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SWEET SUCCESS
How the Mast Brothers fooled the world into paying $10 a bar for crappy hipster
chocolate
mast brothers wrapping paper scam brooklyn 2
Such pretty wrapping paper, but what's inside? (Shinya Suzuki via Flickr (CC BY-ND
2.0))
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WRITTEN BY
Deena Shanker
OBSESSION
Sourced
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.)

El yapimi �ikolata �retiminde �zel isimlerden biri olan Amerikan menseili Mast
Brothers, gida sekt�r�n�n gelmis oldugu end�striyel alt yapiya ragmen,
�ikolatalarini halen geleneksel y�ntemlerle �reten bir firma. Mottosu �from bean to
bar� olan Mast Brothers, �ikolatalarinin �ekirdekten yenilebilir tablet haline
gelene kadar ne kadar dogal bir s�re� ge�irdigini 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 post shared 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 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.�.

Screen Shot 2015-12-16 at 11.22.52 AM

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.

crankandstein
Crankandstein Cocoa Mill in the Mast Brothers Wiliamsburg factory in March 2009
(George Gensler)
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.

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
6269395248_3e253b7161_b 2
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).�

4092298834_2aa981642a_b 2
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.

These pics of the @MastBrothers show how quick the transformation from bros to
beards was https://t.co/1nXXKjeKru pic.twitter.com/HJGaQNRANm

� Nick Zukin (@extramsg) December 16, 2015

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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