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| Gentry Leonard, Tienna Rainey, Mrs Rainey |
Someone just honked to get me out of my
parking spot faster so now we both
have to sit here until one of us is dead!
Living in the city and driving in the city have become second nature. I really love living here. However, when I see pictures that my family sends with grand mountains and colorful fall leaves and beautiful grandchildren, I know that even though I like it here I look forward to being with family and friends. Next fall!
My “get your flu shots” skit has worked. I get calls, texts and in person reports that the missionaries are getting their flu vaccines almost every day. I even had a district report that after a district meeting, they all went together and got their shots. I get such a reward/blessing being with the missionaries. They fill me with love and admiration for the work that they willingly do. They work hard!
We’ve had a cold virus going through the mission causing sore throats, head congestion, headaches, body aches, cough, etc. I have my instructions on a sticky note so I can copy and paste: “Use 1/2 tsp salt in a cup of warm water as a gargle for your throat. Do not swallow it. 1 tablespoon of plain honey also helps soothe your throat and calm a cough. 2 ibuprofen with food helps with fever and body aches. Increase fluids. The juice of 1/2 of a lemon in warm water with honey helps a cough. Sip this. You may use over the counter medications for coughs and colds too.” I’ve come to think that honey works about as well as anything else. Doesn’t work for everyone but it helps many.
I’ve had the pleasure of going to lunch with several missionaries this week. I enjoy visiting with them and getting to know them better. Some are going home this transfer so it was also a farewell lunch/dinner. Transfer day is a week from Tuesday. I can’t believe how fast time flies.
 |
| Elders Carter and Mullen |
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| Sisters Williams and Steninger |
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| Sisters Fa'ulao and Snow |
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| Sisters Petkins and Amaro |
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| Row houses in Greenpoint |
 |
| Wall art |
 |
| Wall art in the making. 3 artists working on a wall |
 |
| Wall sketched in waiting for the artists to paint |
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| Nassau Street business district of Greenpoint. I noticed a lot of mothers/nannies pushing children around in this area |
 |
| Thursday after lunch we walked to MAST, a chocolate factory, for rather
expensive chocolate. It was good but not sure it was that much better than a lesser expensive bar. Lots of flavors in colorful wrappers. |
 |
| When I got home I googled the company. Turns out there is quite a
controversy about the owners and their chocolate making practices. Info at end of blog. |
 |
| On the way to MAST we passed a French macaroon bakery. Of course we were drawn in. |
 |
| Our lunch |
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| The macaroon store had stroopwafels!! Had to get a little bag as my memories took me back to the Netherlands. |
The first of the week was hot and dry. Well as dry as it gets in New York. It was 86 degrees on Wednesday. Friday and Saturday it was rainy. Saturday evening I met Gentry Leonard, a friend from home, who was in Manhattan for a few days. I was able to meet her and her friends for pizza.
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| Gentry Leonard, Tienna Rainey, Mrs Rainey |
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| Mission picture with Elder Holland from last week |
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| Thought I'd show you Fern. When I first got her and now. She has really grown!! |
Sunday for dinner I fixed crockpot London broil and vegetables. I had an abundance of food (I still can’t cook for fewer than 6-8 people.) so I invited Tula and her son to eat with me and 4 other missionaries. Tula is a 92 year old woman from Peru who has lived in the states for 50 plus years. She first moved into the Queens area when there was no Mormon church here for her to go to. There was the Queens Ward which met in Little Neck. There were about 20 members of the church in the whole of Queens. She and her son, Guido who now lives in Brussels, Belgium and is here visiting his mother, told us the history of the church in the area. Finally, instead of going to Little Neck, they made arrangements with the 7th Day Adventists who meet on Saturday to use the basement of their building for church services on Sunday.
They went on to tell how the area where my apartment is and the church next door, in fact this whole block was owned by one man who owned a music school down on Woodhaven. He gave or sold, I’m not clear on this, the land for the church. They had to fight with the neighborhood because no one wanted a church to be built there. After years of hard work and fighting, they finally got the approval for the church but then there was no money to build the church. Tula said that they did a lot of the work themselves such as painting and finishing. They raised money in many ways.
It was an interesting dinner. The conversation caused me to remember that wards used to have to raise money to build chapels. When I was a kid in Las Vegas, I remember my dad being in the bishopric and my mom in the Primary and or Relief Society presidency doing carnivals, dinners, etc to raise money for the chapel that we were building. People donated time if they couldn’t donate money. It was a group effort to build a church building. I think that after a ward had raised a certain amount of money, then the church would send a portion of money to help build the chapel.
Today we have beautiful buildings in which we meet and I fear we too often take for granted. Having to work to establish a house of worship perhaps makes the worship more meaningful. Just thinking….
Today in Primary, the counselor told a story in sharing time about prayer. I had never heard it before. I liked it and thought I would share it with you. It is from a talk, Sweet Power of Prayer, given in April 2003 by Elder Russell M. Nelson:
Many of us have had experiences with the sweet power of prayer. One of mine was shared with a stake patriarch from southern Utah. I first met him in my medical office more than 40 years ago, during the early pioneering days of surgery of the heart. This saintly soul suffered much because of a failing heart. He pleaded for help, thinking that his condition resulted from a damaged but repairable valve in his heart.
Extensive evaluation revealed that he had two faulty valves. While one could be helped surgically, the other could not. Thus, an operation was not advised. He received this news with deep disappointment.
Subsequent visits ended with the same advice. Finally, in desperation, he spoke to me with considerable emotion: “Dr. Nelson, I have prayed for help and have been directed to you. The Lord will not reveal to me how to repair that second valve, but He can reveal it to you. Your mind is so prepared. If you will operate upon me, the Lord will make it known to you what to do. Please perform the operation that I need, and pray for the help that you need.”
His great faith had a profound effect upon me. How could I turn him away again? Following a fervent prayer together, I agreed to try. In preparing for that fateful day, I prayed over and over again, but still did not know what to do for his leaking tricuspid valve. Even as the operation commenced, my assistant asked, “What are you going to do for that?”
I said, “I do not know.”
We began the operation. After relieving the obstruction of the first valve, we exposed the second valve. We found it to be intact but so badly dilated that it could no longer function as it should. While examining this valve, a message was distinctly impressed upon my mind: Reduce the circumference of the ring. I announced that message to my assistant. “The valve tissue will be sufficient if we can effectively reduce the ring toward its normal size.”
But how? We could not apply a belt as one would use to tighten the waist of oversized trousers. We could not squeeze with a strap as one would cinch a saddle on a horse. Then a picture came vividly to my mind, showing how stitches could be placed—to make a pleat here and a tuck there—to accomplish the desired objective. I still remember that mental image—complete with dotted lines where sutures should be placed. The repair was completed as diagrammed in my mind. We tested the valve and found the leak to be reduced remarkably. My assistant said, “It’s a miracle.”
I responded, “It’s an answer to prayer.”
The patient’s recovery was rapid and his relief gratifying. Not only was he helped in a marvelous way, but surgical help for other people with similar problems had become a possibility. I take no credit. Praise goes to this faithful patriarch and to God, who answered our prayers. This faithful man lived for many more years and has since gone to his eternal glory.
I have a testimony of prayer. Many times I have felt that sweet peace that comes with a fervent prayer to my Father in Heaven. There have been times that I haven’t felt or received an answer to a prayer but I still know that my prayer was heard and may yet still be answered. It may have already been answered in a way that I didn’t recognize as an answer. From Elder Nelson’s talk:
Not all of our prayers will be answered as we might wish. Occasionally the answer will be no. We should not be surprised. Loving mortal parents do not say yes to every request of their children. We should pray in accord with the will of our Heavenly Father. He wants to test us, to strengthen us, and to help us achieve our full potential.
I value the gift of prayer. The opportunity to talk/communicate one on one with my Heavenly Father. I appreciate the guidance and opportunities that come to me through prayer. I am truly blessed!!
I love you my family and friends.
This information on
Greenpoint and MAST chocolate is rather long.
Sorry. Just for your interest
only.
Originally farmland – many of the farm owners' family names, such as Meserole and Calyer, are current street names – the residential core of Greenpoint was built on parcels divided during the 19th century, with rope factories and lumber yards lining the East River to the west, while the northeastern section along the Newtown Creek through East Williamsburg became an industrial maritime area. It has a large Polish immigrant and Polish-American community and has often been referred to as "Little Poland." The recent and continuing building boom in the neighborhood, especially of multifamily dwellings, among other demographic changes, has made the neighborhood a center of "hipster" culture and nightlife. There have been recent efforts to reclaim the rezoned Greenpoint / Williamsburg East River waterfront for recreational use and also to extend a continuous promenade into the Newtown Creek area.[
History
Early
colonization and agricultural era
Landmarked
19th-century rowhouses in the Greenpoint Historic District
 |
| Kent Street |
 |
| Lorimer Street |
At the time of European settlement in New York, Greenpoint was inhabited by the Keskachauge[9]
(Keshaechqueren) Indians, a sub-tribe of the Lenape.[10]
Contemporary accounts describe the area as remarkably verdant and beautiful,
with Jack pine and oak forest, meadows, fresh water creeks and briny marshes.
Water fowl and fish were abundant. European settlers originally used the
"Greenpoint" name to refer to a small bluff of land jutting into the
East River at what is now the westernmost end of Freeman Street, but eventually
it came to describe the whole peninsula.[11]
In 1638, the Dutch West India
Company negotiated the right to settle
Brooklyn from the Lenape. The first recorded European settler of what is now
Greenpoint was Dirck
Volckertsen (Batavianized from Holgerssøn),
a Norwegian immigrant who in 1645 built a 1 1⁄2-story
farmhouse there with the help of two Dutch carpenters.[12] It
was built in the contemporary Dutch style just west of what is now the
intersection of Calyer Street and Franklin Street. There he planted orchards
and raised crops, sheep and cattle. He was called Dirck de Noorman by the Dutch
colonists of the region, Noorman being the Dutch word for
"Norseman" or "Northman."[13] The
creek that ran by his farmhouse became known as Norman Kill (Creek); it ran
into a large salt marsh and was later filled in.
Volckertsen received title to the
land after prevailing in court the year before over a Jan De Pree, who had a
rival claim. He initially commuted to his farm by boat and may not have moved
into the house full time until after 1655, when the small nearby settlement of Boswyck was established, on the charter of which Volckertsen was
listed along with 22 other families. Volckertsen's wife, Christine Vigne, was a
Walloon. Volckertsen had
had periodic conflicts with the Keshaechqueren, who killed two of his
sons-in-law and tortured a third in separate incidents throughout the 1650s.
Starting in the early 1650s, he began selling and leasing his property to Dutch
colonists, among them Jacob Haie (Hay) in 1653, who built a home in northern
Greenpoint that was burned down by Indians two years later.[12] Jan
Meserole established a farm in 1663; his farmhouse at what is now 723 Manhattan
Avenue stood until 1919 and last served as a Young Women’s Hebrew Association.[14]
The Hay property and other holdings
came into the possession of Pieter Praa, a captain in the local militia, who
established a farm near present day Freeman Street and McGuinness Boulevard, and went on to own most of Greenpoint. Volckertsen died in
about 1678 and his grandsons sold the remainder of the homestead to Pieter Praa
when their father died in 1718; the name of Norman Avenue remains as testimony
to Volckertsen's legacy.[9][15] Praa
had no male heirs when he died in 1740, but the farming families of his various
daughters formed the core of Greenpoint for the next hundred years or so. By
the time of the American
Revolutionary War, Greenpoint's population was
entirely five related families:
- Abraham Meserole, a grandson of Pieter Praa, and his family lived on the banks of the East River between the present day India and Java Streets;
- Jacob Meserole (brother of Abraham) and his family farmed the entire south end of Greenpoint and built a house between present day Manhattan Avenue and Lorimer Street near Norman Avenue;
- Jacob Bennett, son-in-law of Pieter Praa, and his family farmed the land in the northern portion of Greenpoint and built their house near present day Clay Street roughly between present day Manhattan Avenue and Franklin Street;
- Jonathan Provoost, son-in-law of Pieter Praa, and his family farmed the eastern portion of Greenpoint, and lived in the house built by Praa;
- Jacobus Calyer, a grandson-in-law of Pieter Praa, and his family farmed the western portion of Greenpoint, and lived in the house built by Volckertsen.
The British Army had
an encampment in Greenpoint during the American Revolution, which caused considerable hardship for the families;
Abraham Meserole's son was imprisoned on suspicion of revolutionary sympathies.[15]
Throughout the 18th and early 19th
centuries, the farms were quite isolated from the rest of Brooklyn, connected
only to one another by farm lanes and to the rest of Bushwick Township by a
single road, Wood Point Road (now Bushwick Avenue). The families used long
boats to travel to Manhattan to sell their farm produce. Little historical
information exists about this period of Greenpoint's history other than the
personal papers and recorded oral history of these five families.[15]
19th-century
industrialization
 |
| The Greenpoint Wood Exchange, where lumber is processed |
Greenpoint first began to change
significantly when entrepreneur Neziah Bliss married into the Meserole family
in the early 1830s after purchasing land from them. He eventually bought out
most of the land in Greenpoint. In 1834 he had the area surveyed, and in 1839
opened a public turnpike along what is now Franklin Street. He established
regular ferry service to Manhattan around 1850. All of these initiatives contributed
to the rapid and radical transformation of Greenpoint, which was annexed to the
City of Brooklyn in 1855.[16]
In the years that followed
Greenpoint established itself as a center of shipbuilding and waterborne
commerce; its shipbuilding, printing, pottery, glassworks and foundries were
staffed by generation after generation of hardworking immigrants. Germans and
Irish arrived in the mid-19th century and large numbers of Poles began arriving
before the turn of the century. The homes built for the merchants and the
buildings erected for their workers sprang up along streets that lead down to
the waterfront. Today, this area is on the National Register of Historic Places as the Greenpoint
Historic District.
Greenpoint's East River waterfront
holds the maritime history of the community. The buildings which formerly
manufactured the ropes for the shipbuilding industry are still there. Long a
site of shipbuilding, the neighborhood's dockyards harbored the construction of
the USS Monitor—the Union's first ironclad fighting ship built during the American Civil War. It was launched on Bushwick Creek. The Monitor,
together with seven other ironclads, was built at the Continental Ironworks in
Greenpoint. In 1866, the largest wooden ship ever built up to that time, The
Great Republic, was built along Newtown Creek.
Charles Pratt's Astral Oil Works also
opened on the Greenpoint waterfront in the 1860s. Pratt sold his interest to John D. Rockefeller's recently formed Standard Oil
Trust in 1874. The Astral Apartments were
built as housing for workers at Astral Oil in 1886.
20th
and 21st centuries
The petroleum industry continued to
expand, despite occasional catastrophe. On September 13, 1919, the Standard Oil
refinery caught fire and soon spread flaming liquids into neighboring oil works
and Newtown Creek.[17]
The manufacturing industry of
Greenpoint declined after World War II. The
Eberhard Faber Pencil Factory, once the largest manufacturer of lead
pencils in the United States, operated on West Street until 1956. The company's
former buildings were designated a historic district by the New York City
Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2007.[18]
The Greenpoint
Historic District was listed on the National
Register of Historic Places in 1983
SWEET SUCCESS
How the Mast Brothers fooled the world into paying $10
a bar for crappy hipster chocolate
Such pretty wrapping paper, but
what's inside?
Written
by
Obsession
December 17, 2015
Whether you’ve seen their
beautifully wrapped bars for sale at Shake Shack or Rag & Bone,
featured in the pages of the New York Times or Vogue, or decorating
one of their New York, London, or soon, LA shops, Mast Brothers chocolate bars
have become the world’s most prominent brand of artisanal chocolate.
But while customers can’t get enough
of the company’s bearded, Brooklyn hipster founders, and their brilliantly
marketed, $10 “bean to bar” chocolates, a term reserved for chocolate that has
been produced entirely under the maker’s control, from the cocoa bean to the
wrapped bar, chocolate experts have shunned them. Earlier this year, Slate published a story
on Rick and Michael Mast, detailing complaints by the craft chocolate community
about their undeserved media attention and unparalleled hubris. (“I can affirm
that we make the best chocolate in the world,” Rick told Vanity Fair in
February.)
Now, in “Mast Brothers: What Lies
Beneath the Beards,” a new series of posts on DallasFood.org, Scott, the first-name-only blogger who in 2006 presented
detailed allegations that the now-defunct Noka Chocolate was selling another company’s chocolate at significantly higher
prices, has targeted the Mast Brothers’ story. He alleges that the
company—whose business is staked on its authenticity and commitment to
transparency—did not originally make its own chocolate from scratch, as it
claims it always has. As artisanal food surges in popularity, whether it’s
chocolate, liquor or jam, the Mast Brothers’ story highlights how a company can
have great success selling a product of dubious quality as something
“artisanal” or “handcrafted” with beautiful packaging and handsome, bearded
founders.
“This has been an open secret in the
chocolate industry,” Clay Gordon, a chocolate expert with
15 years of experience in chocolate, including as a consultant to chocolate
makers on ingredient sourcing and equipment and as a former lecturer on
chocolate and wine pairings through New York University and the James Beard
Foundation, told Quartz. The clues were everywhere for anyone paying close
attention, but the media missed them. Quartz has independently verified many of
Scott’s claims.
Mast Brothers repeatedly declined to
answer specific questions. In a statement provided to Quartz by the company’s
public relations agency (and since posted
on its website), the brothers said: “Any
insinuation that Mast Brothers was not, is not or will not be a bean to bar
chocolate maker is incorrect and misinformed. We have been making chocolate
from bean to bar and will continue to do so. Through the years, we have
continuously improved our methods, recipes and tastes. We love making
chocolate, and we have the audacity to think that we are pretty good at it
too.”
Mast
Brothers obscure the fact that they originally used remelted, mass-produced
chocolate
As they tell it, the Mast Brothers
story is a tale of creativity and invention, an American dream with a hipster
twist. Two Iowa-born, Williamsburg-living brothers taught themselves to make
bean-to-bar chocolate. Incorporating their company in 2007, they wrapped their chocolate in expensive, beautiful paper
and sold it for $10 per bar. Customers loved them, and what began in their
apartment led them to a bigger space. By the summer of 2008,
they were running a small Brooklyn factory; by November 2011, it had expanded another 3,000 square feet; and by January 2014, they had opened up a new factory in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They opened in London in
time for Valentine’s Day 2015 and the Los Angeles
store is expected this spring. Now, as a tour guide at the Brooklyn retail
location told Quartz, the Williamsburg spot alone pulled in $28,000 in
chocolate sales in just one December weekend.
But there is evidence that at least
some of their early production involved remelting chocolate bought from Valrhona, a commercial French chocolate manufacturer.
In the chocolate community, the
suspicions of remelting began early. The Mast Brothers’ original bars had a
taste and texture that was too much like the palate-friendly kind available at
the drug store to be truly “bean to bar,” Scott explains in his first post.
Bean-to-bar chocolate has a distinctive taste that, like wine, ties it to its
origin, and craft chocolate makers use minimal processing to retain that taste.
“I was confident that they did not
make the chocolate at that time,” Aubrey Lindley, co-owner of craft chocolate
shop Cacao in Portland, Oregon told Scott and confirmed to Quartz. “It had an
overly refined, smooth texture that is a trademark of industrial chocolate. No
small equipment was achieving a texture like that. It also tasted like
industrial chocolate: balanced, flavorless, dark roast, and vanilla.”
While multiple chocolate experts
echoed these sentiments to both Scott and to Quartz, in part four of
his series, Scott provides accounts from multiple sources who spoke to the
Masts—over email, on the phone and in person—about their use of Valrhona
chocolate.
In February 2008, Oklahoma chef
Larry Gober reached out to Rick Mast about buying Mast Brothers chocolate, as
shown in emails on the DallasFood blog and provided to Quartz. He also asked
where they were sourcing their chocolate from. Rick told him that they mostly
sourced from Venezuela, Ecuador, Dominican Republic and Madagascar. “We also
receive cocoa paste from Valrhona that we will sometimes use as a base as we
experiment with new recipes,” they told him. “We are from bean to bar and hope
to be exclusively bean to bar by the end of the year once our ‘laboratory’ is
complete.”.
But they also told other chocolate
makers that they had included Valrhona chocolate in products. On the phone with
Alan McClure, founder of Patric Chocolate, a
craft chocolate company formed in 2006, in the spring of 2008, Rick Mast admitted
that they had used some remelted Valrhona chocolate but weren’t doing it any
longer. (McClure confirmed this conversation with Quartz.)
That June, though, Art Pollard,
co-founder of the bean-to-bar chocolate company, Amano Artisan
Chocolate, was introduced to the brothers as
they were selling their bars at the Brooklyn Flea, a
weekend flea market in New York, including a dark milk, Trinidad single-origin
bar. He had already heard about the brothers, and was curious to meet them. He
saw they were selling six varieties of bars. “I wasn’t accusing,” he tells
Quartz. “I was just amazed they were able to pull that off right from the
beginning.” Coming up with just a single new bar is “a royal pain in the
butt,” he says. He asked the then-beardless brothers about their sourcing since
he had had trouble getting cocoa beans from Trinidad himself. “These three bars
are ones that we made,” the Masts told him. “And these other three,” pointing
to the single-origin and dark milk chocolate varieties, “are Valrhona.”
(Pollard told Quartz that other chocolate experts who were with him that day
remember hearing those comments, but don’t want to speak to the press.)
These accounts contradict the
statement from the Mast Brothers PR team which stated, “We made our chocolate
from ‘bean to bar’ when we started.” Similarly, in a response to an inquiry from Grub Street, the Mast Brothers wrote, “Needless to say, we were then
and are now a bean to bar chocolate maker.”
Eventually, however, experts believe
that Michael and Rick Mast did start making at least some of their own
chocolate, and as Scott explains, the quality of their bars dropped. “The
change was remarkable and obvious,” Lindley, of the Cacao shop in Portland,
says of trying the bars in 2010. “Most of the chocolate was simply inedible, by
my standards.”
The
Mast Brothers are not as original and innovative as they have claimed
Part of the Mast Brothers’ story is
that the brothers are self-taught chocolate-making MacGyvers, the first of
their kind, inventing and rejiggering equipment to fit their chocolate needs.
“We’ve had to come up with how everything
is done every step of the way because there was no such thing as small-batch
chocolate makers,” Rick told an Australian publication.
Their 2013 cookbook, Mast
Brothers Chocolate: A Family Cookbook, describes “roasting in a coffee drum
roaster… three pounds of beans at a time,” “cracking cacao shells with a hand
mill used for crushing barley in home brewing,” and “winnow[ing] the husks from
the nibs using fans, or even hair dryers.”
“There’s no such thing as commercial
equipment for [small-batch chocolate making]. You can’t say, I’m going to start
a small chocolate company and then go online and get a couple of machines,”
they told NPR in 2010.
The tour guide at the Williamsburg
factory told Quartz that the brothers figured everything out themselves through
“trial and error,” referencing only ancient Incan or Mayan (she couldn’t
remember which) techniques.
 |
| Crankandstein Cocoa Mill in the Mast
Brothers Wiliamsburg factory in March 2009 (George Gensler) |
But in reality, by the time Michael
and Rick started making and selling chocolate in 2007, there were already a
number of American small-batch chocolate makers on the market, as one of the
proprietors of those businesses, Shawn Askinosie of Askinosie Chocolate, wrote for the Huffington Post earlier this year. Scharffen Berger was founded in 1997,
Askinosie started in 2005, and Theo sold its
first organic chocolate in 2006,
just to name a few.
(In the cookbook the Mast brothers
played a little safer, saying that when they started, “barely a handful of
companies were actually making chocolate from scratch in North America.”)
In truth, despite their claim that
they “had come up with how everything is done every step of the way,” the Masts
picked up at least some of their knowledge on the thriving online community of
chocolate makers that has existed for more than a decade. A public website, Chocolate
Alchemy, is a hub of information, where
chocolate makers could trade tips and advice for making small-batch chocolate.
The website even included the tip about the
blowdryer. Its earliest posts are dated October
3, 2003.
This site is also where the brothers
bought some of their first equipment, as the founder, John Nanci, has confirmed
to Quartz. In March 2009, on a tour of the first Williamsburg factory site,
George Gensler—a co-founder of the Manhattan Chocolate Society and member of
the Grand Jury for the International Chocolate Awards—saw and photographed the
“Crankandstein Cocoa Mill,” developed in collaboration with Nanci specifically
for the purpose of cracking cacao shells. Nanci has confirmed to Quartz that he
sold the machine to Michael Mast on March 13, 2008. The note from Mast included
in the order read, “We can’t thank you enough for all you have done. Your site
is amazing.” Mast also separately ordered a 70kg bag of organic cocoa beans
from the Dominican Republic with the note “Thanks for all of your incredible
work and information. We could never have done this without you.”
Mast
Brothers have executed a brilliant marketing strategy, but don’t sell quality
chocolate
A collaboration with Stumptown
Coffee, pictured at Chelsea Market in New York City. (Alexi Ueltzen via Flickr
(CC BY-SA 2.0))
To Georg Bernardini, author of Chocolate—The Reference Standard, aka “The Chocolate Bible,” which includes reviews of over
500 chocolate companies’ bars, the marketing—not the chocolate—is Mast
Brothers’ legacy. “It is not an ingenious story of passion for cocoa, instead a
sophisticated marketing strategy, to earn as much money as possible as fast as possible,”
he writes in the 2015 edition.
Even beyond the allegations of not
being truly “bean-to-bar”, all the chocolate makers and experts Quartz spoke to
expressed a gripe about the Mast Brothers’ past and current lines: The
chocolate just isn’t very good. “This year’s tasting was anything but a
pleasure,” Bernardini writes in the 2015 edition of his chocolate guide. “The
cocoa beans are virtually mistreated by the Mast Brothers.”
Mark Christian of the C-Spot, a chocolate review website, was slightly kinder in his
overall assessment, telling Quartz that it swings from good to bad. “Starts out
quite enticing, takes an interim dive, then improves for awhile, now currently
quite abysmal,” he writes in an email. “Whether they ever again reach peak
levels depends on their whim to shift attention back to hi-craft (outsourced or
in-house) instead of concentrating overwhelmingly on the business of branding
(quite a success).”
A 2009 photo of Mast Brothers
chocolate on sale for $12 at a pastry shop. (Ann Larie Valentine via Flickr/CC
BY-SA 2.0)
The company’s price of around $10
per bar is not unheard-of in the world of artisanal chocolate, but certainly on
the higher end. “We charge $8 for most of our bars and our chocolate regularly
receives awards in Europe for its taste and flavor,” Pollard of Amano Artisan
Chocolate told Quartz. “Charging $10 for a bar made with beans that are not
highly prized should be an exception rather than the rule.”
The paper the chocolate is wrapped
in, on the other hand, Bernardini calls “almost magnificent.” As Scott shows on Storify,
for many fans, “the packaging is the product.”
The Mast Brothers have packaged
themselves brilliantly as well.
Ironically, some chocolate makers
nonetheless see a silver lining in the Mast Brothers’ success. Chocolate
experts are “really unhappy that the brand has grown as a result of misleading
people,” says Gordon. “But by the same token, they’ve been this important
gateway chocolate.” Thanks to Mast Brothers, spending a lot of money on
chocolate doesn’t seem like such a leap.
“If they did mislead consumers, it
is deeply disappointing,” Sam Lehr and Derek Menaldino, co-founders of MUCHOMAS
Chocolate, a relatively young craft chocolate
company established in 2014, told Quartz over email. “Yet the fact remains that
they are one of the craft chocolate world’s great ambassadors.”
The
company celebrates transparency but turns out to be incredibly opaque
It is impossible to know whether or
not the company is currently making chocolate entirely bean-to-bar because, as
several experts pointed out to Quartz, there is no transparency.
In their cookbook, the Mast Brothers
propound on the importance of transparency as early as page 5. “Be honest and
transparent. We demand integrity in everything we do and eagerly open ourselves
up to the world with pride. That’s why we opened a craft chocolate factory in
the middle of New York City!”
But throughout the writing of this
story, the company has refused to answer any specific questions, from whether
Mast Brothers has investors to what kind of equipment the company uses. At its
Williamsburg factory, the tour instructions were explicit: no photographs and
no notes. The Brooklyn Navy Yard factory, where the tour guide said about
two-thirds of the company’s production is done, is closed to the public.
They have also stopped listing the
source of the beans, omitting one of the most critical elements of a
bean-to-bar chocolate label, despite proclamations in their book about
“connect[ing] customers to the source.” The 2016 line of flavored bars, which
include sheep’s milk, mint, and olive oil, no longer lists bean origin, though
a tour guide at the Williamsburg location said they are still single-origin
with just a couple of exceptions. The guide cited two reasons for not listing
the origins: Because it encourages more conversation between retailers and
customers—even though a lot of chocolate is sold off premises and wholesale—and
because it looks better aesthetically to have less information on the label.
Other chocolate makers offer a
different explanation: “It means that it could be virtually anything,” Pollard
told Quartz.
Transparency is important to all
elements of the food movement, but it is particularly relevant in the realm of
chocolate, Carla Martin, lecturer on African and African American Studies at
Harvard University, and founder and executive director of the Fine Cacao and
Chocolate Institute, told Quartz. She cites examples
like Cadbury’s ignoring the use of slave labor in its supply chain in the early
1900s, and early industrial chocolate makers who were found to be bulking up
chocolate with corn sugar. “It’s something that people involved in the craft
chocolate movement are very concerned with,” she says. “There are ideals about
this kind of openness in one’s business practices and it comes from very real concerns
about fraudulent practices in the food industry.” Similar concerns continue to
the present day: Most of the world’s chocolate comes from West Africa, where practices like child labor and rainforest clearing are rampant.
It’s easy to attribute all of the
negative comments to resentment from other chocolate makers—Mast Brothers gets
incredible press from a range of publications all over the world. “There is a
certain kind of jealousy,” Bernardini told Quartz over email, “but more of an
anger.” “But [chocolate makers] should also be angry with the media as it is
the fault and responsibility of the media that Mast Brothers became so famous
(with a mediocre and sometimes also bad quality). Only because they wore
clothes like Amish people with long beards.”
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