Over the past few years, I have been very fortunate to have to opportunity to travel to some of the origin countries of the well known Austrian brand Zotter Schokoladen. While there I photographed, filmed and wrote about a variety of stories that we feel are important to tell about the world of chocolate, from quality of life to the quality of the beans.
A recap video from a trip to Tanzania with Julia Zotter sourcing cacao from Kokoa Kamili - this was one of several videos made on this trip.
If there is anything I wish I could impress upon you, it's just how wildly inexpensive a chocolate bar is.
All the years farmers wait for their trees to mature, the labour to maintain and harvest at just the right time, breaking the pods open one by one, carrying cacao for hours to a buying point, the careful fermentation process, the rugged kilometres it's driven from there, then the thousands more it rocks back and forth on an ocean freighter, all before it even arrives at the doors of a chocolate factory where a lineup of incredibly sophisticated machines slowly breaks the cacao down and massages it into chocolate.
That's when we come along, at the checkout somewhere, jamming a hand into our pockets and slamming a couple bucks on the counter to purchase the anticlimactic summarization of all of this incredible globalised labour.
Chocolate is wildly underpriced, and in almost every case, it's at the expense of the farmer. The mere fact that it takes industry disruptors like Kokoa Kamili or Latitude Trade to come into a market swinging, paying well over double what the going rate is for cacao, just for farmers to be able to afford to send all their kids to high-school is a great example of this. Farmers are getting older, in areas that grow cacao for mass produced chocolate, it's simply not a very desirable crop, younger generations are finding other careers and cacao farmers are in their fifties in places where life expectancies sit around 60.
This industry is broken, and there is a surprisingly short answer when I asked Julia Zotter (from Zotter Chocolate) how chocolate makers can make it better: pay farmers more. Or, for a consumer like you and me, buy chocolate from someone paying farmers more.
So this what it’s all about. This is where your chocolate bar begins. It’s a fruit with a thick, almost pumpkin like exterior and a core of flesh covered seeds which, after harvesting, fermentation, drying, shipping, roasting, grinding down and mixing with cacao butter and milk and/or sugar and other fancy processing, it becomes the chocolate bar you know and love. .
Guatemala, with its range of climates, is home to a wide variety of high quality cacao, usually with a loveable nutty flavour, chocolate from this region is one sought after by craft chocolate makers. Some of the plantations we’ve visited were planted 200 years ago, passed down through Mayan generations, today these heirlooms plantations are a big interest to those like Zotter who are seeking fine cacao flavours.
Of course it all begins long before the pod appears, the tree takes a few years before it starts producing fruit, but once it does, the party begins. Pods are hand picked, cut open under the tree and the blazing sun, the flesh covered beans are scooped out, fermented and dried then hauled up and down mountains and valleys where it’s collected and checked by cooperatives sold to traders, then trucked to ports and shipped around the world to factories who roast the beans, then grind them down to a liquid, mix that with things like sugar, milk powder, other tasty things, pour them in bars, wrap them up in some nice branding and ship them off again to stores. .
