Full disclosure: I first met Browne and Green through Aprovecho, a sustainable living and alternative technology research center in Oregon, where I lived and worked in the late 1990s. Browne lived down the road on 20 acres and Mott Green showed up in town now and again, usually unannounced. Both were regular visitors to Aprovecho and occasional guest lecturers, and when a living space became available in Browne's renovated barn in 1999, just as their chocolate company was beginning, my boyfriend and I moved in. Green arrived at Browne's Oregon homestead that autumn bearing burlap sacks filled with cocoa beans, and the pair set up a proto-factory on the first floor of the barn. Building the machinery needed to make chocolate -- a roaster, a winnower, a mélangeur, a conch and more -- required easy access to parts and a good metal shop. They decided to create the guts of the factory in the U.S., then ship the whole thing down to Grenada.
For a few delicious months life was one big chocolate experiment. We chiseled away at chocolate mountains that were a relief of the five-gallon buckets used as holding containers. We slurped from a messy pot of cocoa, always topped off and rarely washed, that had assumed a permanent position on the stovetop. I fell asleep to the lullaby of the conch rollers methodically grinding the cocoa into a thick, dark liquid, the intoxicating smell of chocolate filling the air.
In March of 2000, the team filled a giant shipping container with their factory machines and sent it across the continent and the Caribbean to Grenada. There, they set up the equipment and continued to refine the machinery until -- a year and a half later -- Green, Brown and Browne were making chocolate on the island with local organic beans. Good chocolate. They replaced some of their hand-built machines with small-scale food machinery -- a nut roaster from Texas, a Swiss grinder once used for sesame seeds -- as well as vintage chocolate equipment including a winnower from a factory in Jamaica and a mélangeur built in Dresden in the 1930s. By 2002, they'd been certified organic and were selling out their run of 1,200 bars a week in Grenada. And then there was a storm.
Grenada doesn't get hurricanes, just warnings. At least that was the conventional wisdom before Hurricane Ivan ripped across the island on Sept. 7, 2004, bringing winds of 115 mph, damaging more than 90 percent of the buildings on the island, killing 28 and leaving thousands homeless. After six hours, the storm continued northward, securing its place in the record books as the most devastating hurricane to hit Grenada since 1955.
The next summer, Hurricane Emily hit -- and it's been a long slow road to recovery ever since. After the storms, the Grenada Chocolate Co. focused on rebuilding and expanding. The owners fortified the factory's roof, increased their solar panel capacity to 6.7 kilowatts and bought a diesel generator that can be run on bio-diesel. They began working to help local farmers become certified organic and ordered more equipment from Europe -- including a refiner from Scotland and an Italian tempering machine -- that would quintuple their batch size and finally make shipments into the world market financially viable.
But while buildings can be rebuilt in a hurry, cacao plants take their own sweet organic time. As the Grenadian crop recovers, the company has had to temporarily supplement its supply with cocoa from Costa Rica -- and only time will reveal whether a changing climate will mean more and more hurricanes in Grenada's future. If a steady supply of certified organic cocoa becomes increasingly difficult to obtain, it could mean big trouble for both this little company as well as larger operations in other parts of the world.
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In the space of six years, Grenada Chocolate has evolved from a flight of fancy to a successful business -- but along the way, concessions have, of course, been made. While the company works cooperatively with Belmont Estates, the local farm that exclusively grows its cocoa, they have not been fair trade-certified. According to Green, it's more than procrastination that's kept them from filing the paperwork: Fair-trade chocolate companies still, almost exclusively, process the value-added product in the first world with raw materials they import from the equatorial belt where cocoa grows. In that way, even the fair-trade system perpetuates a cycle the founders of the Grenada Chocolate Co. are determined to break. "They're buying cocoa from the south part of the world to bring it to the north part of the world," Green said. "But what we're doing can effectively make sure that the people doing the work are actually part of the process." It's bean-to-bar. It's single-estate. Farmers earn a living wage.Legally, the Grenada Chocolate Co. has become a company, not a cooperative, though it is still run with that spirit. Green bought a sailboat, still intent on using it for delivery -- but it's not yet seaworthy. Instead, chocolate is delivered in a little blue Suzuki van around the island and by plane in small but expensive batches to European and American distributors. And there's even talk of reviving that old electric VW squareback that Green and Browne retrofitted for New York City distribution.
There have been no calls from Hershey's. Yet. But this year, when the Grenada Chocolate Co. increases its production, elbowing into a gourmet chocolate market that is growing at 28 percent a year compared to the 2-3 percent growth of the conventional chocolate market -- well, what then?
Dagoba offers an instructive case study. Started around the same time as the Grenada Chocolate Co., the Oregon-based Dagoba began and was also built on an ideal of "full circle sustainability." After five years, the company was so successful -- selling an estimated 7 million candy bars and earning $9 million in 2006 -- that it was bought out by a subsidiary of Hershey's in the fall of 2006. I asked Dagoba's founder, Frederick Schilling, about the state of the company under the new ownership. "The biggest drawback for me is the lack of trust expressed by our fans," he said. But, Schilling admitted, he couldn't blame them. "The past is littered with stories of larger companies buying smaller ones and turning their products to crap." Fundamentally, though, Schilling insists that he didn't intend for Dagoba to forever be an independent. "I wanted to use it as a vehicle of change ... Things are changing so fast these days that large companies have to embrace sustainability initiatives and fair labor practices or they're going to fail."
I asked Browne what he thought about the recent conglomeration of independent chocolate companies. "Sharffen Berger took me by surprise," he said, "but when Dagoba happened, it didn't surprise me. I just know how voracious [Hershey's and Mars] are -- about anything that could marginally be considered candy in the United States. They just snap up everything."
Ever the optimist, Browne remains hopeful about the fate of his own enterprise. "We'll always be small. We'll always be a bit of a niche product, but if anything, having Hershey's buy out companies might make a better market for us," he explained. After all, "there are a lot of people out there who are looking for the small, independent businesses and down-to-earth products as opposed to the ones that are multinational."
About the writer
Meera Subramanian writes about cultural and environmental issues for The New York Times, City Limits, and Audubon Magazine, among other publications. She can be reached at www.meerasub.org.
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