a full lap of the market to deduce what we’re most excited to take home.
• We even mentally roadmap the meal on our plate and figure out a plan of attack, where the end goal is finding the ultimate mouthful.
• And don’t even get us started on buffets and degustation menus.

In our world, every bite counts.

And for someone that prioritizes food over everything, we were shocked when we learnt craft chocolate existed. We never realized that our chocolate “prioritization” was heavily skewed. (It kinda explains why we started the site….)

So we started digging around to find out why. Why We Didn’t We Know About Craft Chocolate?

[A small side note that explains this rant]

In this post, we started talking about flavours in chocolate. The fact that natural flavours in chocolate exists and that we mightn’t have known this is even possible.

Before we start figuring out how to find flavours, we want to get us hungry for them. Because food tastes better when you’re hungry (trust us, we would know!)

So let’s see if this article, the first of three reasons, gets our appetite going…

Our first reason lies in how we shop for our food.

We source the majority of our ingredients and meals from a supermarket, which makes it extremely easy to get a variety of food on our table.

• We don’t need to grow our own vegetables
• We don’t need to farm our own meat.
• We just grab a basket and enjoy a casual wander down the aisles, picking and choosing from all that has been conveniently laid out in front of us.

It’s almost magical. (And when you read this next stat, it’s hard to believe it isn’t!)

“Between 1980 and 2014, for example, the number of items in the average American grocery store tripled, from 15,000 to around 44,000 according to the Food Marketing Institute”.

The Flavour Matrix – James Briscione

That’s massive. It shows just how many decisions we’re faced with every time we shop and how readily available food has become.

But as much as we love an easy shopping experience, it’s created a habit and a strong reliance, where we expect these towering shelves to have everything we need. And instead of having to get our ingredients from the source (hunting and gathering), we’re simply “gathering” conveniently packaged items off the shelves, and continue on our way.

This ease of gathering food has created a distance between us, the shoppers, and the makers of all foods (not just chocolate!).

Supermarkets and grocery stores have removed us so far from the production line that sometimes we don’t question where it came from. And we rarely think about the effort that goes into some items on our shopping lists.

And to be completely honest, we recognize that the combination of our own ignorance plus the shopping convenience has made it so we rarely wonder how food gets into our kitchens.

Bringing it back to chocolate

(because it’s a chocolate website…) What hit us the hardest, is that we never gave chocolate bars a second thought.

Growing up, buying chocolate always meant a trip to the milk bar or the supermarket. We knew the same bars would always be available and the shelves would be lined with the same colorful assortment of wrappers. And that created an expectation. It sets the norm. Which is a shame, because chocolate can be so much more than what we’ve experienced all these years.

It’s also interesting that in a world where we place so much focus on organic and free range foods, we very strangely don’t put that same focus on chocolate. And we’ve never been asked to. Chocolate for as long as we can remember has always been a sweet treat in a brightly colored wrapper, and not much more.

And finally, what we found the most interesting is that, in all our years of buying chocolate, we never stopped to ask:

• Where does chocolate comes from?
• How is it made? (See here for the answers!)

A small change in how we shop.

These days, we try to make chocolate a little more adventurous. We love eating chocolate and we thought a little planning to try something different couldn’t hurt.

We started to look for chocolate somewhere other than grocery stores and the adventure of finding a new bar is a treat in itself. And the endorphin levels sky rocket when that chocolate parcel arrives at your door!

This way we get to sample a variety of craft chocolate, we support craft chocolate makers and farmers and we get a little endorphin hit each time. If you can, try find something else somewhere else. And try it for a while. You might surprise yourself.

Let us know how you buy your chocolate and what you’re looking for! Is it the familiar wrapping you’ve grown up with or have you started hunting around? For us, we shopped at the same place for the longest time and now we’re loving the adventure of hunting around and seeing what’s out there.

We’ll be back with possible reason number two soon! Thanks for talking beans with us!

Where to next?

Reason 2 is the next step from here!

Otherwise, if you’ve read Reason 2 already and you enjoyed this Chocolate Coated Thought, we recommend:

And if you’re still not so sure, check out what events or makers are in your area:

Talk Beans with us!

Got any questions? Feedback? Want to hi say? Reach out below – we’re always happy to chat!

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