Noka Chocolates

Fascinating take-down of Noka Chocolates. Noka bills themselves as a premier luxury chocolate but they are not, they just use a commercial bulk chocolate and repackage it. From Dallas Food comes this excellent ten-part article.

What's Noka Worth?
Four years ago, while standing on a mountaintop in Switzerland, a pair of Canadian accountants, Katrina Merrem and Noah Houghton, decided to leave the ledgers behind and enter the world of gourmet chocolate. Two years later, they founded Noka Chocolate in Plano, Texas. On to the chocolate...

Instead of the usual array of elaborate molded and filled chocolates seen in most chocolatiers' shops, Noka opened with a spartan lineup of small, rectangular molded chocolates (the "Vintages Collection") and simple, unflavored ganache truffles (the "Grand Cru Collection"). The idea driving this minimalism is summed up in the following line from the company's FAQ: "Our passion is tasting real chocolate, in its rarest and purest form, unadulterated by vanilla and any other flavorings."

Noka's molded chocolates and truffles are made with single-origin chocolate -- chocolate that is made from beans grown and harvested in a single country of origin, rather than a blend of beans from different countries. The company takes great pride in the quality and purity of the chocolate. As they state in their FAQ, "Regular dark chocolate contains a blend of cacao from a variety of different origins. Most regular chocolate also contains vanilla, added to round out quality imperfections and create a consistent flavor. We focus solely on the highest quality single-origin dark chocolate and as such there is no vanilla in any of our chocolate."

The price of this chocolate is obscene, ranging from $309/pound on up to $2,080/pound depending on package size and product. Thanks to some excellent detective work by the author, we find that they just buy bulk chocolate from Bonnat for around $12/pound, remelting and molding it and selling it with a 1,300% markup... A great read and some fantastic detective work. Hat tip to Kim DuToit for the link.