Why is our chocolate more expensive than the grocery store stuff?

Why is our chocolate more expensive than the grocery store stuff?

That’s a good question! And one we think about often.

There are three main reasons for this.

Reason #1: the amount of cacao we use in our chocolate

To be sold as “chocolate” in the United States, a chocolate bar needs to be at least 10% cacao. And not surprisingly, you’ll find a lot of chocolate in stores that have 11% or 12% cacao in them. Our standard milk chocolate is 50% cacao and our standard dark chocolate is 70% cacao, and we don’t use any fillers, binding agents, or emulsifiers. Common “extras” you might see on ingredient lists include soy lecithin, polyglycerol polyricinoleate (PGPR), vegetable oil, and maltodextrin. 

Reason #2: our trade standards

We pay a premium for our cacao beans to ensure fair wages for folks across our supply chain and sustainable farming practices. This makes our chocolate more expensive, but it’s something that we feel is really important: Right now there are 1.5 million children working on cocoa farms in Ghana and Cote D'ivoire (source), and Cote D'ivoire has lost more than 85% of its forest cover due to commodity cocoa farming since 1960 (source). This region of West Africa is where “big chocolate” buys most of their cocoa beans from today.

We also do not believe in “fair trade on mass balance,” which is a practice that allows a chocolate maker to use a blend of fair-trade and non-fair-trade cocoa beans in their chocolate and advertise it as “fair trade.” You might be surprised by how many “fair trade” chocolate bars are using a mass balance certification: Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade International allow this practice, and you can read their side of the story here and here.

100% of the cacao that we buy and roast is traded in a way that respects the time, energy, and expertise it takes to grow specialty cacao.

Reason #3: our bean-to-bar process

We are a “bean-to-bar” chocolate maker. That means we do everything that is required to take raw cacao beans and turn them into fine chocolate. Our process starts by hand-sorting the raw cacao to remove any beans that won’t make great chocolate. We then roast the beans, five kilograms at a time in a coffee roaster. After that we crack them, winnow them, and stone grind them for two-to-four straight days until it’s fine chocolate. We then temper the chocolate, pour it, and package it up for you, and this all happens at our roasting room in Bozeman, Montana! We certainly have some cool machines, but what we do comes down to making fine chocolate in a very hands-on and intentional way.

Closing Thoughts

We won’t deviate from these principles, but we do look for creative ways to make our chocolate accessible to everyone, and we will continue looking for ways to make craft accessible while sticking to standards that we feel proud of.

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