Fine chocolate getting more expensive?
Posted in:
News & New Product Press (Read-Only)
I'm new to the world of fine chocolate so my experience is very limited. I've only been seriously learning about this for about 15 months. So from my limited experience here are some expensive chocolates that I've found so far:Amedei I-Cru sampler (12 pieces of 6 kinds of 70%), $120/ lb at ChocosphereThen there's what I (not very politely) call the scammers:1) Noka. most expensive is
Vintages Collection , 4 piece box, at $2080/lbGood investigative journalism discovered this. Read the synopsis version
here from seventypercent.com or the full version
here . The journalist determined the weight of 1 piece, so I'll assume that his calculations are correct.
2)
Cocoa Gourmet . They offer gold and silver leaf covered chocolates. Their most expensive is
US$253/piece !!. (It's US$506 for 2 pieces.) But they don't give any information about the weight of each piece so there's no way to know what the price is per pound. Maybe someone can find out the weight of 1 piece and let us know. Just looking at it it looks like each piece is well under 2 oz (by way of reference a 100 g bar = 3.5 oz). So if a piece is under 2 oz. then it will be over $2000/lb!! And if I read it right they unabashedly say that it's just couverture, so I assume someone else makes it and sends the chocolate to Malaysia for packaging.Unbelievable what people will pay for packaging a mystique of prestige! I imagine the owners of Noka and Cocoa Gourmet sitting at polished mahogany board room tables, counting their obscene profit margins, and just laughing at the foolishness of those willing to buy this stuff.P.S.- To talk about weight it seems to me that it be the easiest and the most universal to use the metric system and use 100g or even 1kg instead of pounds.
