Life+ Meets: Greg D’Alesandre (2/3)
Cacao and the pandemic: how the industry is dealing with COVID-19 and helping people
This is Part 2/3 of our interview with Greg D’Alesandre from Dandelion Chocolate . You can listen to the full interview on our Podcast or read the interview below!
Read Part 1 of Life+ Meets: Greg D’Alesandre, The Chocolate Sorcerer
— What's your outlook on COVID-19?
I’m really curious about how the pandemic impacts crop chocolate in general. I’m curious because we ourselves have heard from a lot of people who want to make their own chocolate.
In the United States, there's a lot of people have lost their jobs. When you lose your job, a lot of times what you’ll do is you’ll sort of work on something that you’ve been interested in working on but haven’t had the time.
I wonder if there’s actually going to be sort of a new wave of craft chocolate makers, who are for one reason or another, getting started during this timeframe.
I’ve got tonnes of inquiries wanting to know where to buy beans. A lot of people have come to us in the past four or five months, specifically around the making side. There are questions clearly around the eating side too, but many more questions specifically around the making side, which I think has been really interesting.
— I think everybody had this sense that the current economic system doesn’t encourage a sustainable and happy way of life. It just doesn’t make for a template of success.
I love that term template of success.
— Hahaha, yes please hashtag me when you use it! Well, as I’m living in Japan, people are moving outside Tokyo. We knew that this city won't be able to offer a job until retirement, but now we really understand that one doesn’t get to live in a nice situation in Tokyo with the current level of salary. I wonder how people will shift to an alternative lifestyle, including myself.
Yeah, I completely agree. Living in the United States when 9/11 happened, it really changed the country. But it didn’t change it in ways that I think anyone at the time expected it would change.
The main thing that it did, is it caused a number of people to be fearful, which then meant that they were willing to give up civil liberties. I think the pandemic is going to have long term ripple effects that aren’t necessarily what we expect.
In the United States, the unemployment rate was very low, for the United States. Now, the unemployment rate has gone up a lot. I do wonder how it’s going to change people’s perspectives, as you were saying about jobs and what it means in cities.
The reality is, the city that got hit the hardest, the fastest, was New York. I think it really starts to raise questions in people’s minds. Urban living sounds awesome, until it like you start talking about instability in jobs.
The other thing that I think has been really, really fascinating is the relationship between the stock market and the real economy.
For example, I don’t know if the cruise line industry will ever recover. It might just be the end of cruises, which wouldn’t necessarily be the worst thing in the world, environmentally they’re not great. There’s a lot of sort of challenges for them.
But the stock market has been doing great. So it’s really interesting to see how decoupled the stock market is from what you would call the economy. I think a lot of people before had seen the stock market is kind of an indicator of how the economy was going.
— For certain companies, they were offering expectations on stability, rather than sustainability. I wonder what people start to expect through the stock market from now on…
I think we are going to be seeing sort of ramifications of this in ways we don’t expect. But I think I agree with your fundamental premise, which is that the way the world was operating was out of balance. I don’t think anyone would disagree.
I’m not saying that there are some people who are happy with that imbalance, but it was certainly imbalanced, but I think now it just highlighted exactly what that imbalance really means.
The craft chocolate industry is certainly no exception. I think we were lucky in some ways. As an industry because we are producing food. It’s not a necessary food, but nonetheless it’s food. For instance, in San Francisco, we’re allowed to continue to operate. If we were a bookstore, we would have had to closed=, and there would have been nothing we could have done about it.
Also, chocolate is something that can be shipped. It’s not ice cream. There’s a variety of food products where you have a much harder time getting it to the consumer. So I think, in some ways, to some degree, we are a little lucky from that perspective.
— Do you see changes in how people enjoy chocolate? (I bought A LOT soon after lockdown)
Chocolate is, I’d say, an affordable luxury. It’s a luxury, you don’t need it. It’s not like you can live without it. But, you know, I mean, there are some luxuries, like private jets, that are not an affordable luxury.
But video game systems or... I always use the example of I often talk about cars. Transportation is often a requirement, but a car is not a necessity, so it turns cars into just some degree a luxury. Um, I mean, you can certainly see it in terms of who owns cars, at least in the United States.
But, but as opposed to a lot of luxuries, $9 or $10 for something that’s going to last you days or weeks — and you can get something that’s the best in the world. Right? Not to say that there aren’t $18 bars.
I think — and again, every country is different. There’s one thing travelling has taught me is that, trying to generalise, from my experience growing up the United States is foolhardy. I’m a white man that grew up in the United States, I have different life experience than most people in the world. And so I should never extrapolate based on that —
I do think one of the things that we’ve seen is that when times are challenging, there’s just survival, and then there’s just surviving with that little bit of something extra to sort of give you a little relief, or a little break from that [survival] during the day.
If all you’re ever doing is just trying to survive — and there’s a lot of people in this situation — having relief from that is is important.
And I think one of the things that we have found from our customer base is a lot more people are giving chocolate as gifts because they’re trying to make friends or family or coworkers feel better, and keeping a connection with them, but also giving them this sort of level of relief... Yeah, it’s a little hard to explain.
— That’s really related to what I’m doing with Life +. You just gave a beautiful description... Can you tell me some of the examples that you hear from your fellow craft chocolate companies?
Certainly, everyone’s online business has gone up much higher than they expected.
Online chocolate sales are not something that most craft chocolate makers have focused that heavily on. A lot of people focus on wholesale. (Back then,) from what I had heard, there was kind of a price point, a breaking point where people were buying chocolate heavily in stores, and above that price point, not so much.
In the United States, there was this mad run on food stores. The distributors basically said, "Hey, you can only buy X number of things from us at a time because we’re trying to keep up with with all of this demand".
When you say X numbers of things, something’s got to drop. And a lot of people felt like or found that one of the things they were dropping was the higher end chocolate lines to go for this sort of lower end chocolate line.
This is one of the things that I think has always been really interesting is if you go direct to consumer, the consumers making decisions about what they buy. If you’re going through a retailer, your retailer makes decisions about what they think the consumer will buy.
So the retailer could be right, but they might be wrong. When you’re going to retailers, you’re actually not selling to consumers, you’re selling to retailers. Your job is to convince the retailer that the consumers want to buy your product. So it’s actually a very sort of different business. So that dynamic has changed pretty substantially.
As I mentioned earlier, we’ve been doing a lot of online experiences, but a lot of other people have been doing online tours. Really early on, Manoa of Hawaii, started doing these Instagram TV videos, where they talk about their whole process, which are just awesome and amazing.
The other thing is, there are some people’s businesses that were heavily predicated on tourism, and some people’s businesses more heavily predicated on the local market. And that’s the other thing that I think is shifting, since tourism is not strong in most places right now.
Because of that, it means you have a renewed focus on your local market, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I know a lot of other people are doing this as well pickup and delivery, which is something that we hadn’t done before because it just didn’t seem worthwhile. But now, you know, it’s certainly been something that has been interesting for a lot of our customers, at least.
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Read and listen more.
Part 1 Life+ Meets: Greg D’Alesandre, The Chocolate Sorcerer
Part 3 of Life+ Meets Greg D’Alesandre: Collaborative ways to make a new category
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Dandelion Chocolate — Website / IG
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