Transcriber: Bella Borahm Hur Vinha Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Imagine if all of the wine in the world was made from just one grape.
Let's say Merlot.
90% of the wine made from one grape,
from one part of the world,
sent to a few industrial chocolate makers
to be made into a beverage that we all associate
with the flavor of wine.
Maybe the other 10% has some independence in their
exploring their hundreds of different varietals of wine out there.
But for the most part, when we thought wine
we thought this one flavor.
This is what it's like in the chocolate industry at the moment.
This 100 billion-dollar industry is dominated by one type of bean -
the Forestero bean.
Forestero grown in a couple of countries, mostly West Africa,
and sent to industrial chocolate makers
where it's made into a product that we all come to associate with chocolate.
Now, I'm not suggesting that you can't make great wine from Merlot,
or that the Ivory Coast and Ghana
don't produce beautiful chocolate.
All I'm suggesting is that there's a whole world of chocolate out there
and it's incredible.
Anywhere 10 degrees north or south of the equator,
you can grow cacao
and there are hundreds of different strains to discover.
I first had my first real bean-to-bar craft chocolate.
A friend bought over a bar from a San Francisco chocolate factory
called Dandelion Chocolate.
They'd made this chocolate bar right from the beans -
beans that they source from Madagascar.
This chocolate bar just had two ingredients.
70% beans, 30% sugar and nothing else.
So I snapped off a couple of squares,
popped them in my mouth,
and a few moments later, a party started.
(Laughter)
Candied strawberry, black forest, plum.
All these incredible flavors
that I had no idea existed in chocolate.
So I had to look at the wrapper, and sure enough,
it was just 70% organic Madagascan beans
and 30% sugar. The flavors I was tasting
had to have been coming from the bean itself.
Up until this moment,
I thought I was in the serious chocolate business
and I do have a good chocolate business
which has started in 2004 and still going strong,
selling in the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
But my ego was somewhat undone by these two squares of chocolate.
I had a little pang of impostor syndrome.
So, phase two of my chocolate journey started.
After 13 years in Melbourne, I decided to pack up
and try and find the best cocoa beans in the world.
This led me - my heart, actually - led me to Peru.
It was here, up the sacred valley
that I visited a cocoa farm for the first time.
Meeting this family and walking through their organic food forest
was a deeply inspiring and life-changing experience.
It was here, in Peru,
that I'd tried my first fresh cocoa bean straight from the pod.
This cocoa bean... the beans are in there
and the white pulp is beautifully sweet around it.
This is the highest quality varietal in the world.
This is what they call the Criollos.
So there's the Forestero, which is coffee terms is like Robusta,
and the Criollo, which in coffee terms I suppose is more like the Arabica.
This is a Criollo Porcelana organic cocoa bean.
So it's deliciously sweet and aromatic.
It was here in Peru that I also made my first chocolate bar
from the bean and learnt the process, and it was pretty awful.
(Laughter)
After some more fact finding and traveling around
visiting other bean-to-bar chocolate makers
and by a bean-to-bar, I mean a small craft chocolate maker
that makes the entire chocolate
from getting the beans in, roasting them, hand-sorting them,
right through to the finished product under one roof.
Rather than buying industrial blocks of chocolate or buttons
to melt, to make other things, which is the skill of a chocolatier,
we're chocolate makers. We make it from the bean to that point.
I decided to move back to my hometown of Wellington
with an ambition to open New Zealand's first,
open to the public, fair-trade and organic chocolate factory.
At this time, I was lucky enough to meet master chocolate maker, Rochelle Harrison.
Rochelle had been researching the art and science
of making chocolate from the bean since before it became trendy,
and we decided to team up, and together
we opened, in December, just gone, the Wellington Chocolate Factory.
(cheer and applause)
Here, you can walk in and you can see the entire process,
from where the beans arrive to carefully hand-sorting,
grinding - there's Ash pouring the cocoa nibs into the grinder,
molding, the whole process from bean-to-bar.
We're proud to offer that level of transparency.
There's no secret or magic to making good chocolate.
It's simply sourcing great beans and you'll make a great chocolate bar.
There's no need to add a lot of flavors
because every bean has their own unique characteristics.
So, hands up here who hasn't tried a freshly roasted cacao bean?
Most of you. That's great!
Okay, so this is where the mystery packages come in.
(rustling)
The sound's a little bit like a bad magic trick but it's not.
(laughter) It could be.
So if you just.. All that rustling. (laughter)
(rustling)
So what you'll find in here
are three items.
You'll find a cocoa bean, which I'd like you to bring out now.
And this bean here is one of those Criollo beans from Peru -
the highest quality in the world.
So, we're gonna taste this.
If you're feeling adventurous
you can have the whole thing - the shell and all.
Or, you can do both.
You crack it like this.
Inside are what we call the cacao nibs
and now you've got a mixture of the shell and the nib.
It's very good for your..
it's one of the actual legitimate super-foods.
It's amazing for your health.
It's a little bit bitter, a little bit sour. It's perfect.
You can quite quickly see
that this is where all good chocolate comes from.
This is the base of what we make a great chocolate bar from.
But I'm not feeling adventurous today
so I'll just put the rest of mine over there.
So, has everybody had a go tasting their first cacao bean?
Great.
All right. The next one.
I'm gonna ask you to pull out the packet with the gold sticker.
This one here is that very same bean
and with a little bit of sugar, made into chocolate.
So we've not added anything to it. It's just the Peruvian cacao bean.
(rustling)
So, here's the gratification.
Audiencxe: Yum!
Yeah! (laughter, cheering, clapping)
So, there are a lot of different flavors in there.
There's maybe a bit of fruitiness - a bit of apricot character.
But that's just the natural flavor of that bean.
Now, I wanted to include one more chocolate,
which is a contrasting chocolate,
and just wanted to say that we didn't change anything
in the making of this next chocolate you're about to taste.
The only thing that's changed is the country that it was grown
and the varietal that it is.
This is a Trinitario bean grown in the Carribeans
so we're going 3,000km north
and you may notice it's a little darker than the first one.
It's got a rich, dark, earthy flavor.
A little bit of citrus marmalade, malt.
It's amazing how different it is. Just being from
two different strains of cacao from two parts of the world,
that aren't that far away from each other.
Mmm. (chuckle)
Now, the cocoa industry is facing a little bit of a problem at the moment.
There's a looming supply issue.
So, as I mentioned, 90% of the world's cacao is Forastero beans
and there are a number of issues facing West Africa at this point.
One of the many issues is that
the younger people are finding it unviable to carry on the family farm.
There's a lot more opportunity for them in the major centers.
So, there's gonna be less people there to produce the cocoa
for the industrial chocolate makers.
So what they're doing to mitigate this
is proliferating the lesser-known cocoa growing regions
with this one type of bean and that's gonna threathen strains
and it's gonna limit our opportunity
to find new and interesting flavors to explore.
I witnessed this firsthand recently on a trip to Bougainville,
which is just off the coast of Papua New Guinea.
I noticed that they've got a clone that they've created,
which is high-yielding, pest-resistant,
loads of beans per hectare.
In one sense, they're putting a lot of education and money
into educating the farmers to streamline their operations,
which can be a good thing. But ultimately,
it's the industrial chocolate makers that are doing this
so that they can continue to pay a low price
and the workers will ultimately work very hard for very little return.
While I was in Bougainville, I met a cocoa legend.
Some refer to him simply as Mr Cocoa.
He's been in the industry for 40 years.
His name is Mr James Rutana
and the guy to my left is his neighbor.
His name is Gary and he is a cocoa farmer.
He's originally from New Zealand
that has been in Bougainville for 30 years now.
So James has had an incredible 40 years of cocoa.
He planted his first tree in 1958.
He was appointed chairman of the Papua Guinea Cocoa Board in 1975.
James has worked in the industry in New York, Ghana and Jamaica.
He's represented Papua New Guinea cocoa in England
and Gary tells me on a couple of occasions
that he's even sat at the Queen's table and had dinner.
James decided to move back to his homeland to start a cocoa plantation of his own,
which employed 300 people locally.
And then a devastating war broke out in 1990.
James and his family fled to the Solomon Islands
and returned in 2002 once the war was over.
He's been rebuilding ever since.
We had a cup of tea in his training shed
and he was talking to me about how he's about to give up.
It's been too hard.
These big businesses have left him by the wayside,
taken a lot of his knowledge from what I can tell.
And he's feeling disheartened.
Regardless of the quality of his beans,
he'll get three dollars per kilo, which is not very much.
Three US dollars roughly.
So, regardless of the varietal or the quality,
it all gets put into the same vat to make our confectionary,
which you know, a lot of people consider as chocolate.
I bet chocolate as a food.
My name is James Rutana. I'm the owner of this plantation here.
It's a small plantation, about 100 hectares.
I mainly plant cocoa trees on this plantation.
I'm looking at exploring into another area of the market.
One of the areas I'm looking at is to find a better price for my cocoa
that I produce on the plantation.
I'm very excited at this point in time.
If I can work with Wellington Chocolate, is it?
Gabe: Factory.
Wellington Factory. I'm very interested and excited
about working with Wellington Factory.
I know there's a lot of good that can be shared
between us and Wellington Chocolate Factory.
I'm very keen to continue working on the cocoa plantation
to see if I can get a better price for my cocoa beans.
(cheer and applause)
As we finished our cup of tea,
James and I launched a bit of a crazy plan.
Early next year, we aim to find a sailing boat
where we can sail the first shipment of two tons of beans
directly from Bougainville into Wellington Harbor
and I hope many of you here tonight
can be there to welcome James and the rest of us
to help shed a positive light on Bougainville
and to showcase the autonomous region of Bougainville
as a world class cocoa growing region.
This might just help. Cocoa is their main export
so it's very important to them
that they get a good price for their cocoa.
I hope that one day, like wine,
many of us have our favorite origin of chocolate,
our favorite varietal and our favorite chocolate makers.
I'm looking forward to growing older,
by which stage I'll be closer to knowing what my favorite flavors are.
Like James, who knows what adventures lie just around the corner.
Thank you.
(cheer and applause)