How Big Companies RUINED chocolate!

EARLY!!! Ann's videos are honestly the best :))

I run a small chocolate business for nearly a decade and have been saying this to people for years. It's nice to see someone with such a good reputation for fact finding taking it on. Thanks Ann. Have a great week.

There's a chocolate company in my country called Chocolate Makers. They were fed up with how chocolate was done by the big companies and started their own company. They also factored in the environment in their business plan where possible. We use it in our bakery and we've had a tour through their factory and their tasting and the flavors were AMAZING!!! So happy to have been able to go with that chocolate :D.

Been working in chocolate for 20 years. You nailed it. Never heard a better explanation of the difference between great chocolate and junk.

It's so funny that Dave and the boys are up to taste just about any cooking "hack" monstrosity, and then the one time there's just genuinely good chocolate, they're like, "Meh." 🤣

I live in a chocolate producing region of Indonesia. The local government then built a theme park called "Kampung Cokelat" (Chocolate village) filled with educational materials of chocolate production and they sell (locally made) chocolate bars as well! Thanks for the video!!

A few decades? ago in the US, Nestle and Hershey's lobbied to have cocoa butter taken out of the definition of chocolate. They lost, but while cocoa butter remains in a few of their flagship products, you'll find in many of them it's replaced with some alternative oil.

as someone from the Philippines, I was shocked at how many varieties of apple they knew, but then when i think about it, i can also name several varieties of bananas easily 😂😂

I had a roommate in college that totally "ruined" me on cheaper chocolate after introducing me to these $5-6-7 bars from health food stores. Like everything, you get what you pay for. But instead of just inhaling those expensive bars like I was known to do with cheaper bars and still not feel satiated , the expensive ones satisfy me with just a few nibbles or a square. It's about quality over quantity!

As a mexican form the state of Tabasco, we are very proud of our chocolate! it was common in the past to grind and make chocolate at home, my grandma used to do it, so i was very familiar with the real flavor of cocoa beans and chocolate. Sometimes when tasting cheap or very procesed chocolate feel weird and some of my friends tend to call me a snob because i'm very exigent with the flavor of chocolate, but when they taste what is a real and good chocolate, they find out why i'm like that hahaha thanks a lot for sharing this knowledge!!!

When we were kids (Philippines) and was introduced to 'Quik' Chocolate drink, were were like, "are we drinking shredded paper soup"??? After years of enjoying chocolate from our Grandma's tree... i knew i know how Chocolate should taste!

0:53 The way he says "no" like he thinks you're about to spring some 5-minute-crafts chocolate on him is so funny

I really appreciate how the video just focuses on facts and communication. There are no memes, goofy gimmicks, drama or over-energetic delivery as cheap ways to "keep the viewer engaged." You made a video that was to the point, just aimed at people who want to learn. Pure quality, thank you.

10/10 love the "17 minute video about a food industry" format, please do more in-depth videos like this!

When I was 8 my family was in Honduras for a vacation, and one day we visited a cocoa farm that was set up to show tourists some of the process of cocoa growing. I still remember being fascinated (and a little grossed out) seeing a pod cracked open and these slimy white beans come out 😂 blew my tiny child mind that chocolate could have ever started from that point. This video really brought me back to that moment, even almost 2 decades later. Hope that farm is still doing well

I once bought a single origin chocolate out of curiosity at an elitist organic store, and until then I believed chocolate always needed sugar to make it taste good, they were delicious without being overtly sweet. They were so expensive though!

I remember the first time I had an artisanal chocolate. It's been too long for me to recall specifics, but the feeling of standing there in front of the guy who made the final product while he explained the origins, the tasting notes, the process... indescribable. It was a creamy mouthfeel unlike anything I had experienced with chocolate before, and hearing him talk about it made me appreciate the product even more. That something like chocolate could have TASTING NOTES was unbelievable. It was a totally different experience. I still love my Hershey's Dark Chocolate stocking stuffers, but nothing can compete with the care that goes into the small batch producers!

I always find it so amazing to think about how things like chocolate came to be. How someone had to harvest these beans and figure out what to do with the stuff inside them, how you have to let them ferment and dry and everything, it's really cool to think about the long history of these products and all the people that helped in making them the way that they are today.

I hadn't realized how complex the process was to make the end product for the cacao beans. It honestly sounds a lot like making cheese, with all the enzymes and fermentation processes. No wonder it's so complex and varied in all the different regions of the world.

That Lindt bar you showed was part of a recent consumer report about lead and cadmium in chocolate. I would love to hear you talk about the implications of that report.