BRAVO COCOA !! SUPER LOVE FOOD
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Congratulations to all these dreamers and visionaries who make the world a better place – for farmers, for retailers and all the other people in the cocoa value chain, including, of course, chocoholics.
It’s time to celebrate. Academy of Chocolate published the winners list of the most important awards in the fine chocolate universe. Below are the results of all BAR categories (filled chocolates were also judged).
Best Dark Chocolate Bean-to-Bar under 80%
GOLD:
SILVER:
GOLD:
Akesson’s 100% Criollo Cocoa Madagascar
SILVER:
- Akesson’s 75% Criollo Cocoa Madagascar
- Amano Ocumare 70% Dark Chocolate
- Bar au Chocolat Dominican Republic 70%
SILVER:
- Akesson’s 75% Trinitario Bali
- Bar au Chocolat Madagascar 70%
- Castronovo Chocolate Rare Cacao Collection – Sierra Nevada Colombia 72%
- Chocolat Madagascar Dark 65% Cocoa
- Chocolat Madagascar Dark 70% Cocoa
- Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate 72% Madagascar, Sambirano
- Green & Black’s THIN Dark 70%
- Hotel Chocolat Saint Lucia, Rabot estate single cote, Bord du Lac 70%
- Pump Street Bakery Chocolate Grenada 70% – Crayfish Bay Estate
- Pump Street Bakery Chocolate Madagascar Criollo 74%
- Duffy’s Honduras Indio Rojo 72%
- SPAGnVOLA Oda Cocoa Estate – 70% dark chocolate, Ondo State, Nigeria
- SPAGnVOLA Single Estate – 70% dark chocolate, Dominican Republic
Best Dark Chocolate Bean-to-Bar over 80%
GOLD:
Akesson’s 100% Criollo Cocoa Madagascar
SILVER:
- Papa Chocolat 80% origin Peru
- Pump Street Bakery Chocolate Honduras 80%
- SPAGnVOLA Single Estate – 80% dark chocolate, Dominican Republic
Saint Lucian chocolate top of the crop in 2015 Academy of Chocolate Awards
http://www.stlucianewsonline.com/saint-lucian-chocolate-top-of-the-crop-in-2015-academy-of-chocolate-awards/
Press release - Friday, April 17th, 2015 at 11:02 AM
Press release - Friday, April 17th, 2015 at 11:02 AM
PRESS RELEASE - Luxury chocolate brand, Hotel Chocolat, has scooped the most awards at this prestigious world event, two of them for products made exclusively from Saint Lucian cocoa, grown at their own estate in Soufriere as well as from 160 cacao growers across the island.
The Awards, now taking place for the 7th time, are a highly anticipated event in the international chocolate calendar. This year a record number of entries was received with over 500 products from all over the world.
Judging took an extensive five days and the tasting panel included globally recognised chocolate experts and buyers, pastry chefs, food professionals and food journalists. Hotel Chocolat was awarded Silver in the “Bean to Bar under 80%” category for their Rabot Estate Single Cote, Bord du Lac 70% cocoa and Bronze in the “Best Flavoured Milk Bar” category for their Saint Lucian 65% Milk Earl Grey. Hotel Chocolat was the first chocolatier to make single-origin Saint Lucian chocolate in 2007. Prior to this, all the local cocoa beans that made it to market were lost in mixed bulk sales and anonymous chocolate blends.
Saint Lucia’s once-prized variety of Trinitario cocoa was in danger of disappearing into the history of chocolate. If properly fermented, dried, roasted and conched, Saint Lucian beans can produce chocolate with a dazzling array of tasting notes, ranging from classically rich cocoa to black tea and ripe yellow fruit, grassy olive oil and dry red Burgundy.
Philip Buckley, Country Head, Saint Lucia comments:
“A key part of our plan is helping Island Growers to keep farming. By buying their harvests at a good price, we allow farmers to reinvest in their farms, and with technical support and access to higher quality cocoa, it’s a win-win for everyone.” Today, more than 166 Island Grower partners have joined us, and we couldn’t be prouder that, working with us, their beans now create some of the officially finest chocolate in the world and that our ethical model of cocoa growing has taken hold on the island.
These latest awards solidify Saint Lucia’s global reputation as a top quality cocoa producer and profile the strong food culture of the island. Hotel Chocolat stocks its Saint Lucia chocolate in 82 company owned shops across the UK and Scandinavia.
UWI to get into cocoa mix
WED, MAY 14, 2014
BARBADOS IS TIPPED TO BECOME not only a producer of fine chocolates but a training centre for chocolate makers. Put that down to a memorandum of understanding which the University of the West Indies’ Cave Hill Campus signed yesterday with SPAGnVOLA (pronounced Spang Vola) Chocolatier, a Maryland, United States chocolate-producer.
The MOU paves the way for training at the UWI of people from the Caribbean’s cocoa-producing countries, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia and St Vincent, and elsewhere to turn out high-end chocolate. It also sets the scene for establishment of a chocolate-making factory by SPAGnVOLA Chocolatier on the near-30 acres of land at Dukes Plantation, St Thomas, which philanthropist Eddie Edghill and his family gave the university. Professor Leonard O’Garro, head of the UWI’s Centre for Food Security and Entrepreneurship under which the project falls, told reporters attending the signing ceremony at the university’s Cave Hill Campus that the chocolate-making factory was expected to be established in another year and a half or two years as part of a multimillion dollar project.
The factory would be using Caribbean cocoa to produce its chocolate. O’Garro said it was too early to tell how many people would find work with the factory but the project “should register on the GDP level and foreign direct investment and employment levels”. The UWI will not have shares in the factory but will benefit from a number of arrangements, including one governing use of its lands, profit-sharing and provision of a lot of the critical research and backup services needed to advance the programme. The training programme starts in August with 30 Caribbean nationals who aim to be chocolatiers. The university will be offering short-term training as well as longer courses, with the package including diploma and full degree programmes. O’Garro said the courses were also open to people from countries not producing cocoa, such as Barbados, once they were interested in becoming a chocolate producer.
The idea is to make Barbados the hub for such training and “the place where you can get the best high-end chocolates” in the world, according to Professor O’Garro. The MOU was signed by Cave Hill’s pro-vice chancellor and principal Sir Hilary Beckles and Eric Reid, CEO of SPAGnVOLA. Reid, born in Panama and with great-grandparents from Martinique and Jamaica, spoke about the importance of Caribbean agriculture adding to the value of its cocoa bean production business. He pointed out that the people who made the most from raw material production were not the farmers, but people higher up the production chain, with some farmers ending up having less than “peanuts change”.
Sir Hilary said the project was a boost for Caribbean manufacturing and the ideal form of development which the university was willing to support. He told the gathering that from an early age he was worried about the exploitation of developing countries by multinational chocolate-makers.
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The University of the West Indies’ Cocoa Research Centre has embarked on a major new project: to transform the region’s cocoa sector. The new project, dubbed the International Fine Cocoa Innovation Centre, is the brainchild of the Cocoa Research Centre and its partners, funded by a $2.17 million grant from the European Union.
It’s all part of a bid to capture a greater share of the $100 billion global cocoa industry, which is slated to grow by another 20 percent over the next decade. “The Caribbean is held in high regard as a cocoa-producing region because most countries produce a fine or aromatic (as opposed to bulk) cocoa,” said Kathrin Renner, International Cooperation Officer of the Delegation of the European Union to Trinidad and Tobago. “I think we would all agree that the Caribbean region holds great potential to be a major player in the international fine cocoa and chocolate trade and the work of the International Fine Cocoa Innovation Centre is bringing us closer to that reality. This is why the EU is happy to support it.”
So how does the Caribbean do it?
The plan is for “Innovative strategies, science and technology, farm management techniques, business models, and extension,” according to Virginia Sopyla, Associate Director of The World Cocoa Foundation. “The International Fine Cocoa Innovation Centre will play an important role in this process, and there are other positive signs of a growing momentum in this direction,” she said. That includes the creation of a full-scale fine cocoa innovation centre by 2017.
“It will house a modern model pilot cocoa orchard, a fine chocolate and couverture factory, teaching theatres, incubators, a restaurant kitchen and labs and a fine cocoa museum and visitor centre. For the first time ever, an innovation centre will integrate agriculture, food processing, research and commercialization for a single food crop – cocoa,” according to a release.
“The IFCIC will form the nerve centre to foster innovations along the entire cocoa value chain by the local private sector and attract innovative foreign investment into Trinidad and Tobago, and similarly in the rest of the Caribbean,” said Professor Pathmanathan Umaharan, director of the CRC. “Singapore did this with its telecommunication sector, Thailand its ornamental sector and Taiwan with it electronics sector. Can we do this with our cocoa sector? Yes, I think we can.”
