Chocolate/ Cacaoism - Waking Up
I am so blessed and lucky in my life. One of these ways is that I have a small galaxy of early memories from Fun Fridays in my K/1 years at Chesterfield Day School. CDS is a small montessori school in suburban St. Louis Missouri and Darcell Butler was my teacher and one of the warmest people in my life. Darcell is a short vivacious champion of the children and boy does she love chocolate, specifically Hershey's Kisses. She loves chocolate so much that most of our Fun Fridays, which were creatively driven activity days that broke from the regular curriculum, involved lots of chocolate. For example I remember having a science themed day where we learned about soil composition and replicated the process out of mashed oreos for dirt and gummy worms. During the most epic set of Fun Fridays ever we, as a class, built a scalable model of the Grand Canyon out of Hershey Kisses. Mrs. Butler always had at hand at least one bag of Hershey's Kisses and she would share them only when she was particularly proud of your accomplishment, so I perhaps the comfort I derive from chocolate is a contrived affirmation that I am succeeding -- thank you Mrs. Butler. And even if it is, I don’t mind. Chocolate is the best.
Fast forward fifteenish years, I am entering my junior year at Reed College as an economics major. Early on the department starts advising us to think about what topic we could commit to studying for a year through an economic lens. So with that in the back of my brain, its early October and I go about my daily routine. As randomly as the school bus scenes in Mean Girls, I am hit with what feels like a ton of bricks as I a stare at some generic picture of chocolate truffles on tumblr and realize with complete ferocity that my thesis can only and must be about chocolate. Luckily after I started doing research, I found out there was this Craft Chocolate revolution going on in America and I started utilizing every resource Reed had to offer so I could find these magical people making chocolate from scratch. In this phase of research I also started finding articles concerned about the sustainability of the current chocolate market and overall these articles predicted a doomsday future with no chocolate! This further light my fuse because I refuse to live in a world without chocolate.
It took me 5 months to finally meet up with a local chocolate maker, Woodblock Chocolate, and on the spot I was introduced and led to Meridian Cacao where I spent the next year and a half working on my thesis while also working on getting the company off the ground. As the second person in a budding company I got to have my hands in everything from building the production space and our machines to assisting in managing the business while my boss traveled on sourcing trips. Getting such a close look at running a cocoa business was a huge help in writing my thesis and gave me access to both producers and chocolate makers. The backbone of my thesis from an economics standpoint, had to be analyzing specialty coffee market and the sourcing standards they have developed in the last 20+ years.
Overall learning a market from seed to cup (coffee) or seed to bar (chocolate) strengthened my mind and resolve that positive changes in a market can happen over time. In the last few years as Craft Chocolate has continued to thrive, scientifically rigorous standards for quality control and production are needed. I hope to work towards building those standards in my life. As I have mentioned, political consumerism and the consumer demand it drives are huge components in driving this change. Supporting business that buy under direct trade or relationship-building practices spreads the signal that sustainable sourcing is preferred over conventional and over time as more people prioritize these values, I hope to see a general market shift. These values that I have developed by learning through my connection to the specialty chocolate and coffee markets now drive all of my food buying choices these days. I have a deep appreciation for food supply chains in general.
signing off
Anjuli