Not A Blog™

I love a good scandal. It’s my attraction to schadenfreude, I suppose. I should exercise more modesty when discussing the subject of others’ secrets revealed, however, as the same thing will one day happen to me.

Not only do I love scandals, but I love chocolate, as well. I prefer the dark variety, in particular. Fitting—and deliciously ironic—that I would live not twenty miles from Hershey, PA. Ironic because for as much as I enjoy chocolate, I cannot stand the sludge which is manufactured by Hershey’s. I suppose it should come as no surprise, seeing as how they strive only for dollars, not quality.

So imagine my delight when I found today an article regarding a scandal among chocolate. Is this the only thing I can think of to write about today? Yes. I can only imagine some people an undetermined number of years in the future, after nuclear war has ravished the planet. They find a binder with that delicate, incredibly precise printing which characterizes a manuscript from before The Fall. They read this article—and can only marvel at the flippant nature of my discussion. Those Americans—they had so much free time and money that they wrote lengthy polemics about their luxury foods as if this were the largest concern in their lives. Indeed, the frivolity of this discussion does not escape me unnoticed. Why, it’s positively bourgeoisie!

Anyone who has a familiarity with chocolate stemming further than simple craving satisfication has probably at least heard of Noka. Aside from having a name which tastes like chocolate when you say it, they’re known for having the most expensive chocolate in the solar system. The galaxy, even. To give you an idea of how expensive we’re talking about, super-awesome gourmet chocolate runs about $70 per pound. (The better-than-Hershey’s stuff I buy is about six bucks a pound.) Noka, runs about $500 per pound.

I’ve never had the pleasure of tasting this supposedly even more super than super-awesome chocolate chocolate, but when I first heard about it some months ago, I couldn’t help but wonder if I would actually notice a difference between that, and the next cheapest stuff, which is merely super-awesome. I mean, how good can chocolate be, really? I concluded, rather reluctantly, that I probably wouldn’t be able to tell that much of a difference, but that I would pretend I could.

This is seen in so many industries that it begins to approach the absurd. It’s the idea that things which are more expensive have a percieved higher quality (and by extention, value) than things which are less expensive. There has to be a name for this, but I’m not sure what it is. There was another story I read somewhere which is a perfect example of this. Unfortunately I don’t remember the source (nor most of the details), but I’ll repeat it for you, probably seventh-hand, so you know it has to be true.

There was a woman who owned a tourist trap near the Grand Canyon (or some other noteworthy desert-esque sight in the US) which sold the usual faux-native-american bric a brac that you find at these places. Specifically, she had a display of turquoise jewelry as one entered the door—prominantly placed and reasonably priced. For reasons she couldn’t figure out, it wasn’t selling. She had plans to change the price to be half off in order to move the crap out the door, but forgot to do so before leaving town for a conference. So she quickly scribbled a note the morning before she left mentioning the price cut to her employees. When she returned, all the jewelry was sold—but there was one unexpected piece to the story. Her employees misread the note, and rather than halving the price of the jewelry, they doubled it. The consumers now saw the inflated prices and, figuring it wouldn’t be priced so high if it weren’t actually worth that much, assumed it was high quality stuff and bought it.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that story; it could have just been made up to illustrate this exact point. But this sort of thing does happen. How many works of art have you seen which look like vomit on canvas (some actually are), and sell for tens of thousands of dollars? Are they actually worth this much? Well, unfortunately, if some rube pays that much, then yes. Of course, the art market is very hit or miss, so even though you’re making twenty grand per painting, you might only be selling one per year. During my senior show in college, it was kind of a joke at how high everyone priced their work, in order to command some kind of respect, like it was actually worth something. Who’s going to drop a couple hundred bucks on some student’s artwork? (In true self-fullfilling prophecy style, no one did, so there you go.)

The point is that even though Noka chocolate isn’t necessarily better (or even as good as) the second most expensive, they still do quite well because people see some sort of quality there, even though the prices are jokingly high. As I said, I don’t think I’d be able to tell the difference, and I’m sure plenty of other people can’t, either.

But at least one guy could. The scandal (which is a pretty harsh word, I’ll be honest) was revealed in an article by DallasFood, a blog related to cuisine in and around the Dallas area. Noka is headquartered somewhere around Dallas, from what I read, and the author of the DallasFood blog—who’s name I could find only as Scott—knew enough about Chocolate to take on the task of actually tracking down their sources and evaluating their stuff.

It turns out that the stuff they use is manufactured by a french company called Bonnat. They are, basically, the lowest quality of chocolate that can still be considered “gourmet”. It’s good, no doubt about it. But, as Scott concluded in his article, it’s not $500-per-pound good.

In other words, Noka is selling for no other reason than its brand and its pricing. It sells because it is expensive. If had bought it, I’d probably feel ripped off, I’ll admit. Caveat Emptor et al. But the point is that this business model does actually work. You can get away with being secretive and make enormous margins—for a time. But running a business this way is not feasible over the long haul. It only works for a certain amount of time.

In Noka’s case, about two years.

-Ted