You Know What? I Just Realized That I Haven?t Had a Good Tantrum in Awhile. Indulge Me, Won?t You?

So I was talking to my friend Gary the other day, and the topic was chocolate.  More specifically, how to tell good chocolate from meh chocolate.  He told me about this site, Chocomize, that allows you to customize your chocolate.  Sounds cool, right?  But there’s customization, and then there’s Customization.  If I were running the Chocomize gig, I’d offer chocolates with different percentages of cocoa butter, small batch artisan chocolate, and varietal chocolate from different countries.  Then, I’d offer tons of ways to customize: from mint to flake salt, spices to honeys, caramel to citrus.  Maybe there’d even be some “stuffed” options, like flavored ganaches or caramel.  Or jam.  It would be Awesome, but I would either have to a) charge a billion dollars or b) go out of business Very Quickly.

Here’s their launch clip from YouTube.The Evil Geniuses at Chocomize offer a product that seems customizable, but it’s an ill-LOSE-ion.  I mean, you can choose from fruits, nuts, seeds, spices, candies, etc, but you’ve only got three chocolate choices.  Three!  It’s really more about the customizable extras than truly customized chocolate.  And they don’t even list the ingredients, although they do say it’s Belgian.  I guess we’re just supposed to believe that all Belgian chocolate is of the highest quality.  Maybe it is, but then list your ingredients.  Does the chocolate contain real vanilla, or vanillin?  Is the fat 100% cocoa butter, or did they sneakily substitute some palm oil or something else?  These are Important Questions to ask, because it means the difference between the aforementioned good chocolate and meh chocolate.  Cocoa butter is Magic and melts at body temperature, giving you that wonderful, slow, even melt right when you put it in your mouth.  Chocolate that contains other fats just sits on your tongue like a wee (or not so wee) piece of brown wax.

Anyway, once you have made your Chocolate Selection, you have a choice of adding up to five Items to your chocolate.  But guess what?  They’re just pressed onto the bottom of the bars!  I mean, even Cold Stone Creamery has “mix ins.”  Chocomize offers Press Ons.  Like Lee Press-On Nails.

Okay, okay, I will admit that it would be much more labor intensive to mix those flavors in, but those Cold Stone people do it, plus they do it In Front Of You.  Double plus they have to Sing on Demand!I mean, that’s a Lot.  Items actually in–not on–your base selection, plus Public Humiliation for the Creamery Bees? Amaaaazing.

So, I just customized a bar, all Willy Nilly, to see how much the whole thing costs.  I chose dark chocolate of Unknown Origin, cranberries, currants, almonds, pecans and sea salt. And the grand total for this Gustatory Delight?  $7.35.  For Three Point Five ounces.  That’s $33.60–Thirty Three Dollars and Sixty Cents–per pound. Plus an additional $5.95 for a Grand Total of $39.55 per shipped pound.  Granted, it’s a flat $5.95 no matter how many bars you order, but still.  Really?  Forty bucks for Potentially Brown Wax with Lee Press On Nails?  Unacceptable.

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Okay, I took a pause to go and peruse these guys’ website again to see if I could Ferret Out the type of chocolate they’re using as the base for these bars.  I ain’t payin’ no Forty Bux for wax, right?  And buried Waaaaaayyyy down in a blog post from last year, I found this:

November 09, 2009

Although our business is based in New Jersey, we import all our chocolate from Barry Callebaut in Belgium. For those of you who have never heard of Barry Callebaut, they are the largest manufacturer of high quality cocoa and chocolate in the world. Most consider them to make the finest quality chocolate, and after trying chocolate from lots of different companies, we agreed that they were the best.

Barry Callebaut gets all their cocoa beans from small farmers in Côte d’Ivoire. Check out this link: http://www.barry-callebaut.com/1718 to learn more about how they are helping cocoa farmers.

Once the cocoa beans are harvested in Côte d’Ivoire, Barry Callebaut imports them into Belgium and then processes them further into actual chocolate.

The chocolate is then sent to our factory in the United States. Once the chocolate arrives, we temper and mold the chocolate, add the ingredients of your choosing, and then package and send the bar to you in the mail.

There are many steps that occur from when the cocoa bean is first grown to when you finally receive your Chocomize bar in the mail. We make sure that you get the best quality chocolate possible but not at the risk of ignoring important social issues. We chose Barry Callebaut not just for their great tasting chocolate, but because they are also a socially conscious company like ourselves. Check out this link to read more about how they help the environment: http://www.barry-callebaut.com/1722.

Hopefully this post has made it clearer where exactly our chocolate comes from, and we look forward to sending you your delicious Chocomize bar soon!–Chocomize Blog, November 9, 2009

If I were the Chocomize Folks, I’d plaster this information all over their home page.  At the very very least, I’d link to the post from the home page.  Like this:  Wanna Know Where We Get Our Chocolate?  Click here. It’s not even in the FAQ, which tells us that the chocolate is not certified kosher, that it is gluten free and that the dark chocolate is vegan. But nowhere do they say what percent cocoa mass is in their chocolate, let alone share an ingredient list. And even though we now know that the chocolate comes from Barry Callebaut, we still don’t know what kind of chocolate it is.  For example, this lovely item is touted on the Barry Callebaut site:

Dark compounds

Barry Callebaut?s dark compounds are ready to use: no tempering needed. They offer taste sensations ideal for mimicking dark chocolate and with their technical specifications, they match even the most specific applications. In textures, we offer a choice ranging from the hard ?chocolate-like? crack to a smooth and soft texture.–Barry Callebaut

Don’t be fooled by the Special French Name, some of their products are Fake Chocolate.  Even if it is real chocolate (and I think it is, because the Chocomize people have to temper it), many different brands huddle under the Barry Callebaut umbrella.  I want an ingredient list.

Perhaps (prolly) I’m being a bit hard on these guys.  After all, they’re three recent college grads with a cool idea who are making it happen.  They prolly make more money than I do.  But I’m not sure that they really understand chocolate.  Barry Callebaut is a serviceable brand of chocolate that is kind of like higher-end Hershey’s.  By that, I mean that their operation is Huge and that they supply all kinds of folks with their chocolate.  They’re a volume dealer, as it were–we used a lot of their chocolate in culinary school, for instance.  So, the unique thing about the Chocomize product isn’t the chocolate.  The unique thing is the press ons and the spices and the labeling.  (You can buy customized wedding favors or chocolate bars with your own packaging).

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you’re in it for the press ons and you have money to burn, order away.  After all, it is a fun concept.  And they’re also raising some money for their preferred charities. But, if you want really excellent quality artisan chocolate, you should look elsewhere.

I’m done now.  Thanks.