All right, Adrian, We're at the corner of Columbus, staring at the storefront, and I've brought you here because I know you were on the scene in Brooklyn circa two thousand seven.

Is that correct?

Yeah, that's correct.

I'm in New York with Adrian Anderson, the ultimate Brooklyn food Maymon.

Adrian has been working with chefs and food media around New York for years, both making the food and making it look beautiful.

I was just getting out of restaurants and starting to work as a food stylist.

It was maybe still living in Williamsburg, maybe Bushwick around that time.

That's what I was hoping for.

Adrian co owned the studio where all the food magazine shop and she did a lot of the styling.

So when I wanted someone to walk me through the ultimate cautionary tale in world of craft chocolate, a tail that has a lot to do with the looks and appearances, but bygone Brooklyn era, I knew wh would ask.

I feel like we were at the beginning or kind of the early stages of farm to table, and I think that we were still in this era of discovery and excitement about sourcing and honesty and authenticity in food, and in that like budding good future suddenly appears a new choppolate maker, Rygan Williamsburg.

The Mask Brothers.

Yeah, do you remember when they first came onto your radar?

I can't pinpoint the exact moment.

It was more of a sort of a creeping light leak at the periphery of your consciousness.

Stores that had the cool food at the time started carrying masts and it was really noticeable because the design the rappers was so good.

It really was.

Every bar looks like it was wrapped in beautiful, old fashioned wallpaper with minimal words.

In an era when most chocolate bars were still heavy on the bling, these bars seemed handmade and real, and the food world gobbled them up.

How do you make absolutely incredible Valentine's Day chocolate?

Well, here at the Masked Brothers chocolate factory, they start with organic CACW beans, the Mass Brothers.

It's very artsy, fancy.

Just as important as that artsy packaging of the bars was the packaging of the brothers themselves, Rick and Michael Mast, two young guys with bushy red beards and Victorian clothing, slinging burlap sacks of cocaw beans for the eager cameras.

Mass Brothers chocolate in Brooklyn.

Rick, your place is a chocolate in urvana.

Basically, I love it.

What makes you guys so different?

Bot making chocolate from scratch, all in house.

We're bringing in beans from all around all over the world.

Right, So like Brooklyn itself, it's a chocolate bar that's made up of things from all around the world.

So today we're gonna show you how we make our Brooklyn blend.

I love the showt T.

The aesthetic was ubiquitous at the time.

It was inescapable if you were, yeah, the bearded Brooklyn bro selling, selling cheese or slicking cocktails.

Suddenly, the Masks had fawning coverage in the New York Times and bond appetite, new shops in London and l a and a global spotlight as America's breakout Kraft chocolate maker.

Their glass walled Williamsburg factory, where you could watch real live hipsters making chocolate, became a tourist mecca.

But there was a story.

There was that big story.

I'm sure you know what it was.

I don't.

I don't remember.

Yes, that's why I'm here.

Some people in the food world, the chocolate world are calling them frauds, the Milli Vanilli of chocolate, which is a very strong thing to say.

They were re melting other kinds of chocolate into their chocolate bars, especially in the early days when they were claiming they were being too bar chocolate alloys.

That's just going against the purity the nature of the very earnest looks in the Big Beard's essentially, a blogger for the website Dallas food dot org broke the story that would bring the Mass Brothers down.

During their rise to fame, when they were the poster beards for authenticity, they weren't actually making some of their own chocolate.

They were buying it from other companies, melting it down, pouring it into their own molds, then wrapping it up in old timey paper.

At first, the Masks denied everything, but eventually they are forced to acknowledge that in their early years they'd been re melters.

They claim they've gone straight long ago, but the damage was done.

The shops disappeared, the factory shuttered, and the Masks themselves faded away.

That felt the end after that, like the expossa had come out.

They had been mocked relentlessly.

Everything closed down.

It just it felt like it was officially over, and so we all thought.

But now here we are.

Look up at the storefront and tell me what I see that We've got a hand painted window that says masked Markets established, and there's a bunch of people inside.

It looks like the two thousand and eleven Brooklyn aesthetic is alive and well.

Yes, the masts are back, selling chocolate and coffee and housewares and body soaps in a squeaky clean space that could double as a Williams Sonoma.

The remelters have reformed, but don't be too quick to blame the masts re melting style over substance.

For all the controversy in the world of big Chocolate, it that's just business as usual.

But to understand just how bad it gets, we're going to have to head into the belly of the beast.

From Kaleidoscope and I Heeart podcasts.

This is Obsessions Wild Chocolate.

I'm Roman Jacobson, Chapter four, Big Bad Chocolate.

All right, so let's actually let's turn to We are old foods.

Here, we are our whole foods.

Whole foods in Brooklyn right on on the planet one of them.

I'm with Clay Gordon, the creator and moderator of the Chocolate Life dot com, which is the world's biggest online community for chocolate fans.

Clay teaches chocolate appreciation classes, he consults with chocolate companies.

He wrote A Great Guy to Chocolate, and he was on the scene when the masts had their big run.

We all wanted them to succeed right because they were m bringing bad chocolate, to prefer from cheap industrial chocolate into craft chocolate, and um.

They were the people who were the gateway.

People came to them right and they were the introduction.

This was during that strange stretch of the two thousands when chocolate suddenly became virtuous instead of a guilty treat.

It pivoted into a worldly earnest, possibly even healthy luxury.

The candy aisles exploded with snazzy bars advertising their high cocow percentage, socially responsible business practices, and exotic cocau surces.

Of course, the first chocolate makers to do such bars really were tiny operations that walk the walk, but it didn't take long before they were joined in the virtuous section by big chocolate.

The handful of giant corporations that dominate the chocolate business.

But to look at the shelves and whole foods, you'd never know it.

It's really really hard to understand what it is we have presented here.

So, for example, there's a brand called Lilies, So Lili's is known for sugar free chocolate.

When most people look at a bar of Lilies, they'll go, oh, it's fair trade, right right.

The other thing that's really important to know is that the corporate parent of Lilies is Hershey Harsh Company.

Yes, Lilies is owned by Hershey, and it should be known that Hershey is a name defendant in a lawsuit having to do with um knowingly profiting from illegal labor in West Africa.

Chocolate, as you may or may not know, has some serious issues.

U S senators shared Brown and Ron Wyden, arguing that there is evidence the Ivory Coast relies on forced child labor to harvest coco instead of attending school.

These children so through cocoa beans on a plantation.

The Washington Post reported in June that more than two million children were engaged in the practice on West African cocoa farms.

The big chocolate companies don't actually own cacao farms.

They are many links away at the other end of the supply chain, and this makes it difficult to tell where the coco originated.

So their argument is that, hey, we're just buying these beans from cargular whoever.

The reality is they got a pretty dark They have accepted responsibility, many of them by signing Hrican Angle Protocol.

They know that these are issues.

In a wave of news stories exposed the shocking amount of child trafficking and slavery in the Chocolate Trade Act in two thousand one, the US Congress responded, led by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Elliott Angle.

Together they introduced the idea of slapping a label on chocolate products indicating whether or not the product was free of child slave labor.

We need a better commitment, a stronger commitment from the chocolate industry worldwide.

That's Tom Harkin.

Families need to know that when they buy chocolate in whatever form, that a lot of that's being produced by what is really an essence, child slavery.

To no one's surprise, the industry freaked out.

Chocolate is a one billion dollar business and a child slavery logo splashed across every candy bar.

Wouldn't exactly be great for sales.

Big Talcola said, you know what, we don't need you to enact loss.

We will take care of it ourselves.

The problem ourselves, and every time their self imposed deadline approach, they kicked the cocoa pot down the road and they're five years.

In two thousand five, Big Chocolate promised to get child labor out of the supply chain by two thousand ten.

In two thousand ten, they said they could do it.

They said that they couldn't even trace where most of their coco comes from.

The problem is that coco is a commodity bought and sold by the shipload by traders in New York and London, then stored in giant warehouses until some company buys it.

Between the farmer who grows it and the chocolate bar on the supermarket shelf, it can change hands a dozen times.

It's nearly impossible to trace that path.

Not that some companies aren't trying, all right, So now you're playing a Tony's chacolon um.

They sold over a hundred million dollars in chocolate.

Tony's is a Dutch company founded twenty years ago.

With a singular mission to eradicate slavery from the chocolate supply chain.

Tony's groovy Piece of Love packaging gives them this Ben and Jerry's vibe.

But there is a key difference.

So Tony's is not a chocolate maker.

Tony's is a marketing company, right.

They produce chocolate bars from chocolate which is manufactured by someone else.

So the chocolate is manufactured for them by Barry Calibrats, biggest biggest chocolate company in the world.

That's Barry Calibo, the goliath of chocolate makers, with more than sixty production facilities around the globe and eight billion dollars in annual sales.

To their credit, Tony's purchases all their beings from seven cooperatives in West Africa that they ensure are free of slave labor, and they pay a premium to do that.

But the fact that the largest chocolate maker in the world is making all of their chocolate for them makes things complicated.

The cocoa butter for this bar is probably produced in the Calibut factory in West Africa.

And why is that a problem?

Well, Calibut is one of the name defendants in the trafficking victims protection reauthorization at lawsuit, and so can we say that they're actually working to eradicate slavery in the entire chocolate supply chain.

They're trying, for sure, but due to its ties to Barry call About, Tony's was removed from an important list of slavery chocolate companies.

And Tony's isn't the only indie brand with ties to Big Chocolate.

Clay picked up another bar I want.

I had some history with chocolate up.

These guys have been around forever, so that was like the first serious dark chocolate I started buying in like thees.

Part of this is looking at labels, so when you buy chocolate products, you can be sure your purchase supports a better future for coco farmers in their families.

So chocolate love Very kel about Choco them too, Yes, I didn't know that.

And so what they're doing is this claim about sustainable, social, and ethical is based entirely on what Very kell About is claiming that they're doing on the farm.

So they're they bary calibut, They're like, you're sustainable and ethical?

Right?

He kept going other brands that you might see Justin's.

Yeah, for sure.

Also Penetrate owned by Hormle Foods, the Endangered Species chocolate company.

They don't make chocolate.

They are a marketing company.

The chocolate is made for them by another company.

Does anybody on the shelf make their own chocolate?

I believe well, I believe well theo they're the only ones.

By the time Clay had gone to the whole shelf, it was clear that what the Mass brothers had done it was just standard practice in the weird world of chocolate, and Clay says, the chicanery goes all the way to the top.

Support you to know the Persha Hershi does not manufacture chocolate at all at all anymore.

They are a candy company, not a chocolate company, and so the chocolate for them.

If you go to if you actually go to Pershey, Pennsylvania, you will not find chocolate manufacturing anymore.

Um.

They buy their chocolate in from big producers, car gil companies like that, big producers.

Um.

When you go to Hershey Park and you're like, ye, they're not They're not making chocolate.

That's also if this makes you want to break free from the chocolate empire completely, you're not alone.

I just felt inherently like there was just something really messed up with the system itself.

But don't join the resistance instead, and I wanted to build an alternative system.

Rad shotgun with a rebel commander on a risky mission.

After the break, Hey everyone, I want to taste of some real wild chocolate.

Delicious, nutritious and free of preservatives or moral conundrums.

We got you covered.

Kaleidoscope has joined forces with Louisa Abram and Statler Chocolate to make a special box to go along with this very podcast.

Now you can say uful flavors from the banks of the Amazon without having to fight off jaguars and anakondas.

Just visit www dot Stettler dash Chocolate dot com to order your wild Chocolate today link in the show notes.

So what's the lifespan on one of these trucks doing doing this kind of work?

You managed to keep it going infinited, Infinited with the right mechanic.

I'm with Emily Stone and Diane Coy.

Emily is the founder of Uncommon Cacao, which acts as a matchmaker for five thousand small farmers in twelve countries and hundreds of being to bar chocolate makers in the US.

And Europe.

Diane is the new managing director of the Belize Business.

She's a Kechi Maya who grew up in the area and spent time as a kid harvesting cocao with her parents.

We're riding in a rusty thirty three year old Ford f two fifty through the back roads of Belie, buying kakao from farmers.

So everything we're seeing as my as part of the Maya Mountains or yeah, everything here this is sort of the southern tip and then extends up towards Kyo.

Really beautiful.

How many communities are resourcing kakao from that vand UM tent to eat twenty eight communities in the Biomos.

In the late two thousand's, Emily was living in Boston working on the campaign to pressure Hershey to address its child slavery problem.

But the more she watched big chocolates say all the right things, the more she realized the system was never going to change from within.

There's no reason for chocolate to be causing poverty.

Um.

It is the leftover inheritance of colonialism and of a world in which slavery was legal.

So Emily decided to help build a new system Her vision was to act as a matchmaker for small farms and being to bar chocolate makers, to cut out those twelve layers of intermediaries and deliver more money to the farmers and better beans to the chocolate makers.

And she knew the place to start was the Americas, which had the old varieties of cacao that the high end chocolate community craved and no system for getting it to market in good condition.

In two thousand ten, she moved to Belize and started talking to farmers.

They told her they needed an easier way to sell their beings at a better price.

She said, got it, So she bought a beat up truck and offered to pick up their beings right at the farm.

Then she built a professional fermentation station which would help her charge more for these improved beings.

Within a few years, farmers were getting twice the price for their coca and My Mountain Beings had become famous.

But police alone was a drop in the bucket.

If she really wanted to build a more just chocolate industry, she needed to expand, and she knew where to go.

I was hearing from people and police, you know.

Oh yeah, my cousins in Guatemala they have like have you ever been to Guatemalad?

And I had it good over there, and then I get the bus and you know, it was just kind of like asking her.

I'm like, okay, how did I get from here to here?

Anytime I got to the next bus station and everyone's looking at me, like, who the f are you?

Someone like asked me.

They're like, what do you here?

I'm here to you know, I'm here to look at cacao.

And all of a sudden they all were like cocaw.

I was like, yeah, they've got we have a lot of cacao.

It's like, oh great, That's what I'm here for.

And literally, as the minibus was like making its way up the mountain, we were stopping at every single person on the bus as cacao, farm and student.

She's meeting everyone in the community and learning how important they were to the history of chocolate.

They were kept chi Maya direct descendants of the people who had introduced chocolate to Europe when they sign a friendly delegation to the Spanish court bearing beans from these very hillsides.

Emily had stumbled into the heart of chocolate, an unbroken lineage going back of years, but that didn't make their situation any easier.

Their market were um coyotes, which are basically intermediaries that drive around these back roads with a stack of cash and a handgun and they buy and a scale and they buy whatever the farmers have to sell, whether that's corn, beans, cardamom, chili, cinnamon, cocao, allspice.

Um, there's no transparency around where that coca is going.

There's no technical assistance, and um there's no fermentation.

It's all washed cocao.

So yeah, these producers were left without a market.

This was her dream scenario.

The cocow varieties turned out to be excellent old ones, but the cocao wasn't being fermented at all.

The farmers were just washing the pulp off as soon as they opened the pods, drying the beans, and selling them as fast as possible.

The delicious flavors that emerge with fermentation were never being given a chance to develop, and it was all due to the dysfunctional market.

The coyotes were going to pay the same super low price no matter what.

So Emily jumped on the opportunity.

She moved to Guatemala, taught the farmers how to ferment and drive properly bought the cacao for twice the going rate and sold it directly to her growing list of being too bar clients.

But the coyotes did not take this lying down.

It's been a huge challenge for locally.

I mean it's been there've been security issues they've been so it has what kind of like what what kind of challenge or what kind of security?

There were physical threats made to association members.

The battle with the coyotes came to a head after the government arranged to build a new fermentation and drawing center for the farmers Association.

Emily wasn't directly involved, but she'd promised to buy the cacao, which was a key to the deal.

But one local coyote was particularly unhappy about losing his turf, and when the government representatives came to sign the paper or work, they met a most unwelcome welcoming committee.

Basically, this disgruntled guy and his family surrounded the building where this signing was happening, armed with machetes and threatened that if they signed it like there would be violence, and so they left without signing.

The project never happens.

The bad blood continued for a couple of years, and the farmers warned Emily and her team not to visit the coyote, and sort of his family members were like, you know, if those people come, it's not it's not going to be good.

But the fermentation center got built in the neighboring community, and once it became clear to all the farmers how much better the new system was, they made it very clear to the coyote that the times they were changing.

We have found that over time there's there is a circle of trust and security that is established by the farmers themselves, and that the consequences for anyone who interferes will be high.

Since then, Guatemala has become a prized source of cocao in the craft chocolate world.

But that doesn't mean it's an easy business.

Bullets, razors, nails, cement, you name it, it's been found in a cocao bag.

And sometimes Emily finds herself thinking more like Walter White than Willy Wanka.

So I don't like guns, and I've never wanted us to have gotten to me.

The idea of having a gun owned by the company out in the company vehicle, someone from the company, you know, having the ability to use a gun is terrifying.

But Guatemala is one of the poorest and most dangerous countries in the world, and a shipping container of cacao is worth tens of thousands of dollars um.

There have been instances of coffee containers being robbed, um, you know, violently in Guatemala, and so obviously want to ensure that our cocao does not get stolen on its way to the port for export.

Uh So, yeah, we've got We've always got guys with guns following our containers.

I hope by now it's abundantly clear that making great chocolate from responsibly sourced beans is really, really hard, even when you're not dealing with guns and charlatan's.

Sometimes you could do everything right and still fail.

I thought this was gonna taste amazing, and this was like gonna be like the like the gold of the forest, just asked Louisa Abraham, the young Brazilian chocolate maker who began working with the Santo Daimi ayahuasca cult in the Amazon.

Louisa fell in love with the people.

She paid fair prices for their cocao.

She did everything right.

It ended up being so crappy.

It was just horrible what to do when you've just made the worst chocolate in the world.

After the break, I I had fallen in love with all the story, with all like the like it's so poetic, like crossing Brazil to go to the forest, go deep into the forest to get the wild cacao savage um and and then to bring it back and to make chocolate.

It was just so enchanting for me.

After meeting the Sciento dim a cow collectors on the Peruce River, Louisa Abraham devoted herself to making chocolate with the wild cocaw of the Amazon.

I want to do something with a purpose.

I want to impact others life.

I want to like believe my mark on this.

So she and her dad bought twenty kilos of cocao for the co op, stuffed it into their extra luggage, and headed back to South Paula.

She built a micro chocolate factory in her parents utility closet, and she roasted the beans in her tiny oven and blew off the shells with a hair dryer and ground them into a silky paste in her mini roller and made her very first batch of wild Brazilian chocolate.

And when it had cooled She lifted a piece in her hand, placed it on her tongue, closed her eyes, and that the essence of the Amazon wash over her, and everything tasted so awful for me.

It was just so funky taste, so like ammonia, and and so like unnatural.

She ran it by some others to make sure it wasn't just her.

I gave it to my chefs and to my colleagues too to try, and they were like mocking of me, like you went all the way too could to get this piece of you know, like naturally.

Louisa assumed that she was the problem, and I was like, okay, maybe I am the one doing it, doing something different.

So I changed the rulest profile.

I changed, like the how I was.

I changed even I even my sugar.

I changed.

I changed everything, and nothing would work.

For the next three years, she kept making chocolate with the paruce beans because she was determined to make it work, but she just couldn't get the taste dry.

And while she managed to get the chocolate into stores around Brazil on the strength of the Wild Cocows Argent story, nobody ever reordered.

So what do you do when you put everything on the line to become a great chocolate maker, and you find yourself making terrible chocolate, Well you need a goog, someone who could bind deep expertise with almost spiritual insight.

So Louisa summoned up her courage and sent a bar to our old friend Mark Christian.

It was a qualified disaster.

We don't need to get into all the particular details of flaws.

They were manifold, you know.

Yep, her bar sucked and he told her so.

But hang on, there was a shiny silver lining.

You can see through the beans right, No matter how poorly they're prepped, whatever their post harvest is and so forth, the d NA, the backbone of those seeds is still there.

And what struck me about that cacao and that bar she made It was good enough that I thought this was the ultimate dark milk chocolate, potentially without any dairy whatsoever.

That's how much it was cream puffing the oral chamber.

Sorry, if you've never had your oral chamber cream puffed, you might not be familiar with the experience.

But in the world of chocolate, or at least the world of Mark Christian, that's a good thing.

Um, all that you know, earthen milk dairy cream, and who doesn't like cream?

I mean, you know, you know, everybody likes cream.

Everybody likes mama.

Right, So it was great, but it was masked.

I mean, you you had you could get the cream, but you were getting a lot of other detritus with it, like what you were getting the basics, such as um, cardboard, chalk, maybe even the black board itself was throwing.

It was all there.

In other words, it's not you and it's not your beans either.

They seem kind of great, but what's up with that fermentation?

I told them there's something there in that valley.

You don't let it go, you know, Let's get this right.

Mark's recommendation was fix that fermentation, get rid of all that funky ammonia, and you might have something really special on your hands.

So how do you fix that?

Well, remember Harvey kit Tell's character in pulp fiction, the Cleaner.

I saw problems.

You need that guy for cacao.

It's funny.

I almost feel guilty for showing up and be like, seriously, this is what you guys do.

And he exists.

Dan o'darty lives in Hawaii, but he spends most of his time ipping around the planet saving Cacal farmers from their own mistakes.

Mark told Louisa that Dan could make her problems go away.

So Louisa invited Dan to her factory and showed him the cruise beans right away from the aroma, but also the very dark, almost black, and the color.

I knew that there were problems.

I mean, over from Kao has this funky you know barn ardi.

Um.

I mean I describe it as you know, somewhat manure, you know, like like like cow manure smells um, I mean it tastes rotten.

So he started with some questions.

How often do you harvest the trees?

What level of ripeness do you select?

What is the lag time between cutting a fruit from the tree opening it?

Is there a delay between opening it and putting it into a box to ferment?

How often do you turn it?

How long do you ferment it?

And how do you dry it?

And and there's even more substeps, and in Perus, the answer to pretty much every one of those questions was wrong.

These boats are going up and down the river and collecting whole pods.

Some guys would take their pods, collect them in the forest and put them on the river banks and they just roast in the sun.

Not good.

Basically, it was all amiss.

The ayahuasca cult was picking overripe pods, and then they were waiting too long to open the pods, and then they were over fermenting the seeds.

And Dan had to break the news to them.

You know, you have to be gentle when you tell people.

I mean, essentially, what you've been doing all this time is wrong.

We're going to change pretty much every step.

Every step.

Pick the pods earlier, open them right away, get those beans in the fermentation boxes, unplugged the holes in the bottoms of the boxes so they can drain, turn the piles every day, keep them covered with banana leaves.

But they did it all, and when the new beans were ready, Louisa tried not to get her hopes up.

She just made her chocolate like always.

Then.

I remember when I first cat the chocolate in my mouth, it was like it was like a drug.

Oh it was amazing.

I mean, has like straight up dried blueberry notes like I had.

People tasted.

They didn't I didn't prime them with anything, and they were like, oh my god, it tastes like you round dried blueberries into it.

Finally, Louisa had a fantastic new chocolate on her hands, and her company took off.

She added three other chocolates to her line, each coming from a different Amazonian community with its own wild cocoutries, and as it turned out, she had dialed her skills just in time, because the kind of opportunity every Beamed Bar chocolate maker dreams of was about to come her way, and he was going to take everything She had to pull it off.

Next week on Obsessions Wild Chocolate, Man, you must have been furious at a lot of people.

I had a little It was a sectional rage and a pure rage.

I would you know, with a gun in my hands, that would have killed some people maybe, yeah, Vulcar Layman.

After years of dodging bullet after bullet in the jungle, he was about to take one right in the heart.

Wild Chocolate is a Kaleidoscope production with I Heart Podcasts, posted and reported by me Row Jacobson and produced by Shane McKeon at Nice Marmat Media, Edited by Kate Osborne and Mangesh haut A Kudor, sound design and mixing by Soundboard.

Original music composition by Spencer Stevenson a k a Botton production help from Baheeny Shorty from My Heart.

Our executive producers are Katrina Norvelle and Nikki Etre.

Special thanks to Laura Mayor Costas, lnos Ozwalash and Aaron Kaufman, Will Pearson, codel Burn, Bob Pittman, Daria Daniel and the team at Stetler who are helping us make a very special chocolate of our own.

That's right, We're working with Louisa at others to protect the rainforest and make delicious Amazonian chocolate.

Visit www dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com to taste it for yourself.

That's www Dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com.

And if you want to hear more of this type of content, nothing is more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews.

Please spread the love wherever you listen.