Unwrapping Hipster Chocolate (Rerun)

Cheat!

Sony Music

True Crime, Tv & Film, Society & Culture

4.8 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 27 December 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2007, two Iowa-born brothers launched an artisanal chocolate company, Mast Brothers, out of an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—the hipster heart of the growing farm-to-table movement. Mast quickly became a well-known operation, partly because their focus was on creating quality chocolate that only required two ingredients: cocoa beans and sugar. And these speciality bars—hand wrapped in expensive, beautifully designed paper—boasted a $10 price tag. It was something people were willing to spend for a product that also came with a compelling origin story. But that all changed when customers started to question the narrative of what they had been sold. A Somethin’ Else & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, what's up, cheat listeners? We know for a lot of people this time of year is all
0:10.9	about family and food, so we're bringing back a cheat episode that's about both. Two
0:15.8	brothers who had a dream of making chocolate the old school way. The mass brothers with
0:21.0	their beards, beanies, and beautifully wrapped artisanal chocolate bars, boasted about their
0:26.4	two ingredient process. But the story they told customers wasn't exactly what it seemed. So
0:34.2	take a listen and we'll be back with our regularly scheduled programming next week. Happy holidays.
0:41.9	It's 2015. Food writer Megan Giller moved from Texas to New York. Her interest in food led her to
0:48.9	the world of desserts and she started to get involved in one particular suite. Most of us love to
0:54.4	indulge in chocolate. When I was a youngster, I just remember Hershey's milk chocolate and thought
1:03.4	it was amazing. It wasn't until I was an adult that I found out that according to some people,
1:09.3	it wasn't the real chocolate. I had no clue that there was a whole world of chocolate snobbery
1:15.6	and this is the world Megan found herself in. And there's this real focus on flavor and quality
1:22.2	and ethics. It was the craft and artisanal food movement that had started a decade or more before
1:26.6	and it was starting to hit its stride. Handmade, homemade, ethically created, and consumed.
1:33.9	Farmers markets were all the rage. People wanted to know exactly what was in their food and where it
1:40.2	was coming from. It's like they wanted the full story of how every item on their plate got there.
1:46.2	And for chocolate, it was no different. As almost as if people were asking,
1:50.2	is my chocolate organic, grass-fed, and free range? One of those hip artisanal companies was the
1:57.0	mass brothers. Rick and Michael Mast, two brothers who had started producing chocolate out of their
2:03.3	Brooklyn apartment in 2006. Their story, chocolate bars, made from just two ingredients,
2:10.9	cocoa beans, and sugar, straight from nature, from the bean to the bar.
2:17.0	And the brothers, they had that straight from nature vibe too. Matching rust colored beers,
	...

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