Big Interview
Why do you think people should value chocolate more? Chocolate should be a precious pleasure where a small quantity gives you a lot of flavour, not a high-calorie mass consumption junk-food product. Consumers need to understand the real price of their chocolate in social and environmental terms and they need to pay a lot more for chocolate. The good news is that you can enjoy better taste from small amounts of chocolate, which is actually better value and a win-win for consumers and farmers.
What is the best advice you have received? I’ve always followed my own path really. That might sound a bit arrogant, but rather than specific advice, I’ve leant a lot from other people who are passionate about chocolate or growing cacao. There’s a shared mission of many people working in fine cacao and chocolate and a collective drive to develop the market and to make it truly sustainable. We are a movement still in the formation stage, I hope in a few year’s time that craft chocolate is as talked about as craft beer or speciality coffee, that’s the collective goal.
What does a typical day in your role look like? Busy communicating and keeping up! We’re currently trying to build a bigger team to cover more ground and move on with new developments we’ve been planning for a few years. We have some great people on board now, so this is helping me move my role more into planning and creating new content and courses. Networking is a big part of this though and my inbox is a kind of bottomless pit I’ve learned to live with.
“Chocolate is not just a product made in Belgium or
Switzerland; it simply would not exist without cacao farmers”
Chocolate is an all-day job and even holidays somehow seem to involve chocolate. It’s an exciting world though and after thirty years it feels like things are just about starting to get going, so I don’t really have much to complain about.
What do you see for the future of the chocolate industry? I’m an idealist optimist, so I hope it’s a bright future. There are a growing group of cacao farmers, traders, chocolate makers, chocolatiers, distributors, retailers and consumers who get the idea of fine, craft chocolate and are very passionate to spread the word about how good chocolate tastes. We are still waiting for our ‘coffee moment’, but there is much more interest than ten years ago, helped by a lot smaller chocolate makers around the world making interesting, complex, innovative craft chocolate. We are tasting new flavours that have never been tasted before, by anyone, like chuncho cacao from Cusco in Peru – ancient cacao that only now has been made into good chocolate. It’s a great time to be a chocolate lover!
KennedysConfection.com
Kennedy’s Confection May 2022
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