But with the amount of media coverage and discussion that has come since, and given that this is such an important issue for the fine chocolate industry, we thought it was important to write this follow-up blog post to further comment on the issue. But if the past week has taught us anything, it’s that people want answers with their $10 chocolate bars. On the phone with Alan McClure, founder of Patric Chocolate, a craft chocolate company formed in 2006, in the spring of 2008, Rick Mast admitted that they had used some remelted Valrhona chocolate but weren’t doing it any longer. Products have to be three-dimensional in terms of the product quality, its price, and value proposition, and the impact that it is having on the community and the rest of the world. In general, you will find them an open and chatty group – in fact, you may not be able to get them to stop talking about chocolate once you get them started. Only because they wore clothes like Amish people with long beards.”. “This has been an open secret in the chocolate industry,” Clay Gordon, a chocolate expert with 15 years of experience in chocolate, including as a consultant to chocolate makers on ingredient sourcing and equipment and as a former lecturer on chocolate and wine pairings through New York University and the James Beard Foundation, told Quartz. You were duped and bought into the hipster image and the pretty packaging. “We are from bean to bar and hope to be exclusively bean to bar by the end of the year once our ‘laboratory’ is complete.”. “These three bars are ones that we made,” the Masts told him. “I was confident that they did not make the chocolate at that time,” Aubrey Lindley, co-owner of craft chocolate shop Cacao in Portland, Oregon told Scott and confirmed to Quartz. They have also stopped listing the source of the beans, omitting one of the most critical elements of a bean-to-bar chocolate label, despite proclamations in their book about “connect[ing] customers to the source.” The 2016 line of flavored bars, which include sheep’s milk, mint, and olive oil, no longer lists bean origin, though a tour guide at the Williamsburg location said they are still single-origin with just a couple of exceptions. If you have questions about our Ecole Chocolat programs, please email us at document.write("" + "info" + "@" + "ecolechocolat.com" + ""); and we will be happy to give you a quick answer. So that’s also why I think transparency is important. Now, as a tour guide at the Brooklyn retail location told Quartz, the Williamsburg spot alone pulled in $28,000 in chocolate sales in just one December weekend. As artisanal food surges in popularity, whether it’s chocolate, liquor or jam, the Mast Brothers’ story highlights how a company can have great success selling a product of dubious quality as something “artisanal” or “handcrafted” with beautiful packaging and handsome, bearded founders. To be clear, there are many businesses in the chocolate industry that melt chocolate made by others to create their own bars that they sell in their packaging. In a recent article for Huffington Post entitled “Peak Mast Brothers (It Was Never About The Beards)“, Simran Sethi the author of a new book entitled Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love“, in collaboration with Clay Gordon from Chocolate Life, eloquently describe the process of making chocolate from the bean. 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