Dark chocolate goes green

The tiny, eco-friendly, politically correct Grenada Chocolate Co. is winning awards, but can it survive in a Hershey's world?

By Meera Subramanian

Read more: Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

June 12, 2007 | There was a time when chocolate was an artisanal product created by small European chocolate makers. Craftsmen used cocoa beans gathered from the spoils of their cacao-rich colonial empires in the Americas, and then Africa and Asia, where they'd transplanted the favored crop. But that time has come and gone. With the industrial revolution, the chocolate industry grew in size and complexity and the chocolate-making process became more refined; large companies rose to dominate the market and still do today. Americans may spend more than $15 billion each year on the food of gods and mortals -- but 80 percent of those sweets are purchased from one of the two mega-candy conglomerates that bully the market: Hershey's and Mars.

But maybe you're one of the few consumers who seek out organic, fair-trade chocolate, maybe a Nibs 68% made by Dagoba Organic Chocolate, a small, award-winning American premium chocolate producer. Sorry, but even then you're out of luck. Last fall, Dagoba was bought by the Artisan Confections Co., a wholly owned subsidiary of Hershey's that was created as a shelter for fine dark chocolate companies. And Scharffen Berger -- another once-independent chocolate maker -- was purchased not long before that. Who's left?

Today most small chocolate companies are nothing more than chocolatiers: outfits that buy ready-made couverture (refined chocolate that has gone through the first stages of processing) in bulk and use their own molds and branded packaging to claim it as their own. "Very, very few chocolatiers make their own chocolate," writes David Lebovitz, the former pastry chef at Chez Panisse and author of "The Great Book of Chocolate," on his blog. "I never believe anyone who says they're making their own chocolate unless they have some documentation to back it up, or I can see it being made."

I've seen chocolate being made. From the swing of a machete to the cleaving of the squashlike pod -- revealing soft white beans covered in a tasty white goo -- to the final delicate tempering. The Grenada Chocolate Co., a homegrown operation on the small island of Grenada, deep down in the West Indies, makes its own chocolate in a house-turned-factory painted in a palette of tropical pastels. Solar panels cover the roof and overflow into the yard. Across the one winding street that defines the small village of Hermitage, a white hand-painted sign on a piece of board points to "slave pen alley," and an abandoned plantation complete with slave barrack, now overgrown with jungle. The factory's cocoa beans are grown organically a few kilometers away. Two of the three founders live on the island and work cooperatively with a handful of workers, all locals.

Edmond Brown, one of the owners of Grenada Chocolate, sits on a set of concrete steps outside of the factory. "I like making chocolate because I like the work," he says in a thick Grenadian accent, swatting at sand flies and stressing the last word to show his deepest respect for the human undertaking of doing something tangible with one's hands. He is a man who tends to speak only when there is something worth saying, yet Brown becomes animated when talking about chocolate, "the organic chocolate," as he calls it. His partner, Doug Browne, is a lanky, gentle 6-foot-7 giant, who now spends most of the year in rural Oregon. In the eyes of the islanders, Doug bears a striking resemblance to Jesus.

Mott Green completes the trio, and he is the talker, the dreamer, the man who first envisioned a Grenadian chocolate company. A sinewy American with a closely shaved head, Green lives in one small, spartan room in the corner of the factory, and exudes kinetic energy, as though he never sleeps. Originally from New York, he describes himself as an "ex-tourist instead of an expatriate." Green has lived in Grenada on and off for more than 20 years, whenever he wasn't hopping rail cars between his other bases in New York and Philadelphia squats or staying with friends in Oregon. It was in Oregon that Green and Browne met, and over the course of their friendship the two developed a taste for tinkering: transforming a Volkswagen squareback into an electric car and building a 20-foot-high solar steam generator, the remains of which reached up into the sky on Browne's Oregon farm for years after the experiment, like some alien communication device.

Browne, Green and Brown make an unlikely business team, with ambitious ideals about every step of production for their chocolate. But their dark (and darker) Grenada Chocolate bars -- 60 percent or 71 percent cacao content, no milk, no nuts, no fruit -- and Smilo cocoa powder are earning accolades. In 2006, they received a World Chocolate Award from London's Academy of Chocolate and were declared "the world's finest, and rarest, chocolate" in the Guardian. Within the company's first year of production, in 2001, they unexpectedly sold out in the Grenada market and since then have only been able to produce enough to meet limited distribution in the United States and Europe, through online outlets and in select shops.

But all that is changing. The co-owners are in the process of replacing their manufacturing infrastructure in order to increase the company's batch size from 45 kilos to 250 kilos. For now the Grenada Chocolate Co. may well be the smallest, most politically correct chocolate factory on earth. But does it have a future in a Hershey world?

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Grenada is known as a "Spice Island" thanks to its production of nutmeg, mace and the cocoa beans that are the key ingredient in chocolate. Green first came to the island as a 15-year-old kid, accompanying his doctor dad on trips from New York to the medical school on the island capital of St. Georges. Green watched the plump cacao pods turn shades of yellow, orange and red as they grew straight from the trunks and branches of the understory trees. He learned that some of the world best trinitario beans grew there, were picked by the dark hands of the islanders, fermented in burlap sacks, turned by native feet to dry under a tropical sun, and then shipped off to far-flung places. Off there, in the first-world nations, enormous expensive machines transformed the Grenadians' raw product into Hershey and Cadbury bars, then packaged and sold them back to Grenada and the rest of the world.

With that realization a different idea -- a question really -- began floating around Green's head, vague and undefined. What if someone made chocolate there, so Grenadians could eat chocolate from their own cocoa beans? The self-proclaimed anarchist imagined starting his own business: a chocolate company from the bean up.

In early 1999, Browne went to visit Green on Grenada, and that vague idea, then decades old, began to take on a concrete shape. As Browne remembers it, the two were sitting in Green's hand-built bamboo hut -- a creaking, leaning, sievelike structure perched on a steep mountainside -- drinking local unrefined cocoa, when they decided together to try and make a go of it as chocolate makers. Browne agreed to invest some of his own money; when the two Americans asked their friend Edmond Brown to join them, the trio was formed.

The ideals of the company were both simple and lofty. All three founders were in their mid-30s. They believed in the human right to have dominion over one's life: Each had worked to make that a reality for himself, and if they had anything to do with it, for others. They swore there would be no compromise in the making of great chocolate. It would be organic, locally grown and produced. Farmers would be paid decent wages and the company would be cooperatively structured. The factory would run on solar power and a sailboat would deliver the finished product throughout the Caribbean. Everything they could do, they would do. The Grenada Chocolate Co. was born.

Next page: For a few delicious months life was one big chocolate experiment