Unwrapping guilt-free chocolate
Money made from mainstream chocolate tends to stay in the countries where it is eaten instead of helping those who grow the cacao beans, but one woman wants to break the mould. By Xanthe Clay
It was back in 2002 when chocolatier Chantal Coady OBE opened a package and a bar of Grenada Chocolate Company chocolate slid out on to her desk. As founder of the Rococo brand – which revolutionised luxury British confectionery when she opened the first shop on London’s Kings Road in
1983 aged just 23, taking chocolate from guilty treat to gourmet obsession – Coady is a tough critic.
She admired the unsolicited bar’s vividly coloured packaging; but she didn’t hold much hope for the contents. Over the years many people had sent her chocolate from around the world “and usually it’s been quite disappointing”.
One taste of the dark, smooth Grenadian chocolate, however, and she was converted. “I realised, although it still had a few rough edges, it was really fantastic technically, had been very well made, and was absolutely outstanding.”
She got in touch with the firm’s founders – Americans Mott Green and Doug Browne and Grenadian Edmond Brown – and discovered that the story of the Grenadian chocolate was as remarkable as its flavour. At the heart of this is a rejection of the model with which makers have worked since the first slabs of chocolate were produced by Joseph Fry in his Bristol factory in 1847, sparking an industry now dominated by a handful of multinationals.
The usual practice is for the chief ingredient of chocolate, cacao beans grown in tropical countries in the developing world, to be harvested by lowpaid workers and bought at a low price. According to biennial industry review the Cocoa Barometer, most farmers don’t make a living wage, and both child labour and deforestation are widespread in the industry.
The beans themselves, after fermenting (a step that intensifies the flavour) and drying, are shipped to countries in the developed world, where a huge amount of value (for which read: price) is added by processing the beans into chocolate. By and large, chocolate is not eaten in the countries where the beans are grown: 10 years ago when
I travelled to the Dominican Republic to see Green and Black’s Fairtrade-supported plantations, we took bars of the chocolate with us so that farmers could see, for the first time, what happened to their harvest.
The result of the standard practice – growing cacao in the tropics, making chocolate in richer temperate zones – is that almost all the money we spend on chocolate stays where it is eaten, rather than going back to support the local economies where the beans are produced. It’s a business, says Coady, in a film made for a new crowdfunding campaign for the Grenada Chocolate Company, “based on colonialism and slavery”.
This is incendiary stuff and, Coady admits, this system is justified by the fact that it is “very challenging” to make chocolate in hot climates as it requires a cool and dry environment to set into the shiny, snappy consistency that is the mark of a good bar. But it also means that, according to the Fairtrade Foundation, just six per cent of what we pay for a bar of chocolate goes back to the cocoa farmers, and much of the rest stays in the developed world.
The Grenada Chocolate Company was founded in 1999 to challenge that. Mott Green had dropped out of university in Pennsylvania and was living “off grid” in a hut on the Caribbean island. He became intrigued by the chocolate drink made by the locals using home roast and coarse ground beans and wondered why it was that “proper” chocolate couldn’t be produced there. Green helped initiate a cooperative of organic farmers and at
Grenada’s Belmont Estate perfected bean drying, fermentation and roasting techniques, setting up a factory to produce actual chocolate. The Grenada Chocolate Company became the first business to produce highquality chocolate in the country where the beans are grown.
In 2012 I visited the company in Grenada as it started shipping some of its bars to Europe via a zero-emission sailing ship. Green picked me up from the harbourside and I sat in the back of his van, clinging to the floor as he drove at hair-raising speed round sinuous lanes lined with nutmeg trees to the factory: a brightly painted residential building on the outskirts of Hermitage, a town in the north of the island, surrounded by banana palms and across the road from a house owned by the Prime Minister.
It was only a few hundred yards’ scramble, across a stream set with stepping stones and up a steep slope,
to see the cacao trees. Their rugby-ball pods sprouted oddly, straight from the trunks, in every shade of orange, yellow, green and red – a sign of the valuable biodiversity in the trinitario trees. A farmer sliced open a pod with his machete and we sucked the lime-sherbet tangy pulp from the pale mauve beans, each the size of a Brazil nut, as we walked back to the factory. Co-founder Doug Browne had died in 2008, but Green and Edmond Brown were continuing the business using refurbished antique machinery alongside hand-made gizmos set up by Green, an engineer by training. A tiny “lab” – more of a walk-in cupboard – housed an air-conditioning unit where the heat-sensitive parts of the process were undertaken, along with the handwrapping of each bar. Past the antique Italian conching machines – which grind chocolate liquor to the
sublime silky smoothness we expect – a Heath-Robinsonian arrangement of car jacks squeezed the beans to extract the valuable cocoa butter. Green himself slept on a mattress in a bare room upstairs near the roasters, Caribbean breezes blowing in from the veranda.
The car jacks are in place to this day, Coady tells me, but the mattress had gone by the time I returned two years later. Mott Green was killed in an electrical accident in 2013. Edmond Brown was – and is – still heavily involved and by then Coady, through Rococo, had gone into partnership with the company. But two years ago Rococo went into administration and, while a buyer was found, Coady unwillingly left and is no longer involved with the firm she created.
Although she is deeply unhappy about the split – especially as money was owed to the Grenada Chocolate Company – she admits: “I suppose the positive thing is that it’s made me really step back and look at what I can be doing in a much bigger way to support chocolate [workers].”
She set about forming a new company, the Chocolate Detective (subtitle: “The finest chocolate uncovered by Chantal Coady”), through which she sells both her own creations and those of reputable makers (her “curated collection” includes bird eggs made from hazelnut praline and Ecuadorian origin chocolate, which are especially covetable). She aims to shed more light on chocolate production, making ethically produced quality chocolate more available. The firm sports a logo designed by illustrator Sir Quentin Blake, whom Coady met through Rococo’s work with the Roald Dahl Foundation.
Coady’s commitment to the Grenada Chocolate Co remains unflinching. The company is still a pioneer, she points out. Since its formation in 1999, countless tiny firms around the world have gone the “bean-to-bar” route, shipping in beans and turning them into chocolate, aided by CocoaTown, an IndianAmerican company that has repurposed countertop spice grinders into affordable small conching machines for craft chocolatiers. But there are still very few practicing what the Coady calls “treeto-bar” production, where the entire route of the chocolate is transparent. The Grenada Chocolate Co still buys all its beans from the farmers’ cooperative, and supports the farmers by providing help with land management and agriculture, as well as paying a 65 per cent premium on the standard bean price.
Now she has a new goal, as the Grenada Chocolate Company needs help. The owners of the factory building want to return it to residential use and so new premises need to be found. Coady has set up a crowdfunding page to raise £10,000 for designs for a new solar-powered factory that will secure the future of both the firm and the farmers and workers behind the chocolate. Rewards for donations include bundles of the chocolate bars, which will arrive in time for Christmas, and simply buying the bars is supporting the Grenadian farmers.
This could be the true guilt-free chocolate: not promoted by the healthy eating brigade, but chocolate that you can really feel good about eating.
‘It’s made me really step back and look at what I can be doing in a much bigger way to support workers’