The solar panels are "green" technology.

I heard through the grapevine that the solar panels narrowly beat out using wind power but they were worried about the wind encountered at such high velocities and the possibility of killing birds.

I'm a big fan of some of the people who work there. Their heart is truly in the right place. I'm not a fan at all of the company or their chocolate. It is now owned by Emil Capitol which is a huge investment group with literally billions of dollars behind them.

Please PM me and I'll be happy to say who my company is.

It is easy to blame the middle men. It is depressing to me when I see various products in the store and I know what everybody down the line is making. For example, with candy (which chocolate is -- at least in mind of the stores product buyers), the wholesale price is 50% of the retail. Distributors take an additional 20-30% of what is left. That's a lot (and not much left for the manufacturer such as myself). There are all sorts of other costs along the way including packaging which is way more expensive than you'd think. This doesn't just have to do with the food industry but every industry. Unfortunately, if you want your products on the shelves, that is simply what it costs to get it there. Many of the people along the way (such as the distributors) do provide a function. Most stores don't want to work directly with the factory for each and every product they sell and it allows them to consolidate shipping. So while it costs, they do provide value. While we make very good chocolate, it certainly isn't a cash cow in terms of a business --- and part of it is because of the hidden costs on what it takes to get your product to the shelf.

There is a grinder called a "Santha" which works well for small batches of chocolate. It is actually an Indian spice grinder but it works. They are kinda expensive though ($500) so you need to be pretty committed to take it up as a hobby. It produces about 2-4lbs at a time. Takes one to three days.

Our factory is in Orem. We have a "store" but most of what we do is wholesale to gourmet grocery stores or high-end chefs so our store is open when we are there doing the shipping. Often we are over in the next building (which isn't open to the public) where we are actually making the chocolate.

I'm not celebrating Hershey's. I don't eat the stuff. But, he did lower the price by adding sugar and milk (and hence removing the cocoa). This made chocolate available to a wider range of people than it had been available to previously. At the same time, he commoditized chocolate which makes it hard for people to understand the immense amount of labor involved and to have them pay enough so that the farmers can be paid as well as they perhaps should be to maintain cocoa as a viable crop.

Well, part of that has to do with the fact that Hershey's doesn't taste particularly good. I wouldn't pay $2-3 for it either. I agree with the other response using the McDonald's burger analogy. At the same time, there is certainly room in the market for a $6-$10 burger. Yes, they don't sell in the same volume as McDonalds but the customer gets a whole lot more, it tastes better, is better for you, and the ingredients are typically a lot better quality and probably sourced from farmers who care a lot more about what they are doing. If Hershey's tasted better, it would probably be worth the additional few $$$.

My focus as a chocolate maker is about quality. If you want to produce a quality product (as opposed to a low priced product), you have to be willing to pay what it takes to get the ingredients, materials, and skills that it takes to get it to all happen. Not everything about being a capitalist is about paying the very least -- it is about paying what it takes to get what you want. If you overpay, you are out of business. If you underpay, you won't get what you need and your product will probably suck one or more ways. That is just how the world works.

There isn't much monopoly that I've ever seen. There are some huge chocolate traders and companies out there. Many have the resources to create hedges so that the market doesn't affect them in the same way it does smaller producers. However, the chocolate business is pretty competitive. There are many brokers and in country cocoa traders. If one cocoa trader isn't paying the farmers as much as another, the farmers will switch. The farmers are typically poor so they don't feel as tied to loyalty as they might otherwise and they follow the price paid. The bigger problem is simply that Hershey's (as an example) has a low-end chocolate bar that they have to run all the ingredients and final products through the supply chain all to have a bar that is $1.00 (or so --- I don't keep track of their price as I don't eat the stuff) by the time it reaches the final customer. This means that they can only offer a price so high to make the numbers work.

So it is about educating the customer so that they will pay more. We (as a company) try to help educate the farmers and help them increase the quality of their cocoa. (Most of the world's cocoa is amazingly poor quality). If the farmers increase the quality of their cocoa, they can charge more. Hopefully, we will get to buy it when they do improve the quality. With good quality cocoa, the farmers can always charge less if they choose or if they have to. With poor quality cocoa, they can never charge more. Quality provides options for the farmers and in my experience really helps improve the self image of the farmers which is an amazing thing to see.

That's why I said follow the quality. You can't get good quality beans without paying a premium price to the farmers. There is nothing stopping someone from selling crap for way too much though. If the quality is good, the farmers were paid more (and sometimes much more) than they'd be paid otherwise. If the quality isn't good, they might or might not have been paid well.

I'd look to some of the European manufacturers -- primarily Michel Cluizel, Pralus, Amedei, Domori, Fris-Holm, Valrhona (as I mentioned above they don't use as good cocoa as they used to -- I consider it the bottom of what I'll actually eat). A lot of these would probably only be available in your gourmet / specialty food stores but are well worth seeking out.

Funny ....

Actually, Hershey's does taste like baby vomit. When Hershey's started, they'd ship in the milk by rail car. By the time that it got to Hershey's (which wasn't that long actually), it had started to spoil. This would create butyric acid -- the primary acid in vomit and is responsible for much of vomits flavor. Today, it isn't made with spoiled milk and the butyric acid is made by treating the milk with enzymes.

So yes, it does taste like baby vomit. Good call. I do have to ask though .... How do you know what baby vomit tastes like??? ;-)

I answered it as best I could given the limited amount of data I have on their supply chain and not wanting to break down their formula (which is doable) and call my suppliers to find out how much they are paying for their commodity milk and sugar and cocoa butter. This would all take time and I'd probably not be able to answer it with any degree of accuracy until the end of next week and that would be too late to have any reasonable impact or meaning.

Probably the best widely available chocolate would be Guittard. Guittard is run by Gary Guittard and it was started by his great grandfather in San Francisco during the gold rush. I'm personally good friends with Gary and I know where they buy their beans (not all of them but enough so that I have a good sense as to what is paid and we buy from some of the same farmers.) Guittard buys some very premium cocoas (and some lower grade too.) For their premium cocoas, they pay premium prices. Gary (along with myself) are founding members of Direct Cacao an organization that was set up to promote the direct trade of cocoa with the farmers to help ensure that farmers get paid enough to keep cocoa a viable crop and to help keep quality up.

Lindt actually owns Ghiraldelli which is funny. When you buy San Francisco Chocolate, you are actually buying swiss. I'm familiar where they get some of their beans and their beans generally aren't particularly good quality. Their Madagascar chocolate is made with some of the lowest quality cocoas from Madagascar for example -- they couldn't buy their cocoa from the better growers for example Akkeson's plantation where we, Valrhona, and many of the europoean manufacturers buy their cocoa from.

Chocolate brands to look out for would be IMHO: Michel Cluizel, Pralus, Amedei, Domori, Valrhona (though they don't us as good cocoa as they used to). In the US, I'd look at companies such as Guittard (the big one) and smaller ones such as Amano, Theo, Patric, Rogue, Dandelion, Askinosie, Taza, Ritual, Dick Taylor, Fresco, Patomic, etc. There is a new movement in the US for craft chocolate making much in the same way the beer industry went a few years ago. These companies (and others) are at the forefront and many of their owners truly care about what they are doing and the farmers they work with. Among many of these companies is the desire to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. I've been immensely proud to hear how the owners all want to pay the farmers more. Gary Guittard in one of our Direct Cacao meetings got up and specifically said: "We all need to pay even more to the farmers." I was so proud to be part of a movement where this was being said. The biggest hurdle is to educate the public so that chocolate isn't seen as just another commodity so that the public is willing to pay enough that we can pass that along to the farmers as we would like.