Learning Objective: Understand the Ecole Chocolat perspective on the chocolate industry
The Ecole Chocolat perspective
In our ongoing research of both historical and current data, we firmly believe that the fine-chocolate industry continues in its renaissance. There is a continued interest (supported by sales, even in hard economic times) of high quality chocolate products and small artisanal chocolatiers and craft chocolate makers.
After a couple of decades of interest by consumers in the larger European luxury chocolate brands, such as Godiva Chocolatier, now smaller independent regional chocolatiers are gaining support. These focused operations are positioned to deliver both fine quality and value for their target markets.
Chocolatiers in turn are demanding finer chocolate couverture from the cacao growers and manufacturers. Valrhona started this trend in 1986 with the introduction of their Guanaja and Manjari couvertures. Now you will see the addition of grand cru, vintage and varietal chocolates from such traditional manufacturers as Guittard's E.Guittard line, Felchlin's Grand Cru and Peters Chocolate's Adair and Galeton. They are moving to both dark and milk chocolate with less sugar and higher cocoa butter content. There is a trend to dark milk chocolate which is basically a milk chocolate enriched by more chocolate liquor.
Cocoa nibs are showing up everywhere – incorporated in chocolate bars or truffle centers and sprinkled as decorations. Always available in Europe, they are now being distributed across the globe by all chocolate manufacturers. Chocolatiers will need to watch the quality as they become more mainstream.
The lowly chocolate bar has morphed from being made by very big chocolate manufacturers to very small artisan chocolate makers, a progression from Hershey's to Scharffen Berger to Amadei to Dandelion. Also chocolatiers are producing in-house bars from special blends and the packaging proclaims their pedigree. These luxury bars in various forms are on most chocolatiers' shelves and contain high levels of cocoa: 60%, 72%, 85% and even up into the 90 - 99%, up from the 10 - 30% cocoa just 10 years ago.
And finally, traditional chocolate "bark", long the domain of chocolatiers, has morphed into chocolate "bars" of all sizes and shapes - spiced up with interesting inclusions and ramped up in flavor. And more importantly, customers are literally eating them up. Think: Askinosie's Dark Milk Chocolate + Black Licorice Collabaration Bar, Moonstruck's Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Almond Bar, Madre Chocolate's Triple Cacao, Pacari's 60% with Lemongrass, Cocoa Dolce's more traditional Tavalozzas, Recchiuti's Sesame Nougatine Bar, etc, etc.
Speaking of Hershey's, in the summer of 2005 they bought Scharffen Berger, Joseph Schmidt and Dagoba Organic to lay the foundation for a new luxury division, Artisan Chocolate. They recognize the change in the consumer attitudes toward chocolate and want to get a piece of the luxury market. Did this mean a Scharffen Berger bar in every corner grocery? Yes, we've seen that happen and it will eventually dilute the special "brand," just as Campbell's soup did with Godiva Chocolates. In early 2009 they closed the Scharffen Berger and Joseph Schmidt factories to move production to other Hershey's plants. A month later, they announced the closing of Joseph Schmidt Confections after the Easter season because it just isn't as profitable for them as the bar business with Scharffen Berger and Dagoba, which fit nicely into their distribution system.
Cadbury Schweppes bought the organic chocolate manufacturer, Green & Blacks. In a conversation with Craig Sams, Green & Blacks' founder and president, he says that nothing has changed following the purchase. The management team is still in place along with their goals and aspirations for the company. What I have noticed since that conversation is much wider distribution, supported by a very expensive advertising campaign in North America. Cadbury was taken over by Kraft Foods in 2010; only time will tell if that will impact the Green & Blacks' brand and operations.
Also in late 2007, Swiss-based food giant Nestlé went into partnership with Belgian fine chocolatier Pierre Marcolini Chocolatier Bruxelles, a move aimed at bringing the company further into the premium and luxury chocolate market. Pierre consults with Nestlé to develop premium brands, and Nestlé has given Pierre what is the company's first R&D facility entirely dedicated to the development of premium and luxury chocolate. In January 2012, after more than four years partnership, it was announced that Pierre Marcolini will continue his international expansion independently.
History teaches us that change is inevitable, but that traditions can survive and flourish. Favorable trends abound:
- An aging population that appreciates and will pay for products created by artisans. In disposable income, Boomers rival the18-34 demographic.
- Consumer understanding that not all chocolates are created equal and that with chocolate flavor and quality, you get what you pay for.
- Better ingredients are more readily available to satisfy the need for deep and refined flavors.
Along with these come some not-so-favorable trends. One trend I worry about implies that if a chocolatier doesn't make their own chocolate from the bean, that they are in some way inferior. That is not true at all.
Think of your favorite baker who produces fabulous pastries from flour and other ingredients. We don't expect that baker to also own a flour mill for milling the flour he uses in his products. We know he buys the best flour from one or a variety of flour mills.
It's exactly the same in the chocolate industry. These are two very different businesses. One is creative development, the other is purely industrial. Each requires different financial, human and equipment resources.
In the fine chocolate value chain, there are three separate segments of the industry:
| Industry | Product produced | Who does this? |
| Cacao cultivation, fermentation and drying | Dried cocoa beans | Cacao growers, brokers, traders |
| Chocolate and cocoa manufacture from the bean | Bulk chocolate and cocoa | Chocolate makers and manufacturers |
| Bulk chocolate transformed into value-added products | Bonbons, bars and confections | Chocolatiers and craft chocolate makers |
A handful of brave souls may diversify, but the reality is that most people in the chocolate business focus on one segment of the industry. Chocolate making is basically bulk ingredient manufacture, while the profession of being a chocolatier is taking those ingredients (bulk chocolate) and producing more valuable and distinctive products.
As owner/operators, many chocolatiers don't have the time or money to open an additional business. You can decide how much you can afford to spend on human and financial resources in order to run two diverse operations at the same time. Today, there are lots of opportunities for differentiation and specialization, without making your own chocolate.
One of my concerns over the past five years is the very limited supply of fine cocoa beans. As you know, fine-flavor beans only comprise a fluctuating 1 - 5% of total cacao production. With many new artisan chocolate makers now searching for the best beans, along with most traditional manufacturers bringing out new lines of origin chocolate, is there a fine-flavor cocoa-supply crisis coming in the future? We address those concerns and star-gaze at the future of chocolate in our book: Raising the Bar - The Future of Fine Chocolate.
This interesting article is asking the same thing, but from the perspective of cocoa beans in general:
Chocolate: Worth its weight in gold?Chocolate – we can't get enough of it. But cocoa farming can't keep up with our appetites, and in the future a single bar could cost us £7, warns Anthea GerrieThe Independent, Monday, 8 November 2010 Chocolate consumption is increasing faster than cocoa productionFancy a bit of chocolate? An afternoon Kit Kat with your cup of tea? A chunk of fruit and nut? Go on, you've earned it. Except that in the future, chocoholics might have to work quite a bit harder to pay for their fix. The world could run out of affordable chocolate within 20 years as farmers abandon their crops in the global cocoa basket of West Africa, industry experts claim. "Galaxy, Creme Eggs, every kind of £1 chocolate bar will be a thing of the past," warns London chocolatier Marc Demarquette, who believes a bar at £7, or its future equivalent, will be more like it. And Demarquette, who worked as an advisor for a recent BBC Panorama documentary on the troubled West African cocoa fields, is not alone. John Mason, executive director and founder of the Ghana-based Nature Conservation Research Council, has forecast that shortages in bulk production in Africa will have a devastating effect: "In 20 years chocolate will be like caviar. It will become so rare and so expensive that the average Joe just won't be able to afford it." The reason for this unimaginable shortage – which has been presaged by the doubling of cocoa prices in six years to an all-time high over the past three decades – is simple. Farmers in the countries that produce the bulk of cocoa bought by the multinationals who control the market have found the crop a bitter harvest. The minimal rewards they have historically received do not provide incentives for the time-consuming work of replanting as their trees die off – a task that usually means moving to a new area of canopied forest and waiting three to five years for a new crop to mature. "It's hard to maintain production at high levels in a particular plot of land every time, because of pest problems that eat away at the yields and the farms need to be rejuvenated," explains Thomas Dietsch, research director of ecosystem services at the Earthwatch Organisation. "Although research into new varieties and better management methods could solve those problems, the other challenge is that cocoa is competing for agricultural space with other commodities like palm oil – which is increasingly in demand for biofuels." Meanwhile, as the supply of the raw material diminishes, millions of new consumers in the developing world are becoming addicted to the sweet energy-fix at the end of the processing chain. "Chocolate consumption is increasing faster than cocoa production – and it's not sustainable," Tony Lass, chairman of the Cocoa Research Association, told the annual conference of Britain's Academy of Chocolate last month. Despite price rises on the trading floor, precious little reaches the smallholders who make up 95 per cent of growers, according to Mr. Lass, a former Cadburys trader and ethical sourcing advisor who has co-authored a book on the cocoa industry. "These smallholders earn just 80 cents a day," he says. "So there is no incentive to replant trees when they die off, and to wait up to five years for a new crop, and no younger generation around to do the replanting. The children of these African cocoa farmers, whose life expectancy is only 56, are heading for the cities rather than undertake backbreaking work for such a small reward." As harvests diminish on the Ivory Coast, by far the world's biggest cocoa producer, crops in Indonesia, the third largest producer, have been hit by a change in weather systems, forcing cocoa prices sky-high. Demarquette, who makes chocolate for Fortnum's and has a shop in London's Fulham Road, adds that, to make matters worse, the soil in Africa's traditional cocoa fields is rapidly becoming depleted. "In Ghana and Ivory Coast the earth is dead where trees have already been harvested – there are no nutrients left in the soil," he claims. And some farmers in West Africa have turned to child labour to compensate for the manpower shortage. "Production will have decreased within 20 years to the point where we won't see any more cheap bars in vending machines – unless they are made with carob instead of chocolate," he says. "It's because the growers in West Africa only see 2p for every £1 bar. Even if you double that, it's no incentive for the next generation – which rightly expects decent working conditions. Those young people are heading for the cities. They won't stay around just so schoolchildren and commuters can continue to get their quick fix." The good news for consumers is that cocoa, which can only be grown in latitudes within 10 degrees of the equator, is also being produced in South America, the Caribbean and Asia. However Demarquette says it looks doubtful that those areas will be able to satisfy increased demand, "given the speed with which consumption is growing, with new markets like India and China coming along behind and following Western tastes". There is already an upward trend in retail prices for quality chocolate, he notes: "With growers of premium cocoa beans already getting up to 45p per bar to look after their crops properly and fund their future, chocolate will go back to being what it used to be – a rarefied treat." Perhaps the world will be happy to live with that. Mintel figures released last month show that all the growth in the £3.6bn chocolate market is in the premium sector, which means chocoholics may well be prepared to dig ever deeper into their pockets for their fix. "We are currently selling a 70g bar for £7 – and the price will go up, as there is ever more demand for properly cultivated beans," says Demarquette. "Of course," he adds, "there is all the difference in the world between decent chocolate and confectionery that is so full of sugar and palm oil that it doesn't deserve to be called chocolate at all." Sara Jayne Stanes, chair of the UK Academy of Chocolate, believes foodies will save the chocolate industry from extinction by paying whatever it takes for the good stuff: "I do not believe we will run out of cocoa beans, as sustainability is something that affects us all," she says. "Over the past 10 - 15 years, growing curiosity and interest in the fine-chocolate end of the market has created an understanding of how it is different from chocolate confectionery," she says. Consumers must appreciate that "fine chocolate, like fine wine, will cost considerably more, as cocoa farmers stop leaving the land in search of better-paid jobs in the cities. The result will be more careful cultivation of the crops, and a greater supply of fine cocoas." A spokesman from Cadburys doesn't deny the shortage of cheaper cocoa, but suggests scarcity might be averted through Fair Trade initiatives. "Together with other manufacturers and the wider cocoa industry, we have been working on a number of agricultural initiatives to both increase and improve yields," he says. "Our move into Fair Trade was a separate step, to both pay a better price to farmers, and to encourage the next generation of cocoa farmers to stay within the industry." The crisis may well be averted in Ghana, Cadbury's supply heartland and the world's second largest producer, according to Divine Chocolate, a Ghanaian manufacturer that is 45 per cent owned by a cooperative of 45,000 cocoa farmers. "The Fair Trade system helps ensure that the value of farming is delivered directly to the farmers and their communities," says its managing director Sophi Tranchell. "The best route for sustainability is for farmers to organise themselves into larger units, to be able to manage their own farming improvements through improved remuneration, and to put them in a position where they have more influence in the cocoa supply chain. Why else should they continue?" She believes Divine Chocolate has found the right recipe: "Fairtrade – and particularly the Divine ownership model – delivers sustainability into the hands of the farmers, not the hands of the global buyers." But it is in the Ivory Coast, by far the world's largest source of cocoa, where the future of the crop is much more uncertain. "Fair Trade doesn't really exist here," says Ange Aboa, a reporter based in the country's largest city, Abidjan, who specialises in covering the industry. "Young people are moving away from cocoa into rubber, whose price is more stable. And on top of that we have cocoa diseases like swollen shoot and black pod, which have caused a 10 per cent drop in production." The biggest hope, he says, is a Nestlé project to replant 10m trees over the next decade: "But these are only for the cooperatives with whom they work, and the replanting will make up for about a quarter of the trees which have been lost. Their goal is to buy only from the cooperatives in future, and not top up by buying from local exporters." This should result in better quality beans, he says, but the question of whether there will be enough of them to continue to perpetuate the world view of chocolate as a cheap energy-fix is much more questionable. "It's hard to imagine a world without a demand for chocolate, but whether it remains the low-cost snack food it is now may well change in time," says Earthwatch's Dietsch. "If the demand for biofuels pushes up the price of the oil-palm crop it may well supplant cocoa – unless measures are taken for those farmers who still grow it to remain in cocoa production." But one cause for optimism, he says, is that "the cocoa industry is far ahead of other commodities, like coffee, in putting programmes in place that seek to ensure sustainable supplies."
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I also believe, as chocolatiers and chocolate makers, we have to strive for excellence in everything that we do. I very much like the "International agenda for great cooking" written by Ferran Adria of El Bulli, Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck, Thomas Keller of the French Laundry and Per Se, and writer Harold McGee in 2006. I think the principles are just as relevant today and apply to those of us in the chocolate business as well.
International agenda for great cooking
The world of food has changed a great deal in modern times. Change has come especially fast over the last decade. Along with many other developments, a new approach to cooking has emerged in restaurants around the globe, including our own. We feel that this approach has been widely misunderstood, both outside and inside our profession. Certain aspects of it are overemphasized and sensationalized, while others are ignored. We believe that this is an important time in the history of cooking, and wish to clarify the principles and thoughts that actually guide us. We hope that this statement will be useful to all people with an interest in food, but especially to our younger colleagues, the new generations of food professionals.
1. Three basic principles guide our cooking: excellence, openness, and integrity.
We are motivated above all by an aspiration to excellence. We wish to work with ingredients of the finest quality, and to realize the full potential of the food we choose to prepare, whether it is a single shot of espresso or a multi-course tasting menu.
We believe that today and in the future, a commitment to excellence requires openness to all resources that can help us give pleasure and meaning to people through the medium of food. In the past, cooks and their dishes were constrained by many factors: the limited availability of ingredients and ways of transforming them, limited understanding of cooking processes, and the necessarily narrow definitions and expectations embodied in local tradition.
Today, there are many fewer constraints and tremendous potential for the progress of our craft. We can choose from the entire planet's ingredients, cooking methods, and traditions, and draw on all of human knowledge to explore what it is possible to do with food and the experience of eating. This is not a new idea, but a new opportunity. Nearly two centuries ago, Brillat-Savarin wrote that "the discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star."
Paramount in everything we do is integrity. Our beliefs and commitments are sincere and do not follow the latest trend.
2. Our cooking values tradition, builds on it, and along with tradition is part of the ongoing evolution of our craft.
The world's culinary traditions are collective, cumulative inventions, a heritage created by hundreds of generations of cooks. Tradition is the base which all cooks who aspire to excellence must know and master. Our open approach builds on the best that tradition has to offer.
As with everything in life, our craft evolves, and has done so from the moment when humans first realized the powers of fire. We embrace this natural process of evolution and aspire to influence it. We respect our rich history and at the same time attempt to play a small part in the history of tomorrow.
3. We embrace innovation – new ingredients, techniques, appliances, information, and ideas — whenever it can make a real contribution to our cooking.
We do not pursue novelty for its own sake. We may use modern thickeners, sugar substitutes, enzymes, liquid nitrogen, sous-vide, dehydration, and other nontraditional means, but these do not define our cooking. They are a few of the many tools that we are fortunate to have available as we strive to make delicious and stimulating dishes.
Similarly, the disciplines of food chemistry and food technology are valuable sources of information and ideas for all cooks. Even the most straightforward traditional preparation can be strengthened by an understanding of its ingredients and methods, and chemists have been helping cooks for hundreds of years. The fashionable term "molecular gastronomy" was introduced relatively recently (in 1992) to name a particular academic workshop for scientists and chefs on the basic food chemistry of traditional dishes. That workshop did not influence our approach, and the term "molecular gastronomy" does not describe our cooking, or indeed any style of cooking.
4. We believe that cooking can affect people in profound ways, and that a spirit of collaboration and sharing is essential to true progress in developing this potential.
The act of eating engages all the senses as well as the mind. Preparing and serving food could therefore be the most complex and comprehensive of the performing arts. To explore the full expressive potential of food and cooking, we collaborate with scientists, from food chemists to psychologists, with artisans and artists (from all walks of the performing arts), architects, designers, industrial engineers. We also believe in the importance of collaboration and generosity among cooks: a readiness to share ideas and information, together with full acknowledgment of those who invent new techniques and dishes.
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