Could standardizing chocolate help small-scale farmers? Chocolate scientist Julien Simonis thinks it could help persuade consumers to pay for higher quality chocolate, in turn helping out these growers. Every cacao bean is different, and for a long time, there wasn’t a standard way of comparing the quality of chocolate. But in 2009, a sustainable agriculture nonprofit started a program called Cacao of Excellence. The goal was to develop a standard way of evaluating cacao just like those sommelier’s do with wine. So today, we’re going behind the scenes of a chocolate laboratory to see just how cacao is evaluated.
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