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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.) El yapımı çikolata üretiminde özel isimlerden biri olan Amerikan menşeili Mast Brothers, gıda sektörünün gelmiş olduğu endüstriyel alt yapıya rağmen, çikolatalarını halen geleneksel yöntemlerle üreten bir firma. Mottosu “from bean to bar” olan Mast Brothers, çikolatalarının çekirdekten yenilebilir tablet haline gelene kadar ne kadar doğal bir süreç geçirdiğini vurgulamak istiyor. @mastbrothers #mastbrothers #mastbrotherschocolate #chocolate #cikolata #chocolat #dessert #amerika #unitedstates #tatli #lezzet #food #foodie #foodart #instafood #pastry #patisseriebyfoodinlife #patisserie #chocolatier #gastrolover #foodlover #culinary #gastronomy #gastronomia #art #artisan #life #foodlife #foodstagram @gokmensozen @gastromasa @foodinlifemagazine @foodandwoman A photo posted by Patisserie by Foodinlife (@patisseriebyfoodinlife) on Dec 15, 2015 at 7:31am PST 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 now 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 its 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 a 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.” 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 palette-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.)
