The Next Big Thing: Bean-to-Bar Chocolate

It’s a fact of life that trends come and go – even in the chocolate industry. The craze for organic confectionery launched chocolate companies like Green and Black’s, while the fair-trade movement brought international attention to the farmers of cacao beans. Artisan chocolates produced waves of handcrafted confections, and the single-estate fad has sparked growing interest in the distinctive flavours of beans farmed from a single cacao estate.

All of these developments indicate one larger, underlying trend in the chocolate industry: consumers are no longer satisfied with conventional, mass-produced chocolate, manufactured in relative obscurity in factories far, far from the cacao estates of Africa and South America. The new products catching on now all enable the consumer to get closer to his or her chocolate, but none more so than bean-to-bar.

What is Bean-to-Bar?

Bean-to-bar chocolate is based upon the premise of a single goal: carry out the chocolate-making process, from grinding the beans to moulding the bars, under one roof. It may sound like a simple concept, but many producers of retail and wholesale chocolates work with chocolate from another manufacturer, which they melt to form into truffles, bonbons, or other confections.

Companies might opt for a bean-to-bar operation for a number of reasons: large companies might own the process for economic reasons, but the smaller companies cropping up in abundance now want to control the production process for the purposes of improving quality, working conditions, or environmental impact.

Where Did the Idea Come From?

The trend toward bean-to-bar chocolate production first sprang up in San Francisco, on the west coast of the United States - a city known for its culinary pioneering. However, the fad didn't take long to cross the pond to the UK. Duffy’s Chocolates of Lincolnshire buys unroasted cacao beans from Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala, Peru, and other cacao-growing countries, and then does all the subsequent processing in-house. Sorting, roasting, winnowing, grinding, conching, refining, and tempering chocolate is a long, intensive process, but for many chocolatiers it has paid off - with chocolate bars of exceptional quality.

Other British chocolatiers, such as Willie’s Cacao and Hotel Chocolat, are also capitalising on the do-it-yourself trend. Willie’s is churning out high-quality single-estate chocolate bars from its factory in Devon, where the entire process is overseen by Willie himself. Hotel Chocolat grows cacao beans on its own plantation in St. Lucia, and offers workshops at many of its locations, where visitors can learn how to make chocolate straight from the bean.

One British chocolatier, London-based Paul A. Young, is taking the concept one step further by including even the shell of the cacao bean in his creations. Though most chocolate makers discard the shell and use only the nib, Young is experimenting with grinding shells and all with unrefined Demerara sugar, capturing the true essence of the entire bean.

Trends move fast in the culinary world, but it looks as though bean-to-bar might be here to stay. Given the increasing consumer interest in ethically sourced and produced, high-quality chocolates, it seems this universally loved confection has reinvented itself yet again.