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Post by Ben on Mar 25, 2019 14:08:02 GMT -5
No evidence to provide. I'm only suggesting that because there is much better tasting and higher quality chocolate than Hershey's, some of which is produced by smaller bean-to-bar chocolate makers. Some of those makers also produce cocoa powder using higher quality cacao than Hershey's uses.
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Post by Brad on Mar 26, 2019 1:56:14 GMT -5
Ben, in your opinion there is something out there which tastes better than Hershey's. However your opinion is just that: YOURS. Not everybody shares that opinion.
You see Ben, one of the biggest traps that small chocolate makers fall into is the trap of their own opinion, and in doing so forget the one fundamental principal of being successful in business: "Find out what people like, and then give it to them."
I see it all the time in the craft chocolate industry - small artisans making crappy, under/over roasted chocolate with no vanilla and weird inclusions. While it's great to be different, these small guys get so used to eating the crappy chocolate they've made and gotten accustomed to, all while trying to rid the world of mediocrity, that they forgot to ask that all-so-important question of their customer: "What do YOU like?" What ends up happening is that they struggle to grow, reach a plateau, and then become a slave to their business. They can't make enough to hire staff, and they are just barely too busy to have any kind of life balance.
Welcome to retail jail.
This past summer I started working with a national retailer on a program that will eventually see us make pans of brownies for all 1500 of their stores. We started with straight cocoa beans, but they found it odd tasting. At the end of the day we had to incorporate some alkalized cocoa powder into the recipe to give the brownies a more conventional/industrial chocolate flavour. It certainly wasn't by my personal recommendation, and was something I had to struggle with as a business owner who openly promoted using the "best" ingredients that money can buy for our confections.
However....
I'm in business to make money and put my daughter through college, and when a customers says "We'll buy 30,000 pans of brownies per month from you, but you'll need to add cocoa powder to it.." Well.... That's a no brainer! I am being a pragmatic and intelligent businessman and giving my customer what they want.
I know this is off track, but when I read people say "This is better, or that's better..." Well... That's just their opinion.
I make pretentious chocolate that sells out in grocery stores for 2 1/2 times the price of my nearest competitor. Yet I think Spam and hotdogs are awesome!
It's all about personal choice and what we've grown up to enjoy as OUR OWN PERSONAL comfort food. Everybody's opinion of what's the best and what isn't is different in their own unique way.
Now back the regular scheduled programming....
Cheers Brad Churchill CEO Chokat
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Post by Ben on Mar 26, 2019 10:16:01 GMT -5
Of course. I am only stating my opinion. I think there are much better chocolates out there than Hershey's and think it's worth it for chocolate lovers to branch out and try other things. In general, I think when people try better chocolate, they end up liking it more than the mass produced stuff. Not always, but more often than not, in my experience.
I also do believe that there are higher-quality and lesser-quality foods. Whether I, or anyone, likes one or the other more or at all doesn't change that. That being said, this line of discussion is pointless. People either believe that there are definitively better and worse things, or they believe that quality is in the eye of the beholder--what's best is what you like the best. I've only rarely seen anyone change sides on this point.
On the 'make what people want' discussion, it's not the only consideration. Obviously, you're successful making higher-end chocolate than Hershey's, but Hershey's is more successful than you are. If 'what people want' is the sole consideration, shouldn't we all just be making Hershey's? I'd suggest that 'what people want' is just one of many things to consider. For example, I didn't know that I wanted higher-end chocolate until I tried it. If someone had asked me what I wanted before then, I'd have said a 3 Musketeers bar. If everyone had listened to what I wanted, I'd never have been introduced to better chocolate and never become a chocolate maker.
In general, I make chocolate that first and foremost I love. Luckily, many others seem to like it as much as I do. My philosophy is to make a great product that I believe in and trust/hope that others will enjoy (and buy!) it, too. This may limit the size of my business, but I'm ok with that. I don't have aspirations to be as big as possible. My aspirations is to make something great and to be successful enough. What 'successful enough' means is something every business needs to decide for themselves.
If a customer had a suggestion, comment, or critique about my products, I'd happily take it and experiment with it and see if the product could be improved. But, if I didn't like the final product, thought it reduced the quality, or compromised my principles in some way, I wouldn't implement it.
As an example, I occasionally make liquid caramel bonbons. A friend suggested that I make the caramel using the method where you cook a can of sweetened condensed milk in a slow cooker. It is an unarguably easier way to produce caramel than the traditional way of cooking sugar on the stovetop, adding cream, etc., but doesn't make as good caramel. Besides the lower quality, this was missing out on the hand-crafted aspect, which is important to me, and I would lose some control of the sourcing of my ingredients. We discussed it a bit, but in the end, he thought I was crazy for not going the easier way because it was 'good enough' and most people wouldn't know the difference. The problem is that I know the difference. I know that I can make a better product using a different technique so that's what I'm going to do.
I'm in business to make great chocolate and to make money. If money always trumped quality, I'd just make Hershey's.
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Post by Sebastian on Mar 30, 2019 6:04:11 GMT -5
Smarba - So, you DO know that Hershey doesn't make that cocoa powder, right? And the absence of llavado cocoa power in the US is wildly explicable, for a legion of reasons, to those who are even casually familiar with the supply chains and production of these products.
My source? I ran R&D for the large cocoa/chocolate companies in the world for a couple of decades. There's a huge amount of information on the topic - far more than you'll read online - most of which is not publicly available, as we'd spend hundreds of millions in developing it, and consider it to be IP.
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