Can we Hack the Market to Give us VARIETIES of WHOLE Sipping Chocolate?
Here’s a future I want for our city. We go to a random coffeeshop. We order sipping chocolate. We get the real thing.
This is not happening right now. What you usually get is some variation of Swiss Miss. Weak, sugary, watery, soulless.
This is not the sipping chocolate that I know. Gone is the silky texture, the lazy afternoon viscosity, the many aromas and flavors that I remember from my childhood.
After a whole lot of experimentation and visits to speciality chocolate shops, here’s my conclusion: most cafes serve sipping chocolate that isn’t whole. Something is missing.
How did we end up here? Let’s trace the story of chocolate to find the answer.
Our journey toward solid state chocolate
Mayans and Aztecs bred cacao for millennia. A few hundred years ago, Spanish conquistadors brought it to Europe. The Europeans invented a process to turn cacao into glorious bars that snap in your fingers and then melt in your mouth. Solid state chocolate has since become a worldwide billion-dollar industry.
The wonderful volume and variety of chocolate that we now have is a testament to the power of the free market. Leave inventors, artisans and entrepreneurs to do their jobs, and we’ll get what we want — more, better and cheaper.
The story of chocolate also shows the dark side of capitalism. Its unrelenting drive for efficiency and scale can leave dead bodies in the wayside. In the case of chocolate this is almost literal. Chocolate isn’t the cause of lawlessness and poverty in the Ivory Coast, but it certainly benefits from it.
Scale and efficiency also drives uniformity. Complexity is difficult to scale. The key inventions that made chocolate a global phenomenon were alkalinization and the removal of cacao butter. These transform cacao into powdered cocoa, a commodity which is much easier to store, transport and trade.
The tradeoff has been a loss in flavor. Alkalinization of cacao is like autotune in music. It tames the wildness of cacao, but it also removes the possibilities of delicious outliers. Removing cacao butter feels like turning off the bass in your favorite song. It becomes an empty shell of what it could have been.
Fortunately, this is not the only storyline of chocolate.
The secret history of flow state chocolate
My apologies if I sound like a chocolate snob, but I am haunted by memories of whole sipping chocolate, which makes anything less taste like a pale imitation. I invite you to join us in this secret history, and you will understand what I’m talking about.
Europe was not the only place the Spaniards brought cacao to. For 250 years, galleons plied the Pacific, trading goods between the Americas and Asia, via Acapulco and Manila. Unlike frigid Europe, the cacao plant found welcoming soil in the Philippines.
It was not only the soil that embraced cacao. Philippine cacao probably started as garden trees of colonial officials and missionary friars. Cacao eventually propagated across the backyards of Filipino families through many generations.
Since the American colonization, there have also been waves of efforts from farmers, industrialists and the government to grow cacao on a commercial scale.
So here we are after 500 hundred years since Magellan opened up our economic, cultural and botanical trade with Latin America. We are close enough to tradition to be haunted by whole sipping chocolate, but too far from the soil to make it ourselves, bean-to-cup.
We have moved in droves to the city. We have plugged ourselves in global business. We always compare ourselves to the first world, and tend to only see what we lack. Yet if we look at our own past, we see that this city has never had the wealth and opportunity it has today.
Will all this just mean taller buildings, faster cars, and ever more sophisticated forms of signalling status?
Can we at least get a good variety of whole sipping chocolate?
The craft chocolate movement gets it
Fleur owns a specialty chocolate shop called Florentina in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She roasts her cacao herself, cacao which she sources from farms that have built a reputation for unique flavors. She also sells chocolates from around the world with the same mindset. They don’t have the scale and unrelenting consistency of a mass-produced chocolate bar —that is, they could surprise you with unexpected flavors.
It turns out Fleur is just one of many chocolate makers and consumers that are rebelling against the chocolate status quo. Part of it is to create an alternative to a supply chain plagued by child labor and modern-day slavery. My guess is that they are also haunted. Once you have tasted a bar crafted by people who obsess about chocolate, lesser bars will only remind you of what you are missing.
These craft chocolate bars are whole and come in a variety we should expect from a fruit of nature.
Hacking the market
I’ve lived life long enough with myself to know my strengths and weaknesses. I’ve met enough cacao farmers, fermenters, roasters, chocolate makers, baristas and shop owners to appreciate their work — and know that it takes years to master their craft. Theirs is not a game I am meant to play.
What I do know is hustle, which is startup shorthand for the unsexy work of selling, marketing, building a team, working with partners and suppliers, developing repeatable processes, and just doing whatever it takes to get a business off the ground. This feels like play to me.
Here’s my initial hypothesis: the easiest way for me to make an impact in my city — profitably — is to bring top quality sipping chocolate to three customer segments:
- End users: those who consume sipping chocolate both at home and in coffee shops
- Coffeeshop owners and baristas
- Businesses that use chocolate as a raw material
Next step is too get to know these segments well enough to market and sell to them — to know their language. I have some initial assumptions on how to brand the product and bring it to market. My work will be to prototype the business to test these assumptions and iterate to find a model that works.
If you’re familiar with the business model canvas, here’s v1.0 for Flowstate — yup, that’s the brand name.
Standing on the shoulders of tradition but not be shackled by it
If you’re from my city, Cebu, you might have noticed that I have not used words related to our tradition of sipping chocolate — tablea and sikwate.
This is deliberate. These words are powerful. When I started introducing various kinds of sipping chocolate to friends and family using these words, it seemed to limit our exploration. Sikwate, the traditional sipping chocolate of Cebu, has a very strong identity: it is dark roasted and minimally fermented.
My pet theory on cacao is that it is never performs solo. It needs to play in a duet, at the very least. Sikwate, for instance, is designed for a trio: cacao and sugar dance in liquid, and is paired with traditional rice-based pastries or bread. Advanced sikwate drinkers enjoy cacao in a quartet. I wonder who the crazy genius was that thought of adding mango to the troupe.
We are missing out if we don’t let cacao play in other genres. The ancient Mayans and Aztecs used chilli as cacao’s main partner. Modern Mexicans add sugar, cinnamon and cornstarch to the mix. The Europeans were the ones who brought cacao and sugar together. They also made that brilliant addition that we now take for granted — milk.
Can we bring together enough consumers, baristas and coffee shop owners to produce a variety of preparations, similar to the range we have for coffee? Could this be enough of an economic force to motivate variety in fermentation and roasting — and all the way back to variety in cacao plant genetics?
I guess we’ll just have to find out.
Follow Flowstate to see where this story goes
- Medium.com/flowstate-chocolate (meta)
- Facebook.com/flowstate.ph
- Instagram.com/flowstate.ph
- Twitter.com/flowstateph
- Meetup.com/CebuChocolate (chocolate tasting classes)
- Flowstate.ph
Here’s prototype 1.0:
