When I saw the tiny illustration that accompanied the "teaser" for this article, something gnawed at me. It was familiar. Well, it should've been considering just two nights ago my husband and I talked about the Grenada Chocolate Co. to a friend, showed her the wrapper from a 71% bar, and let her smell what's left of a small bag of Smilo cocoa powder. We visited the factory last November while on a Windjammer cruise, and the tour of the factory was one of the highlights of the trip. It was so exciting to find a factory that wasn't "factory-like"--with its antique machinery, solar panels, and water tower. The GCC is all about the chocolate, and they make amazing chocolate.

So it's exciting to see this haven of purity and (for lack of a better term) unalienated labor get this kind of attention. Too many of us spend our time in cubicles making widgets of one sort or another--either physically tangible or of an informational variety--that to find someone who makes something with his or her hands and enjoys it is rare. We might do it as a hobby, but few of us take it seriously or are taken seriously enough that we can do it for a living. What makes me nervous is that the purity will somehow be ruined by the attention. But in the catch-22 that is business, they need the attention to be able to keep on doing what they love to do now. I'd like to believe that the GCC will keep its "flavor," using renewable resources and holding on to its philosophy. It would be a shame if it couldn't increase its success and show Hershey's the way to do it right.

You seem to have forgotten to mention.

It's that a large chocolatier wants to make money from it and has persuaded the smaller company in some way to sell. I doubt that Hershey's has any interest in "doing it right". They want to make money, and they're doing that very well.

My local store replaced Dagoba with Art Bars (organic fair trade; see my signature for a link) when Hershey bought Dagoba. I'd like to try the Grenada chocolate, but the Art Bars are quite tasty. I favor the Extra Dark, myself.

O.K., I liked all I read about your company (had a moment of

pause when I got to the part about not washing the pot - it

passed) and I want you to stay around until my grandchildren

are grown. If you let me know who might have your chocolate

in Charlotte, North Carolina I will certainly be an avid

consumer.

Ann Wood

Yes.

Two of my local grocery stores, neither a Whole Foods, always have two to three brands of organic chocolate for sale and have had so for more than a couple of years now.

Does this mean most Americans will come to appreciate real chocolate produced in an environmentally responsible manner? Of course not. But companies like Grenada will have a market and actually make more money because they aren't really competing with Nestle or Hershey.

Theo Chocolate in Seattle (Fremont) is the real deal. I toured their factory last weekend. They don't use any "ready-made couverture." Their beans are fair trade and organic and roasted at their factory. I don't have much of a sweet tooth but I have to say the chocolate is FANTASTIC! Here's their site: http://www.theochocolate.com/

When I met Robert Steinberg (half of the Scharffen Berger Chocolate company) at my daughter's restaurant (Hell's Backbone Grill, Boulder, Utah) in the summer of 2005, he was just on the verge of the deal to sell his company to Hershey. He had a health issue, I believe, which necessitated the sale. He brought several pounds of chocolate with him and gave the staff (and me) a delicious demonstration of how to make ganache the proper way. His description of their chocolate making process was fascinating, to say the least. What a charming man he was! I still buy the chocolate on occasion, and it still tastes really good. He told us that Hershey swore it wouldn't change the manufacturing process. Seems as if that might be true.

I don't know if it's a mass-marketer or "chocolatier," but the Blommer Chocolate Co., located just northwest of the downtown area of Chicago, has been a "presence" in the city for years. The aroma from its factory blanketed the atmosphere of the surrounding neighborhoods, making that morning or afternoon commute just a little more pleasant...until a few busybodies petitioned the city to force the company to institute "pollution controls." So now we enter the city to the delightful sensory experience of auto exhaust!

I could make bamboo bicycles and sell a few of them, I guess. I'm not sure what the point of it would be though.

Excerpts from "Taking Child Slavery Out of Valentine's Day", February 14, 2005

By Tom Harkin and Eliot L. Engel

Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on labor, health and human services and education. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) is a member of the House International

. . .Few realize that most of the cocoa beans that go into Nestle, Mars and Hershey candy bars come from Ivory Coast, where thousands of enslaved boys — some as young as 9 — work in the most squalid, brutal conditions imaginable.

According to one report, the child slaves of Ivory Coast "are whipped, beaten and broken like horses to harvest the almond-sized beans that are made into chocolate treats for more fortunate children in Europe and the United States.". . .

We have long been active in efforts to stop exploitive child labor, as well as trafficking in slaves. . . .We wanted to stop child slavery, not chocolate production.

We viewed a legislative remedy not as a first resort but as a last resort. So, in good faith, we engaged the major chocolate companies in lengthy, intense negotiations. The result was the Harkin-Engel Protocol, signed in 2001.

. . .The U.S. government's role is to ensure that whatever certification plan emerges from this process is credible and effective in eliminating abusive child- and slave-labor practices in the cocoa industry and ensuring the rehabilitation of the victims.

We have done our best to accommodate the chocolate companies. We preferred a two-year deadline for the creation of an industrywide certification regime, but agreed to four years. We all agreed that the regime was to be completed on July 1, followed by rigorous implementation.

Last month, however, the companies informed us that they would not meet the deadline. Instead, they planned to initiate a small pilot program in Ghana and, perhaps, in Ivory Coast. Although this is certainly a positive step, it falls woefully short of the robust action promised in the protocol.

The time for talk has passed. Children are suffering. Will the chocolate companies redouble their efforts and make good on their commitments? Or, as with blood diamonds, will legislation be necessary? Our preference is for the chocolate industry to take charge of its own destiny. But if corporate responsibility is lacking, government will have a responsibility to act . . .