Democratizing Chocolate With Technology. A Lesson In Leadership In The Consumer Led World

Chocolates everywhere. Dark chocolate is very healthy (in the right amounts). Healthy bars with chocolate as an ingredient are popular. However, there is a slight irony in playing with chocolate that is not the case with almost every other type of food.

From pancakes to loaves of bread, fruits and vegetables you can grow at home to cheese and animal products, most of us know how they are grown or made. However, how many of us know how chocolate is made? A billion people get chocolate every day. That’s just under one in seven of us on the planet eat some form of chocolate every day. How many of us already know how it is made, unlike everything else we consume, chocolate is often less frequent and how it is made and grown is an almost complete mystery.

Chocolate has a rich and very important history as it was once a form of currency in the Mayan era. European countries account for more than half of the world’s chocolate consumption even with less than fifteen percent of the world’s population. However, how many of us have tried to make it at home?

Until recently, it was nearly impossible to make your own chocolate while anything from bread to pasta, wine, beer, and more has been readily available for centuries for an artisanal and even a home experiment. Even in the United States, we eat all 11 pounds per person per year.

Our guest Nate Saal, founder of CocoTerra, believes that the world of 2031/2032 will see a very different world for us in terms of how we can make our own chocolate at home with endless levels of customization.. Imagine being able to easily make chocolate at the push of a button at home with any combinations of ingredients at home without needing dozens of hours to do so. This was the promise behind the home baking machines or home brewing industries in the 1970s and into the 2000s. It’s also an illustration of the changing needs for a more independent sense of control and personalization of food that we can all see through tens of millions of food blogs, food-based Instagram and other social media accounts.

CocoTerra developed the world’s first tabletop chocolate maker. The CocoTerra machine makes dark, milk and white chocolate in one unified machine. Users can easily customize and personalize their chocolate recipes with different flavors and designs. No experience required as users are guided through the entire process from cocoa nibs to solid chocolate in about two hours. Skilled makers and craftsmen can use their expertise to customize the chocolate making process, too.

Chocolate that you can make at home is a unique intersection of four elements:

Raising awareness of how cocoa beans are grown and a stronger relationship with those communities. As seen with ethical coffee. Like wine for decades.

· A natural extension of the homemade handicraft in food which has grown exponentially over the past few years. Making your own chocolate was almost technically impossible before.

The ability to customize and plant on an almost infinite level with a new vision of production that blends cooling, heating and grinding technologies into one simple countertop machine like a bread maker.

The idea of ​​”home and made chocolate” for restaurants or dinner parties opens up a whole new field of opportunity that the past five hundred years have either prevented or missed the big five chocolates.

As a leadership lesson, this example shows how new thinking must come from outside the traditional neighborhoods of the market. Just like Elon Musk and Tesla, the next 10 years will see hundreds of these technologists apply their ideas in new sectors, under traditional market conditions.