The man who made Britain fall in love with dark chocolate
When we think ‘ organic food’, our minds automatically switch to the idea of someone in a loose, calico smock wearing Birkenstock sandals and wittering on about climate change.
So when I meet Craig Sams, one of the pioneers of natural food products in Britain, it comes as something of a surprise.
Deeply tanned, with his openneck shirt, wavy grey hair and craggy good looks, Sams has more the appearance of an ageing hollywood star than the creator of food brands.
In the 1970s, with the promotional support of brown rice fans Pink Floyd, Sams opened a small macrobiotic restaurant on the fashionable Portobello Road in notting hill, west London.
Yoko Ono, widow of John Lennon, was among the first clients. next door he founded the Ceres grain shop. With his wife Jo Fairley, formerly forof the Mail on Sunday, he is better known for launching hing Green & Black’s. The couple can rightly lay claim to revolutionising the taste and ingredients of chocolate in Britain. Consumers in the UK eat more sweets and chocolate per head than anyone else in the world, as will be seen when most of us indulge this holiday.
The honorific title of president of Green & Black’s stays with Sams even though the brand has changed ownership several times.
he hosts chocolate tasting events for employees at his home in hastings, in east Sussex, and travels the world as a roving ambassador for the brand. The restless natural foods entrepreneur is currently seeking to turn an organic energy drink Gusto (already on sale at posh supermarket Whole Foods) into a nationally available leisure drink.
SAMS’s discovery of chocolate was an accident. In 1982, as a niche player in the organic food market, he overreached and found himself stuck with a 55,000 sq ft warehouse in Willesden, north-west London, full of kidney beans, which he found difficult to sell.
The bank, which had a debenture over his whole enterprise, sought to close him down. he begged for more time.
‘In those days bank managers were still allowed to think,’ Sams says. ‘The manager gave me 30 days to sort things out.’
Sams cleared enough stock to pay a £90,000 loan, bought out his fellow investors and was left with his peanut butter brand Whole earth, some jam and ginseng roots. As a result of problems with his peanuts, he stumbled into chocolate after finding out one of his suppliers grew cocoa beans as well.
It was a light-bulb moment. At the time only the Swiss chocolatier Lindt was making 70pc dark chocolate. Lindt had decided it couldn’t be marketed in the UK because Cadbury and others had ruined British chocolate taste buds by loading up our favourite chocolate brands with sugar.
even the darkest British chocolate, Bournville, mainly used for cooking, had just 40pc cocoa content. Sams and Fairley decided to get a sample of the African cocoa beans made up in a French lab to see what they were going to taste like.
‘We loved it and my wife came up with the name Green & Black’s,’ he said, explaining that the name represented the organic ingredients and the very dark colour.
The next task was to find distribution. First port of call was Waitrose who sent it back unopened with a note saying ‘we’ve already got cooking chocolate’. There’s been a change of mind, however. The supermarket is now Green & Black’s biggest customer.
Sams stuck with the project launched in the UK and remarkably found a US importer, having originally been told that Americans would never eat anything so bitter.
‘It took off like a rocket,’ he says. ‘There were a lot of people out there who wanted a different kind of chocolate.’
The concept of Green & Black’s may have been born in Britain but it is manufactured in Italy.
Sams says: ‘They are artisans. The key with a mass market brand is that every bar tastes exactly the same as its predecessor. That’s difficult when you get up into the higher cocoa solids. They have the ability to take cocoa beans from different shipments and decide how long to roast them, and the blend, to get the same consistent flavour.’ Cadbury came to Sams and Fairley with an offer they couldn’t refuse, buying a 5pc stake with an option to take over the rest. Between 2000 and 2005, when Cadbury took full control, Green & Black’s went from a £2m niche brand to a £26m brand. Sams acknowledges there was criticism from chocoholics who feared it wouldn’t taste the same. But true to pledges, Cadbury has not interfered with the formula and it is still made by the same Italian firm.
THERE was tension at the time of the Kraft takeover of Cadbury in 2010, but it now lives quite comfortably as a boutique brand within Mondelez, Kraft’s snack and confectionery spin-off.
Sams is now seeking to repeat the success of G&B with Gusto, which started out as a Dutch energy drink in the 1990s.
he used the crowdfunding site Crowdcube, aiming to raise an initial £180,000, but was 230pc overfunded with nearly half a million pounds in the kitty.
‘It’s fair trade and its fantastic. It’s the healthy, sane alternative to Red Bull,’ he asserts.
At present it is only to be found in Whole Foods.
But given Sams’s record as one of the great natural food innovators, it could well become next big thing for one of the big food conglomerates, all of which are searching for brands that appeal to health-conscious hipsters.