Data Analysis Paralysis WtAF(*)!? | #PodSaveChocolate Ep97

By Clay Gordon | 2 days ago | 7 min read

Original image Markus Spiske / Unsplash.

What can we learn by analyzing the 2024 Academy of Chocolate Awards winners and other lists? Episode 97 of #PodSaveChocolate does just that, concluding: What the *Actual* F(^)!?

When and Where to Watch

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The stream airs at LIVE 11:00 MST (10:00 PST, 12:00 CST, 13:00 EST), on Tuesday, February 4th, 2025.

Links below to watch live – or to view the archived episode.

Click on this (shareable) link to watch on YouTube. Please subscribe (free!) to the @PodSaveChocolate YouTube channel, like this video, comment, and share this episode to help grow the #PSC community.

This **LINKEDIN** link is shareable, too.

This **FACEBOOK** link is also shareable.

Episode 97 Overview

The Academy of Chocolate just announced the awardees of the 2024 competition. I immediately visited the page on the website (link below) with the list – hoping against hope the organizers would finally publish the list in a format that made it easy for members of the public – and data-savvy journalists like me – to use the list as presented.

2024 - Academy of Chocolate

Academy of Chocolate

Click to visit the list of awardees.

Sadly, the answer is it’s (still) a real mess.

In my opinion it’s an affront to the companies who entered the competition and it flips the bird at people who want to explore the products that won awards.

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For some still unknown reason, none of the names of the winners links to their website. At £60 per entry, the least the organizers can do is take the time to link to a website.

In 2025, WtAF?

Further oversights by AoC and issues I have with the list include:

It’s not sortable or filterable – at over 500 entries this makes it unwieldy to navigate.
Capitalization is inconsistent.
Spelling is inconsistent.
Alphabetizaion is inconsistent.
There is no indication of the country of the entrant.
There is no consistent mention of the cocoa origin (producing country).
There is no consistent ordering of key data like cocoa percentage.
There is a huge amount of redundancy.

I scraped the contents of the page and used a programmer’s text editor, a word processor, and a spreadsheet to regularize and normalize the data, added features that assist in sorting the results (and return them to their original ordering when necessary), and more.

I was not able to start any actual analysis until all the above work was completed.

In this episode, I am going to share the journey I took taking the data as presented on the page to a condition where I could start some analysis and present that analysis. I will also demonstrate what else needs to be done to make the data actually usable (not including finding all the URLs).

When I am done with that rant, I will share some insights from the most recent Candy Industry Top 100 Global “Candy” companies – a task that was much harder in many respects than the AoC awards list even though it’s only twenty-percent as long.

Why It’s Important To Do Better

The organizers of awards are sitting on a treasure trove of information about the specialty chocolate industry.

They publish a subset of the information the gather.
They regularly change what and how they publish the information from year-to-year.
They make it difficult to use the information they do publish by deliberately obfuscating the data in badly-written and even obfuscated HTML.

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The question is, “Why?” After going through all the work to collect the data, why not make it usable?

Want to Help?

Since there is no copyright on informative lists, I am happy to make my 2024 awards spreadsheet available to anyone who wants to use it as the basis for more analysis. Let me know in the comments and I will make it available to download from this page.

If you are a programmer and want to help automate the process of scraping, normalizing, and regularizing the data (to the extent possible) from awards programs because you think it’s a valuable project to embark on, you have the skills, and you have the time – contact me by email. I think this is a perfect project for a student looking for a thesis idea and I am happy to discuss where I think the work can lead.

I am not singling out the Academy of Chocolate here – I have similar experiences with the International Chocolate Awards.

Questions?

If you have questions or want to comment, you can do so during the episode or, if you are a ChocolateLife member, you can add them in the Comments below at any time.

More Episode Hashtags

#cocoa #cacao #cacau
#chocolate #chocolat #craftchocolate
#PodSaveChoc #PSC
#LaVidaCocoa #TheChocolateLife

Future Episodes

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January News & AMA

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