Rethinking Craft Chocolate| #PodSaveChocolate Ep61

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Episode 61 Overview

There’s an old saying, “You have to think outside the box.” Deepak Chopra famously updated this phrase to, “You have to throw the box away,” suggesting that more is needed.

My corollary to Chopra’s update is, “To be truly innovative, you have to forget what boxes are.”

At its core, forgetting what boxes are means regularly re-examining assumptions and being open to changing what you believe because the words you use inform your beliefs, your beliefs inform your actions, and actions have consequences.

For example, many people who call themselves “bean-to-bar” chocolate makers only make bars. This makes sense in this framing. However, changing the framing to, “I make chocolate, what can be made with chocolate?” opens up the possibility of making other things, even if it’s just chocolate bark.

When call yourself a “craft” chocolate maker, what assumptions are you making? What assumptions are you bringing to your interpretation of the word craft? What are the implications of your assumptions and interpretations?

This is an existential question for many makers these days given the cost of cocoa beans today and the uncertain movement of prices in the short, medium, and long-term.

David Nilsen and I explored some of this in episodes of Bean to Barstool and PodSaveChocolate:

This past weekend was TheChocolateLife monthly member AMA call. These calls are like Forrest Gump’s apocryphal box 0f chocolates – I never know what’s going to be discussed.

In this instance, the call was spent with a ChocolateLife member who is a chocolate maker looking to talk through ways to expand their product line to be less dependent on cocoa (and cocoa butter). Although these calls are scheduled to last 90 minutes, this one ran to three hours because I wanted to get some opinions about ideas I’d been thinking about – ideas that I started to discuss in the following PodSaveChocolate episode.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation a lot since Sunday and in this episode, I will share some of those thoughts, spurred on by recent reports of the 0ff-harvest in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

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Questions? Comments?

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Episode Hashtags and Related Accounts to Follow

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

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