Life+ Meets: Greg D’Alesandre (3/3)
Collaborative ways to make a new category
This is the final part of our interview with Greg D’Alesandre from Dandelion Chocolate. Check out our Podcast or read Part 1 and 2 of this interview (links below)
— Our podcast is focused on early-stage consumer startup founders. In most cases, they seem to be very alone. Can you tell us a bit about the relationship you have with the other companies and how you kind of brought up that sense of community amongst those companies?
I appreciate you sort of giving me some credit for that. It’s not just me. Maybe chocolates unique this way. The people who get into chocolate tend to get into chocolate because they love it. They love chocolate. They love tasting chocolate. But they love tasting other people’s chocolate too.
I guess that’s probably true in most cases you get into industries and around things that you’re sort of excited about, right? But there’s something really interesting about how a lot of us are using the same things. You can talk about your similarities and your differences.
In a market that’s sort of changing rapidly, such as craft chocolate, it’s really important to rely on other people for information and building a network.
I know early on, we had tonnes of help early on. French Broad Chocolate out of Asheville, North Carolina, let us come let us fly there and try out a tempering machine that we were considering buying. It was a day of their production gone to allow us to try this, which was incredibly generous considering they didn’t know us at all!
There’s a lot of these examples of people who went out of their way to help us. I’m just about every piece of what we have today.
We originally learned about packing from Bar Au Chocolat, who is
a chocolate maker in Los Angeles, Nicole. She told us about her winnower, which is how we found PACKINT, and we now have a lot of their equipment. A lot of chocolate makers helped us early on and gave us thoughts, gave us guidance, to point us in the right direction.
The other thing is ーbecause we’re such a small industryー we’re this sort of interconnected web.
Most people are using equipment from a small set of companies. It’s not like there are thousands of companies supplying equipment. The same thing on the bean side. While there are smaller people who are growing beans, a lot of people are getting beans from Maya mountain, Coast Esmerelda, Koko Kamili, Buki Ali…
If we don’t do a good job of telling people who we’re working with, they might not work with those people. And if we’re the only people working with them, they might not continue working in this room.
In the cocoa industry, people have the option to try to make a better product and sell it on the craft market, or spend less energy and sell it the commodity market. It’s an active choice every cocoa producer makes for their business.
I think for some of them, they don’t have the necessary access to people who would buy speciality cocoa. For the people who do have access, and the people who are selling speciality cocoa, they’re making an active decision.
The reality is, if people don’t buy their beans, farmers will do something else. Same on the equipment side. They’re taking a risk that there’s enough industry there to build a business.
I clearly fundamentally believe that it’s just practical.
It’s good business to ensure that the whole business is visible. I mentioned the videos that Manoa does. Those videos that Manoa does are educating other people on craft chocolate and they’re gonna find us.
One of the things we started doing is origin stories, we essentially are buying chocolate from five of the makers. Normally we don’t sell other makers’ chocolate, in Japan we did, but not in the United States, in part because a lot of other companies do their own subscription services, their stores and all these kinds of things.
We have a conversation with the cocoa producer, and then with five other makers. So we all sort of chat about making chocolate by these beans and how we work.
In a pandemic where your production is a little shaky, it’s important to be able to select the product line. It also introduces our customer base to a bunch of other chocolate makers, which we believe will help get them more excited about chocolate. And most customer’s won’t be like “Oh, well I’m not buying Dandelion now that I have found Chequessett Chocolate out in Cape Cod”.
I don’t fundamentally believe that the way this industry works is that people only opt to buy from one person/company.
The other thing is, it’s just more fun to be involved in an industry when you have friends and you can talk about what you’re doing and the trials and tribulations.
My best friends come from the chocolate industry. I still have friends from the work I did in the tech world and college. But the people I talk to most often, the people who are closest to what I’m doing in my everyday life, are other people in the chocolate industry.
The one other thing I’ll add is that, as an owner of a business ー there’s a lot of great team members we have at Dandelion that I love dearlyー but they work for you. There is a dynamic around that.
It took me time to learn that it’s important to make sure that you have a network outside your immediate colleagues and company.
When you’re working at a company, you have most of your friends or you know who you’re working with. When you’re running a company, you can’t have that same dynamic. And so it really is important to get that support from other people who basically understand what’s going on, but you don’t have that same sort of level of power dynamic — which is a dynamic you have to be really respectful of.
— How does the day to day communication happen? I understand that you had chocolate fairs in many cities. How has communication changed?
There are a fair bit of Zoom conversations that happen. Whatsapp is used heavily worldwide. So there’s a lot of sort of group-based conversation in WhatsApp, where people are asking questions to groups to try to get answers , things like that. Instagram has been a great way to keep up with what’s going on!
— Nice. Is there a way for like UK listeners to kind of get Dandelion Chocolate?
Yes, you can find us on @cocoarunners, but there’s great UK Chocolate makers such as @pumpstreetchocolate, @choctreescotland, @nearynogschocolate, @firetreechocolate and @dormousechocs!
—All right, thank you for the great interview! Talk to you soon. Bye!
Bye!
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Read and listen more.
Part 1 of Life+ Meets: Greg D’Alesandre, The Chocolate Sorcerer
Part 2 of Life+ Meets Greg D’Alesandre, Cacao and the pandemic: How the industry is dealing with COVID-19 and helping people
Find us.
Dandelion Chocolate — Website / IG
Life+ — Website / IG / Podcast
