No climate drama
Clunker of the year (maybe the decade)
My Linked In feed these days is full of regenerative agriculture, COP Thought Pieces (no thanks) and retirements announcements from old colleagues in sugar, cocoa and coffee. Well done you.
Today I came across an announcement for cell cultured cocoa. The company making it shall remain nameless but they’re easy to find. They’re at a food show in Europe, promoting their new product. Fine. I have no problem with cultured cocoa. It’s going to have either two fates: 1 it will flame out like cell cultured meat/meat analog or whatever we call it these days, or 2 it will replace the underwhelming coatings on supermarket confectionery bars, which we cannot call chocolate anymore. I don’t see it replacing fine flavored chocolate. Google Ruby Chocolate.
What got on my wick was one of the selling points. I give you “No Climate Drama”. I would have loved to have been in the Zoom call when they came up with that. So they’re going to make a chocolate substitute, then pull up the ladder behind them, leaving the rest of us to figure out climate change while they make bank.
They don’t even call it chocolate, just “climate resilient cacao”.
Sidebar: why is it in English everyone wants to say “cacao”. It’s cocoa. Cacao makes you sound like a beret wearing goateed wine snob (or the female equivalent, I’m an equal opportunity shit stirrer).
No Climate Drama. Like comparing climate change to your 5 year old having a tanty before dinner.
Anyway, they’ve raised buckets of money from VCs, way more than I ever will growing cocoa in the dirt in an agroforestal model, training youth and women, improving the soil and carbon sequestration yaddah yaddah yaddah. Maybe I should sell our chocolate (and it’s actually chocolate) as “Contains Climate Drama”.
Gotta go, have a meeting with my packaging designer…….
PS My comment on the post has been deleted.
Over and out.
Cacao vs cocoa: lots of makers (myself included) use the words interchangeably, as do the consumers of chocolate. No clue why, though I think the same folks who coined “fine flavor chocolate” (which no consumer said, ever, and which does not convey the “meaning” it’s intended to convey—fine wine, fine dining, fine…is just code for “we say it’s worth more that’s why it costs more?)
You have different meanings for "Drama". Their's is "Crisis" or "Damage", which people are usually not fond of. Whereas your "Drama" is synonymous to "action" or even "progress" which, of course, is good. Beside, "Drama" is life, so I do not find it a good selling argument.