Excellent series about Noka chocolate at Dallas Food
While catching up on my reading, I scanned the list of nominees for best post in the Food Blog Awards at Well Fed and came across one that I found both very well written and fascinating. As an added bonus, it was at Dallas Food, a blog I hadn't come across before.
First a bit of back story.
Noka Chocolate is a two year old Texas chocolatier with lots of stylish trappings and unbelievably expensive chocolate. Seriously. Second most expensive in the world. Ranging from a smidge over $300us to a bit under $2100us. Yep, you read that right: almost $2100 a pound! That is a pretty impressive price for any company to command for chocolate, let alone an two year old upstart in a strip mall in Plano, Texas.
But they do have pictures of the chocolate attending the Emmys and being named the #1 luxury chocolate in the world by a British TV show (or would that be telly?) and a corporate philosophy.
NOKA Chocolatier, Katrina Merrem, has as her life-passion, the goal of returning chocolate to its pure, luxurious state by creating the finest single-origin dark chocolate truffles and chocolates, made from the rarest cacao sourced from exclusive plantations around the world.
It is with this vision that NOKA Chocolate was founded. And it is this very vision that guides NOKA Chocolate in handcrafting the most exquisite chocolates to ever grace the palate.
I am totally there with most exquisite chocolates to ever grace the palate part of this. If the best chocolate in the world costs 2000 a pound, and it is actually the best, then I'd have to buy a little bit...once. (Of course, I would then have to donate a LOT of money to the local food bank to assuage my guilt.) So it's nice that Dallas Food published this series, in which they asked a simple question: Is Noka chocolate worth the price? You know, just in case I ever win the lottery.
The answer comes in the form of a ten part series. It does an excellent job of analyzing the factors that might make the chocolate worth the exorbitant prices and coming to a conclusion that, while not necessarily surprising, is rather hard to dispute. (and comments are disabled, so no disputing is taking place) There's research and interviews and taste testing and everything! (ok, so the muckraking geek part of me was very amused)
It's well worth the read and points to one of the things that is best about independent publishing here on the tubes of the Internets: I doubt that any mainstream outlet would have cared enough to do this piece until the company got big enough to matter and, by then, the company might have mattered enough that the question never got asked.