Big Interview
Tell us more about your roles at Seventy%, the International Chocolate
Awards, direct trade
organisation Direct Cacao and the International Institute of Chocolate & Cacao Tasting. How do these give you a greater awareness of fine chocolate within the professional and consumer capacity? We launched the International Chocolate Awards in 2012 because we could really see the interest in fine origin chocolate growing around the world and the interest coming in many countries without a big history in chocolate, in Asia for example. Since then, the Awards has grown to be the largest chocolate competition in the world, of any class of chocolate, with over 3,000 chocolate products entered each year in fourteen regional competitions and the World Final. My role in all of this is to keep the competitions moving, overseeing the logistics, judging and scoring and to plan ahead and develop new ideas and initiative. The Awards have increasingly taken over my working life, so Seventypercent. com got a bit left behind, but it’s now being reinvented as the home of our interactive chocolate flavour profiling system, which we use for judging, teaching and professional work. IICCT was founded to
bring together the different
workshops and course being run by the Awards’ founders into a coordinated curriculum, modelled after WSET in the wine world. Chocolate doesn’t yet have well defined quality standards, so this is something we’re working towards and I spend a lot of my time developing this, alongside new courses and our forthcoming Level 4 Diploma in Chocolate Tasting, as well as teaching many of our current courses. Fine, craft chocolate still has a massive problem of recognition with consumers, who struggle to distinguish these small artisanal products from luxury ‘premium’ brands. All of our initiatives aim to help improve this and ultimately to help increase the price of cacao for farmers, otherwise, there will be no good cacao for great chocolate!
“When you taste the best of something you realise there is another level of quality you’ve been missing”
Why are events like the International Chocolate Awards important to the industry? Do you enjoy judging them? The fine chocolate world is a fairly small bubble right now. We estimate that the proportion of cacao grown in the world that can be made into chocolate that has complexity, balance, distinctive flavours and no defects – what you would expect from any fine wine or specialty coffee – is tiny, around 0.04%. This needs to grow to be sustainable and is especially important give that many cacao farmers are farming at a loss when you factor in the value of their land. This is one reason why West Africa is being deforested, for example. The chocolate world needs a better model for growing cacao. Craft chocolate makers may not be the whole answer, but they can play a significant part. The Awards aims to give them recognition for their work and is just one way that the market can be helped to grow. Judging is, of course, a huge privilege and learning experience. It’s not necessarily the dream job everyone imagines though. You might think it’s great for the first 50 samples. My wine cooler currently contains well over a thousand samples I’m evaluating with more to come. It takes a special mindset and real love of chocolate. We are a growing community though, with hundreds of judges contributing each year, from all parts of the world. We are constantly working on standards, calibration and a better understanding of chocolate flavour. This is our mission.
KennedysConfection.com
Kennedy’s Confection May 2022
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