My spouse works at an artisanal chocolate factory in Raleigh, NC[0]. From experience, there is a huge difference in quality between small batch chocolate bars and bonbons vs mass manufactured. Even with small batch, there's a difference between buying it in a store vs buying it fresh from the factory.
That said, I don't think that difference is worth an extra $290. Once you're over the $5-to-10 per bar mark, there's diminishing returns on quality (for me at least.) Anything over that and you're paying for the story and branding. A $7 single-origin fair trade bar tastes the same as a $300 one, and in both cases, they're probably sourcing from the same farmer.
The fact that it's possible to charge this much for certain food & drink is both embarrassing and fascinating to me.
On one hand, anyone who's spent the time to cultivate a preference can tell some bit of difference between "crappy" beer/wine/coffee/chocolate/etc. and "the good stuff". On the other hand, taste & smell in particular are so adjusted by expectation, visual presentation, and of course stories of bespoke products from old-world artisans.
But even if you're aware of all that, I'm the first to admit it's easy to get enveloped in the more "objective" ways to put food & drink on a magical pedestal (especially those with psychoactive properties like alcohol, caffeine, & other drugs). Learn how different hop varietals contribute different alpha-acid concentrations that affect the taste and smell of beer, or the flavor profile of coffee roasts, or the THC/CBD ratio of marijuana strains...
It's not that it's all bullshit, there's some truth there for sure, it's just interesting to me when I find myself geeking out about these things. I don't (think) I fall for stories behind products, but there are many ways humans essentially get lost in, for lack of a better word, the "magic" properties of substances we ingest.
I see it as a kind of glitch of the human mind that's both life-enriching and, sometimes, to the detriment of our wallets.
You have to remember that there’s a large group of people to whom $300 means little more than $5. That’s the target demographic for these products, and to them, there is no predicted risk in spending $300 on chocolate. In other words, they have no problem spending the money because there will be no pain if the product disappoints. The money just doesn’t matter.
Knowing that, you just have to figure out how to reach them with the promise of a novel, luxurious experience.
That’s actually a really small group and most of the people who buy ultra-luxury consumables are not in that group. Michelin star restaurants aren’t supported primarily by the ultra wealthy. Nor are niche luxuries like chocolate bars that cost hundreds of dollars.
There is really no predicted risk for anyone on a $300 chocolate bar. You spend the money and get a chocolate bar. If it’s the best chocolate bar in the world, great. If it’s junk, that sucks. Either way your $300 is gone.
I don't think comparing this to a high-end restaurant is fair.
For $300, I can get an incredible several-hours long meal in a fantastic space, with devoted, engaging service. I'll have a great experience, memories forever, and inspiration for my own cooking. My friends will want to hear all about it. It's practically a half-day vacation.
It's reasonable for people that aren't super wealthy to save a bit and splurge for an experience like that every now and then.
This is a fucking chocolate bar. If I tell me friends I spent $300 on a chocolate bar, they will think I'm a crazy person.
Especially since a 3-star restaurant is a $30 chocolate bar, not a $300 bar.
Maybe there are some restaurants for russian oligarchs and other people with bad taste and too much money, but unless you go crazy on the wine (which they keep around for just such guests) all the 2 and 3-star restaurants I've been to have been 10-25 times more expensive than mcDonalds,not 100-250 times.
Wine is tricky, the taste is complex,the experience depends so much on what you are or have been eating, temperature, the glass, and I suppose the ambience, and is a rather strong (upper-middle) class marker,so even so-so expensive wines are given much benefit of a doubt.
It’s a fair comparison because they’re both within equal reach.
I think a $300 candy bar is stupid, but it’s objectively got no less utility than a $300 meal. You could eat a meal of rice and beans with a $300 candy bar for dessert and from a health and satiety standpoint you’ve probably equaled the $300 meal. The difference is the subjective experience.
> That’s actually a really small group and most of the people who buy ultra-luxury consumables are not in that group. Michelin star restaurants aren’t supported primarily by the ultra wealthy. Nor are niche luxuries like chocolate bars that cost hundreds of dollars.
A really small group with a lot of money is still worth paying attention to. Think about it like this, you wouldn't want to miss giving them a chance to spend that money. As the article says "To’ak chocolates—requires good storytelling". At that point it is all about storytelling. If you're selling a phone case, they are not buying just a wooden phone case, they are buying a hand crafted and polished product that came from an ancient jungles of South America, it was blessed by the shamans, and painted with pigment from crushed beetles etc.
Rich people will often look for ways (not necessarily conspicuous) of asserting their status. Spending money of frivolities like these is giving them a chance to do so. Many will understand that maybe all those claims are mostly bullshit, but they'll still buy it. Maybe just to show it off to their friends, give it as a gift, or flash it around their poor relatives and remind them what they'll never be able to afford.
> Rich people will often look for ways (not necessarily conspicuous) of asserting their status.
The point is that non-rich do that, too. Most people buying luxuries are not ultra-rich. $300 dollar chocolate is not out of reach for the upper-middle class, or really even the regular middle class. It might be a dumb purchase, but you could realistically earn less than $50k/year and still buy a bar of this.
I would imagine that my peers make up a much larger portion of To’ak's clientele than Warren Buffet's peers.
But the poor dont buy these products for quality. They buy them to emulate the rich. So you dont market to the poor. You market to the rich and famous knowing that the poor will follow. Get the queen to be seen eating your pies and tomorrow they will be sold in every grocery store.
The trick is too keep your price just under what someone living paycheck to paycheck might decide to spend on a special occassion. 300 is right in the middle of that range, the sort of thing one might buy as a special present.
If they are spending 10K on brunch it was good foresight of their ancestors to park the loot in a trust fund, otherwise they would likely end up broke.
Some of them do end up broke. I met this junkie in Amsterdam, who claimed that he'd burned through his trust fund. And then supported his lifestyle as a heroin smuggler, using young trust-fund women as unwitting mules.
>nyone who's spent the time to cultivate a preference can tell some bit of difference between "crappy" beer/wine/coffee/chocolate/etc. and "the good stuff".
Maybe not. But people will pay for a story.
Charles Shaw wines (sold at Trader Joe's stores, and affectionately known as "Three Buck Chuck") has won numerous blind competitions over wines costing a hundred times more.
And the famous Stradivarius instruments, valued at north of $1,000,000 cannot easily be discerned from high-end modern violins. But the mystique of the brand, the imagery of these little singing cabinets scraped out of wood 200 years ago, continues to fuel the market.
People pay $60 for a single ice cube carved from a glacier. That 100,000 year old ice sure must be yummy.
That sort of "luxury" ice was refined and distilled down to a throwaway gag in "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt".
Kimmy asks a rich boyfriend to bring ice for a party, and he arrives carrying a hinged, dovetail-jointed wooden box, lined with velvet, containing ornate ice tongs and six perfect ice cubes. The only way it could possibly be funnier is if they were all perfect ice spheres.
I have a friend who makes high-end violin, &c, bows (think: five-figure price tags) who was recently at a conference of sorts for musicians, bow makers, and such.
An acquaintance of his was carrying a Stradivarius, on loan from some foundation or other which had it insured for a silly amount of money. The acquaintance played it during a performance at this event. To my friend's somewhat experienced ears, it actually sounded pretty flat (not poorly tuned, but rather dull), relative to so many of the other instruments he's heard. In telling me about this, he didn't seem particularly surprised by that.
It's anecdata, but it clearly supports the notion that people will pay mightily for a name and attendant reputation, over actual quality.
The classical world has created a tautological definition of violin quality - a good violin is one that sounds most like a Stradivarius. With modern luthiery techniques, it's not difficult to build a relatively inexpensive instrument that's brighter or darker or more powerful or has more complex overtones, but any "improvement" will be perceived as a deviation from that ideal. Blind tests of violins are remarkably rare, which I think is a largely deliberate decision.
I happened to see a YouTube blind-test of a flute, and the next to cheapest flute won.
But blind testing is also hard, maybe you need to listen or taste for days,not just a few minutes.
I suspect a lot of sugar and artificial flavours are added to products as people are reacting favourably in 30 second blind tests, but given a chance they would appreciate the nuances of less engineered products. The sugar and the esters are getting old fast.
appealing to people's pretentiousness and such is a fine art and many a marketing scheme has arisen to do just that. exclusivity by price is just one feature. at these price points you can go all out on ingredients as well as packaging. in many cases packaging itself has more effort put into it than the product.
I think it's that any experience is a combination of the senses and that most importantly of all thought is a sense.
A sense is anything that happen involuntarily. Gathering data from the environment.
Food is mostly nose/tongue senses but also very visual. The tongue also has touch. However stories also implant thoughts and is perhaps the most advanced form of making food taste good as eventually all non-thought sense BECOME thought.
Stories however are limited because they create thought only in the form of whatever language is used, say English. It is also the method of gauging quality. "That was great".
The highly personal experience must snap to pre-existing words. Subtlety and thus more exact and truer meaning requires combinations of different words. Say a poem.
Food itself falls prey to the consumerism feedback loop that creates experiences that try to titillate the senses more and more in an absolute way rather than through subtlety. Spicier and spicier food is an example. As is more and more violent TV.
There's nothing wrong with this persay. It's just that the hedonistic treadmill ratchets upwards and eventually you run out of stuff and end up so numbed to subtlety that the small but beautiful things are difficult to appreciate because you've dampened your resolution capabilities.
High-food has the same problem as high-art. It takes too much discipline to appreciate and no one has the time. We're all too busy trying to one up the world.
Food has a third dimension. As one food snob put it, the best meal he ever had was a can of baked beans in the army when he was really hungry. Five star meals are more about novelty than primal hunger, which is rather limiting.
That's a good point. I wasn't thinking about thought in that way, but I think you're right.
I still put thought in a different realm since (at least for the cases where the price tag is bullshit) informed thoughts have the potential to counteract a purely sensory illusion... A different realm, but definitely an overlapping one.
I agree with much of what you’ve written, with a caveat about spicy food. I’m fact the vanilloid receptors which capsaicin binds to is damaged over time by exposure to spice. In other words the more spicy food you eat, the less sensitive you will be to spice on a physical level. Where spicy food is concerned, it’s more like opiate addicts requiring higher doses; it is a form of acquired tolerance, albeit on the tongue rather than in the brain.
It's the same with almost any product. Take cars for example: you have to pay thousands of dollars more to get a higher trim, which only has a different design and 1-2 options that are really useful.
If you like chocolate, too, there is a charming company called Chocosphere: http://chocophere.com that sells a pretty wide variety of bars and also has subscription options. Their website is a bit 2005, but the product is good.
It's been a long day and I don't know why I even clicked the link. But, after doing so, I wanted to mention that I really like the website. Whoever made it did a good job. It's probably as informative and easy-to-use as a site like that would ever need to be without being filled with useless, time-wasting fluff. Like I said, I've had quite a day and figured I'd end it by saying something positive. Even if it's just to my screen.
So, I assume Videri does small batches, it's all about quality, and doesn't put the usual industrial crap in its products.
If that's so, I would love to buy chocolate from them. I only suggest to price the 3-pack lower than $20 (if a single is $7, a 3 pack should be closer to $16-$17).
What types of difference in quality do you see? I'm not a chocolate connoisseur but it is interesting. I do pay premiums for coffee and cigars though. :)
Ingredients and care in the roast are the big things. You can taste the difference between chocolate made with cane sugar vs corn syrup, or in how much oils or coagulants are mixed with the cocoa butter. You can feel that same difference in the texture. The origin of the bean plays a big part as well, same as with coffee. Cacao beans bring in all sorts of fruity, earthy, and other flavor notes, which a good chocolate maker can turn up or down depending on how they tweak the roasting process. Also, good chocolate should be shiny, and snap when you bend it, a signal of a good grinding and tempering process. Compare this to Hershey bars (even their dark bars) which have a dull finish and either bend or crumble. Like with coffee or beer (or cigars, I assume), it takes time and effort to refine your palate for chocolate.
I’ll note that I had an eye-opening moment regarding the flavor of different beans at the Tcho chocolate tour on the Embarcadero.
At the end of the tour they do a tasting of bars made from single-origin beans. With the only additives being varying amounts of milk and sugar, one bar tasted bright and citrusy, another was earthy and nutty, and another was rich and (for lack of a better term) “chocolatey”.
It makes total sense in retrospect, but I’d never considered how much the flavor of beans by themselves can make such a difference.
apologies if this is a silly question but you said "per bar" a few times. i just checked your spouse's shop and a bar is 1.4oz (38g). That is quite tiny and equals roughly USD18 per 100g. In Europe I am more used to people comparing the 100g price, bar price doesn't matter that much. Is it common to ignore the weight of the bar in such comparisons?
That said, I don't think that difference is worth an extra $290. Once you're over the $5-to-10 per bar mark, there's diminishing returns on quality (for me at least.) Anything over that and you're paying for the story and branding. A $7 single-origin fair trade bar tastes the same as a $300 one, and in both cases, they're probably sourcing from the same farmer.
[0] https://viderichocolatefactory.com/