Feliu Chocolate - Flor De Un Dia 70%

Hello David and thank a lot for your review. And thanks for bringing in the price point discussion. We are happy to share more information about the economics of craft chocolate making. The production of both craft chocolate, like the Feliu' bar you've tired, and mass-produced chocolate, like Hershey's Kisses, are so different that it makes them to be completely different products that belong to two different categories. The fist and the biggest difference is that Feliu's chocolate is a cacao centered product while Hershey's Kisses are technically not. Feliu is in a quest to find the best rare flavorful beans from Mexico sourcing them directly from cacao growers. Flor de Un Dia is a small village in Mexican Sierra Madre region. The beans are fermented, roasted and processed in a way to preserve the unique natural taste of those unique cacao beans. Plus to preserve the natural nutritious qualities of cacao. Plus in order to give the farmers enough initiative to continue growing those unique bean the maker pays the price that is 2-5 times higher than the market price of bulk cacao.

In case of Hershey, for their kisses they use alkali processed cacao. Alkali (or dutching) is a chemical process of removing acidity (read flavor) from cheap bulky unfermented cacao mass. Nutritiousness, taste quality and consistency of this cacao mass is so low, that it requires to be mixed with other ingredients, like milk fat (which makes dark chocolate label to be not 100% correct), 'natural' flavor (which is a very strange term, because natural should mean that it coms naturally from something and this something is not cacao mass from which flavor was removed and definitely not milk fat) and sugar. We don't want to go to this rabbit hole of fair-trade and growing practices for cheap bulk cacao which comes from Western Africa or Indonesia. But, we guess, you've got the idea. And we are not trying to say that one products is better then other. We just want to say that they are two different products with absolutely different economy of production, which finally reflected in their prices.

But what we also noticed that due to the nutritiousness of the real dark chocolate we rarely eat more than 2-3 squares a day which gives us the same 'return on investment' so to speak as dark chocolate candies do. Only without chemicals.

Saying that, we would like to thank you for supporting real hard-working people whose goal is to make for you the best chocolate possible. By eating craft chocolate (even is not very often) you help all of us to preserve and to develop real chocolate-making legacy. By growing this industry together we will finally be able to achieve the economy of scale which will make that kind of chocolate more accessible and affordable. thanks again for finding time to write your review.