Luke Owen Smith has been working in craft chocolate for over a decade and was frustrated by the fact that the makers doing the hardest, most skilled work rarely get the recognition they deserve.
According to Owen Smith, consumers still don't understand the difference between mass-produced industrial chocolate and craft chocolate, or the difference between bean-to-bar (made from scratch) and pre-made couverture-based chocolate.
He added that, for most of its history, the chocolate industry has done very little to help consumers understand what they're actually buying.
“To the untrained eye, everything on the shelf looks the same; a beautiful wrapper is a beautiful wrapper, whether what's inside was made from scratch by a passionate artisan or churned out by a multinational corporation,” said Owen Smith.
“a bar apart started as an idea to fix that. A simple, trustworthy emblem that tells you, before you've even opened the wrapper, that this chocolate was made from scratch by someone who knows exactly where their cacao came from. It's been in my head for five years and took another year to build, but here we are.”
As transparency becomes a priority in the premium chocolate sector, for makers, the emblem is about recognition, while for consumers, it's about clarity and confidence, an easy-to-recognise visual signal that they can trust, backed by clear criteria and ongoing accountability.
Cacao farming also poses serious ethical problems, such as modern slavery and illegal child labour. When cacao is bought on commodity markets and blended from multiple anonymous sources, those problems become invisible.
Read more in the latest issue here
