Do you remember when craft chocolate makers used to think that mass-produced chocolate was not their competition? Good old times.

“The person that buys mass-produced chocolate is not the same person that would buy craft chocolate”, many professionals used to claim. In 2022, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only because buying mass-produced chocolate instead of craft chocolate could be just a matter of lack of education (instead of budget), but also because mass-produced chocolate is now speaking the same language of craft chocolate, slimming the perceptive gap between the two products.

This malicious marketing practice is putting the entire craft bean-to-bar market in danger.

How is mass-produced chocolate different from craft chocolate?

When we talk about mass-produced chocolate, we refer to chocolate that is:

manufactured in large quantities,
with automated technology,
resulting in standardized characteristics that never change over time.

When we talk about craft chocolate, we refer to chocolate that is:

manufactured in small quantities,
with mostly artisan methods,
resulting in unique characteristics that change from batch to batch.

These two types of chocolate are at opposite poles of the market for both quality and business practices.

If mass-produced chocolate rarely reveals the source of its raw materials, craft chocolate makes transparency and traceability part of the unique selling proposition. If craft chocolate lets the natural flavors of fine cacao be the protagonist, mass-produced chocolate tends to be heavy on sugar, milk and vanilla instead. While you can see the humans working tirelessly behind craft chocolate every day, mass-produced chocolate is a faceless product that at best can show you multimillionaire CEOs.

So why would mass-produced chocolate want to speak the craft chocolate language?

Modern consumers keep companies accountable for their behaviors. They demand ethical products that respect both the environment and the workers dedicated to their production. Authenticity, transparency and trustworthiness are the kind of feelings that companies now want to evoke in consumers to gain their purchase. However, mass-produced chocolate suffers from a lack of all the above.

From child labor scandals to greenwashing claims, aware consumers are losing faith in big chocolate companies. However, instead of changing their products and behaviors for the better, mass-produced chocolate companies are opting for a faster and easier solution. They are blatantly copying their more trustworthy counterpart: craft chocolate.

mass-produced chocolate is copying the craft chocolate vocabulary

Despite having a large marketing budget, mass-produced chocolate companies have kept a close eye on the success of the craft chocolate segment in the past 10 years, and decided to take advantage of their distinctive vocabulary.

Terms that were unique to the craft chocolate industry such as Bean-to-Bar and Single Origin, together with the addition of Tasting Notes and Cacao Origins, can now be found on the packaging of the biggest chocolate manufacturers.

More and more chocolate bars on supermarket shelves now showcase exotic origin names like Ecuador, Ghana or Indonesia. Others include fancy-sounding flavor profile descriptions. Some more claim to be “artisanal” (while being manufactured in the largest machines available on the market).

Needless to say, the use of the same exact words for two very different products is creating confusion in the minds of consumers. Before the taste test, the average chocolate lover can’t tell much of a difference between the two types of products anymore.

Here are some examples of mass-produced chocolate speaking the craft chocolate language.

the BEAN-TO-BAR mania

The term Bean-to-Bar was first invented in the craft chocolate community. It described those professionals making chocolate from scratch starting from the raw cacao beans, refining them all the way to the finished chocolate bars.

We know that all chocolate is made starting from the raw cacao beans, but this term represented a badge of honor specifically for all the artisanal chocolate makers and their efforts in preserving fine flavor while working with the raw material. However, after witnessing its rising popularity, also large manufacturers started using this appealing term to describe their own chocolate, in spite of being far away from the craftsmanship implied in the Bean-to-Bar original meaning.

One example is the 92% Dark Chocolate bar by Ghirardelli.

The Ghirardelli Chocolate Company is an American confectioner owned by Swiss confectioner Lindt & Sprüngli. Their declared total revenue for the year 2020 was $575,000,000, definitely putting the company in the mass-produced chocolate category. Yet, they decided to add the “From Bean To Bar” claim to their 92% Dark Chocolate bars without changing anything else. Even the ingredients are still the same: unsweetened chocolate, cocoa butter, sugar, milk fat, vanilla extract, natural flavor, soy lecithin.

Nothing has changed in the product except for the addition of this new trendy term (and how this 92% INTENSE DARK CHOCOLATE is legally allowed to contain milk fat, only God knows).

On the other side of the globe, Japanese giant Meiji decided to launch an entire collection called Bean-to-Bar in 2017 still available to this day.

From the appealing packaging to the unique molds created to deliver specific mouthfeels, these chocolate bars were a hit, awarded many times even at international competitions. But even in this case, Meiji is a holding company with annual revenues of $9 billion using a term born to describe small artisanal businesses.

all for the artisan feels

Mass-produced chocolate companies will do pretty much anything to give their products an artisanal feeling.

With this strategy they want consumers to associate positive emotions of familiarity, craftsmanship and rusticity to their products. Reality couldn’t be more different: mass-produced chocolate is made in automated machines with rigid standardized protocols and only a few humans instructed to monitor times, temperatures and performances. There is no artisan or human touch in mass-produced chocolate.

One example of this misleading marketing is performed by Whittaker’s in their Artisan Collection line.

Despite being a family-owned company, this New Zealand based confectioner employs around 200 people and brings home something like $18 million in yearly revenue. In 2015, Whittaker’s released the Artisan Collection, described as “a range of six 100g blocks for chocolate lovers seeking that little bit of luxury, featuring delicious local ingredients sourced from equally passionate artisan producers around New Zealand and the Pacific.” As you can tell, the new Artisan Collection bars (on the right) definitely have a different look and feel compared to the regular Whittaker’s bars (on the left).

So the food producers providing the local ingredients are (supposedly) artisans, but Whittaker’s chocolate? Not so much. Unless the company has a specific space in their factory dedicated to the making of this specific line using artisan methods, separated from their other automated systems, then there is nothing artisan about this product. Therefore, isn’t it misleading to call it the Artisan Collection making it sound as handmade as craft chocolate?

Another artisan collection was created in 2019 by chocolate giant Nestlé.

Made with Single Origin chocolate from Ghana, Nestlé USA launched these chocolate baking chips on the market in 2019, which contributed to the company’s $10 billion in annual revenue. This product cashes in on two craft chocolate terms: artisan and single-origin (which indicates cacao coming from a single country). Reading the word ARTISAN on a product made by the world’s largest food & beverage company is definitely baffling.

the boom of single origins

The country of origin on a chocolate bar gives us an idea of where the cacao to make it came from. It doesn’t tell us anything on the actual quality of the chocolate, but it is still a sign of somewhat transparency and traceability (better than nothing).

Before craft chocolate makers declared their cacao suppliers and origins on their bars, no big chocolate brand in the industry ever cared to reveal the provenance of the cacao used for a product targeted to end consumers. Curiously enough, even big chocolate manufacturers now add the name of exotic countries on their bars.

One of them is Ritter Sport.

In 2019, the German confectionery company launched the Cocoa Selection line of 3 chocolate bars: 55% Ghana, 61% Nicaragua and 74% Peru. Each single bar was marketed as having a peculiar tasting profile based on the origin of the cacao used. This has always been the core message that craft chocolate brands worked very hard to communicate. Mass-produced chocolate unashamedly incorporated it into their own marketing.

Also Godiva jumped on the trend early on.

godiva single origin Mexico — Godiva’s single origin Mexican collection.

The Belgian chocolatier (with Turkish-Korean owners) launched a collection of six super premium Mexican single-origin chocolate bars back in 2016. Each 75 g bar retailed for $7 and was geared towards “consumers seeking higher-end chocolate products with sustainable cocoa sources”, Confectionery News reported. By using the term Single Origin, also Godiva aimed at evoking feelings of transparency, traceability and trust in their customers.

Mass-produced chocolate is speaking the craft chocolate language, and this is dangerous.

By using the same terminology, mass-produced chocolate becomes very similar to craft chocolate in the eyes of consumers, who can’t perceive that much of a difference before they taste the chocolate. If two chocolate bars speak the same language (“artisanal”, “bean-to-bar”, “single-origin”, “Ecuador”, “fine cacao”), it becomes increasingly hard to explain to consumers why they would need to pay $3 for one and $12 for the other.

So the question is: will the craft chocolate industry need to invent a brand new vocabulary to protect itself from the savvy, aggressive and thieving marketing of mass-produced chocolate?

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