ka-ka-sh-ka 1720036 Very actual information about services social welfare….

Are you female? :p

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2005-08-11-sweet-usat_x.htm

Hershey definitely recognizes the 70% distinction. It’s all about manufacturing low cost food for the masses which amounts to unadulterated cocoa content of 0%.

I suppose the Scharffen Berger purchase is a luxury brand burnishing effort, much like Ford buying Astin Martin, and similar to Robert Mondavi making Opus One (”a proprietary Bordeaux-style blend”).

As you point out, in the case of Nestle buying Green & Blacks, Hershey buying Scharffen Berger also helps burnish the corporation’s environmental/organic/fair trade credentials, at leasst in the short term. But will it have any impact on corporate buying/manufacturing practices? More than likely it will only augment empty marketing promises.

And I can understand having a sense of nostalgia about Hershey establishing America’s chocolate tastes, some might say it’s a dubious legacy, but today the stuff is mass produced cocoa flavored vegetable oil.

I was reading a surprising (to me) consumer chocolate market report from ‘03 earlier and it indicated that Barry-Callebaut leads the market by 24%, followed by Nestle 21%, Mars 13%, Cadbury 12%, Kraft 10%, and Hershey 10%. (Lindt’s only 3%!)

You never know, maybe Mars is preparing to buy Valrhona. The ‘cocoa provides healthful antioxidants’ marketing hype has only just begun.

Have you tried See’s King Tut chocolates? I enjoy it when food items are produced for particular cultural events. Come to think of it, one of my fave releases is Hershey’s Mint X-Mas M&M’s.

Hershey pretty much established America’s chocolate tastes single-handedly. He created the affordable consumer chocolate bar at a time when “candy” was king and regular folks couldn’t afford chocolate regularly. He took care to control his entire supply chain, even owning his own sugar plantations in Cuba (hell, a whole town), his own dairies in Pennsylvania (and buying plenty of other milk from the local farmers) and making long-term deals for his raw cocoa beans. He developed his recipe for milk chocolate through trial and error (no one in Europe would help him).

Hershey owns lots of other candy companies, they don’t buy competitors so much as just amass different kinds of candy (twizzlers, jolly ranchers, breathsavers, reese’s, peter paul, york). I think they’d see the distinction between the 70% movement and the normal consumer chocolate.

I think of chocolate like cheese or wine, there’s a lot of room for variation in the different forumlas in the world. Hershey kind of reminds me of yogurt (there’s a sour tinge to it) and European Cadbury reminds me of powdered milk. I suspect some of it might have to do with the differences in milk around the world as well as how they roast and blend their chocolate.

Nestle recently bought organic chocolatier Green & Blacks. I am very curious to see what’s going to happen there, I’d like to think that the organic and fair trade movement could work on a larger scale such as with Nestle, but I’m probably dreaming.