I don't really understand why a 4 year old article about a fake chocolatier is relevant to this site.
I actually went to their store in Williamsburg before this drama unfolded, and I remember saying something along the lines to my wife 'Wow, I can't believe this is their only facility, it looks way too small to pump out so many bars'.
My BS alarms started going off on these guys when they chartered a sailing ship to transport cocoa beans to their factory, on the argument that you could taste the difference between beans shipped by sail and beans shipped on a ship with an engine (!).
<pedantry>
"Kopi" is Indonesian for "coffee", so "kopi luwak coffee" is in the same vein as "ATM machine" and "PIN number". "Kopi luwak" or "civet coffee" are the preferred terms.
</pedantry>
> Where specifically did you see this argument? In this WSJ article, this is the reasoning given:
>> They hoped it would save energy, help lure environmentally conscious buyers, and, maybe eventually, cost less.
The attempt to save energy (even though they only hope that someday it will cost less, which is a very chic way of saying that it is more expensive to do so) -- all of that virtue signaling combined with the understated costliness of doing so is almost guaranteed to make it taste better. Just ask anyone who has actually tried these confections.
1. It's delicious
2. It's nutritious
3. Too many people eat bad chocolate
4. There lies a very interesting challenge in creating more heat-resistant chocolate (think climate change)
5. It's a fragmented, huge market.
6. I was looking for a hobby involving manual labour that has the potential to turn into a company
I posted the article here - I wasn't aware of the previous discussion on HN. I guess there's probably a decent percentage of other HNers that wasn't aware either.
I also wasn't aware of the dallasfood article either. You raise good points, but I don't know how I could have acted differently...
I remember reading about the hysteria of this 4 years ago and wondering if me, a non-foodie, could actually taste the difference in chocolate quality. I finally had my first mast brothers bar recently and...
...yeah. It taste like a slightly better quality hershey's bar, definitely not a $10 bar of chocolate. I was kind of floored, it was actually pretty bad.
same, I tried it once, and thought it was bland..... and kinda crappy/cheap tasting.
Now that I have been living in NYC for few years, my BS meter has improved.
There are enough tourists and young people that come and go in NYC, and that propels a whole industry for "expensive/overpriced" but crappy goods and services.
Both Brooklyn and Manhattan are the place of 100$ haircuts, just because your barber has a hipster beard....
Seems like $100 for a haircut isn't that bad when you'd need to pay $3000/month for a bedroom within an hour's commute, assuming it's a fancy haircut that takes 40+ minutes
I live near the Mast shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The place does not smell good.
It's a real shame because friends/relatives who visit always zero in on that place for souvenirs and gifts for the family. Say what you will about the chocolate; their branding and design is on point.
This article is a reminder that many luxury goods don't have enough intrinsic value to account for their price. In those cases, marketing needs to actually add value to a product, not just inform people of the intrinsic value of a product. This practice is used in almost all end-consumer products on the market.
Seeing an Apple ad of a shiny image of a new iPhone imprints that image into the customers mind, even after they purchase and use the product. Their perceived value of their iPhone one year after purchase is greater than if they have not seen any advertisements, because they keep associating the product in their hands with the very high quality image on TV.
This is what's happening here with Mast Brothers chocolate. The high price itself can increase perceived value ("If it's expensive, then it must make me happy!"), appeal to values held by the consumer ("I support small businesses so I value the purchase more!"), and the packaging or storefront proximity ("Imagine how much value the product is since the packaging is such high quality, or the presentation on the shelf is high quality").
None of these have anything to do with the edible substance they're buying (the "end product").
In fact, I would argue that the end product matters the least for this particular product. Beyond some point, the quality of product does not affect its intrinsic value. Mast Brothers is beyond that point. The marketer therefore must use the above methods to further increase perceived value.
If you are a business owner yourself, you can choose to increase perceived value of your product in ethical or unethical ways. Some customers will detect unethical practices, some won't notice (such as people who don't read this article), and some won't care.
Or artisanal products like Mast Brothers' are actually Veblen goods (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good), where demand for the product is driven by the high price because it lets its buyers conspicuously signal that they're better off than everyone else. Poor people can't afford $12 chocolate bars, so for a person who regularly buys $12 chocolate bars, part of the value to them is the opportunity to demonstrate how not-poor they are. All the markers of authenticity are just there to let the buyer convince themselves that they're doing something loftier than that.
"Artisanal products" Right. Getting really tired of that. Overpriced bread.
Oh, and because wide bread is now "artisanal", long-slot toasters have acquired luxury pricing and are more expensive than four-slot toasters. Even though they have identical heating elements.
It's an evolution. In the 50s white bread was considered modern, sanitary, more shelf stable, and futuristic. Now rustic and artisanal bread is considered nutritious with higher quality ingredients because we have fewer worries about quality and we're not giving up many of those other traits. Soon enough, that will be mass produced and there will be some other signal of higher quality or desirable trait that requires us to buy newer toasters.
I still think white bread makes a better grilled cheese, pb&j, and brioche makes superior french toast. Those are all terrible on multi grain bread, which has its own uses.
Here's how "artisanal bread" is made now.[1] Conveyors, robots, stainless steel. No people.
"When you want to bake as much bread as possible, you need robotic assistance. You have to get out of the way. If you have 12 or 15 oven decks, you can't physically load it fast enough."
I hear this argument about Apple products constantly, and have a knee-jerk reaction to debunk it as the actual reason, when it’s more likely motivated by preference.
I just can’t imagine anyone even thinking that holding expensive chocolate is going to signal their status, and can’t imagine that anyone is so insecure that they would even feel a need to. A lot of people buy overpriced items because they actually believe they are higher quality (whether true or not, like with wine).
Yet, jewelry and expensive watches exist seemingly only for that purpose, so I have to call my own assumptions about others behavior into question on this.
But all of these examples require you to speculate about the motives of other people.
Apple products are qualitatively different from its competitors products. Whether that makes them better is a personal preference. The same can absolutely be said about wine, and expensive watches. Watches can be used to signal status, or satisfy some aesthetic tastes, but they are also some of the most beautiful examples of high-precision mechanical engineering you can find. If I was filthy rich I’d absolutely by a nice watch with an exposed tourbillon, there’s no such thing as a cheap version of that.
I can easily imagine them doing that, but I have trouble with the assertion that their reason for doing so is to signal their high status.
The business argument doesn’t apply, I’m talking about the consumer side. Of course a business would sell something if it’s profitable, regardless of why.
There are a couple of videos on youtube comparing $1000 Louis Vuitton color pencils (yes, you read that correctly, thousand US dollars for a bunch of color pencils made by Louis Vuitton) to cheap everyday color pencils and the LV pencils lose! It is amusing to watch.
I guess many luxury goods are just good marketing and advertising.
I'm surprised by a lot of those kinds of products. I figured they're "art projects" and promotional. Other examples seem to be veblen goods. I think other A/B comparisons are looking at the product the wrong way, like complaining baby seats don't fit in a Lamborghini.
It's actually deeper than that. It imprints the image into our collective minds. Even if YOU don't think iPhones are better, it may still be rational for you to buy one if you know that people will think more highly of you when they see you holding one.
* If you are willing to spend $10 on chocolate, well then you deserve to open yourself up to being hoodwinked by marketing and branding.
* More and more people are buying stuff not for its intrinsic value but as a status symbol. From the super smug colleague showing off their Oat milk in the fridge and artisanal roasted beans. To the person buying bespokoe sunglasses (which are sourced from the same factory as Ray Ban). Not forgetting the Avocado on toast hipster, whose appetite is causing drought and deforestation across the world.
> If you are willing to spend $10 on chocolate, well then you deserve to open yourself up to being hoodwinked by marketing and branding.
Disagree. If you get $10 worth of enjoyment out of a really good chocolate bar, and you can afford it, then it's perfectly reasonable to do so.
> Not forgetting the Avocado on toast hipster, whose appetite is causing drought and deforestation across the world.
Are you aware that the "avocado toast millennial" thing is nonsense? You've only heard of it because an out-of-touch millionaire claimed that millennials are only poor because they spend all their money on Starbucks and avocado toast, and the mockery he received went viral.
> If you get $10 worth of enjoyment out of a really good chocolate bar, and you can afford it, then it's perfectly reasonable to do so.
I think the insinuation here is that the purchasers of this chocolate are deriving their enjoyment of the product from the knowledge that they paid $10 for it, or from being able to tell somebody they paid $10 for it, not from the quality of the actual chocolate.
Yeah, absolutely, if you're only buying it for conspicuous consumption, that's silly. I just felt like mothsonasloth implied that it's fundamentally dumb to pay more than a few dollars for a chocolate bar.
I love that spoof. One big difference is that the artisans in the spoof appeared to be genuine true-believers, but the investigative articles around this chocolate story seem to allege intentional deception at some points.
Interesting they mention Valrhona, which I get at Trader Joe's for 2.99 or so. It is the smoothest and least bitter 85% chocolate I've found in supermarkets, and slightly prefer it to both Ghirardelli and Lindt. I didn't know anything about it until now.
So they started out reselling (remelting) it for 3x the price. Fake it till you make it, indeed.
As I read the article, I can't help but feel that the tone is exceptionally unfair to Mast Brothers.
It seems the primary charge is that 'some, but not all, of their earliest sold chocolate bars were made from mass-produced chocolate,' referencing bars sold at a flea market (wherein they allegedly acknowledged to a buyer that some-but-not-all were made from mass-produced chocolate).
The article then criticizes them for browsing the largest Chocolatier forum on the Internet for advice... Is this supposed to be a serious criticism?
Then it goes into the quality of the chocolate and alleges that it's overpriced. I would argue that it's subjective, and there isn't anything inherently wrong with strong marketing. Maybe their chocolate isn't that good (I've never heard of Mast before reading this) and they're just convinced it is?
Finally, the article ends with attacks based on mere speculation and attacks on the general chocolate industry as a whole.
I'm not making any judgment on Mast Brothers chocolate one way or the other. It's just that this article has a whole lot of aggressive language propping up some pretty weak evidence.
Yeah, I found it remarkable that the Mast brothers were rather up front about the sourcing for each of their chocolate bars. If they have the skills and dedication then they should be able to improve their product to meet their marketing.
I actually have a favorite chocolate bar that is about $10, made in Hawaii by Manoa Chocolate [1] They have a factory store in Kailua where you can do a tasting and they show you how it’s made. They also sell them in some Whole Foods. No chartered sailing ships as far as I know.
This is exactly what readers of HN should be doing.
Fake it until you make it
It's not like they were faking blood tests or fake solar roads that cause harm. It's just chocolate.
I'd hope this old article is highly rated for that, or trying to understand how humans work and what they value, rather than the dopamine rush from trying to see people fail.
69 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadI actually went to their store in Williamsburg before this drama unfolded, and I remember saying something along the lines to my wife 'Wow, I can't believe this is their only facility, it looks way too small to pump out so many bars'.
But what do I know. Based on the number of comments, readers love this post, so I was clearly wrong that it was off topic.
All that said, it's delicious.
Same with Chai Tea.
Where specifically did you see this argument? In this WSJ article, this is the reasoning given:
> They hoped it would save energy, help lure environmentally conscious buyers, and, maybe eventually, cost less.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303714704576385...
>> They hoped it would save energy, help lure environmentally conscious buyers, and, maybe eventually, cost less.
The attempt to save energy (even though they only hope that someday it will cost less, which is a very chic way of saying that it is more expensive to do so) -- all of that virtue signaling combined with the understated costliness of doing so is almost guaranteed to make it taste better. Just ask anyone who has actually tried these confections.
I am currently going down the deep rabbit-hole of chocolate making and re-read this just recently. Highly recommend the coverage on dallasfood.org as well: http://dallasfood.org/2015/12/mast-brothers-what-lies-behind...
The Mast Bros situation has been discussed to death, yawn.
I also wasn't aware of the dallasfood article either. You raise good points, but I don't know how I could have acted differently...
...yeah. It taste like a slightly better quality hershey's bar, definitely not a $10 bar of chocolate. I was kind of floored, it was actually pretty bad.
But either way, the new M&M bars taste infinitely better than both Hershey's and Mast.
Now that I have been living in NYC for few years, my BS meter has improved.
There are enough tourists and young people that come and go in NYC, and that propels a whole industry for "expensive/overpriced" but crappy goods and services. Both Brooklyn and Manhattan are the place of 100$ haircuts, just because your barber has a hipster beard....
It's a real shame because friends/relatives who visit always zero in on that place for souvenirs and gifts for the family. Say what you will about the chocolate; their branding and design is on point.
Seeing an Apple ad of a shiny image of a new iPhone imprints that image into the customers mind, even after they purchase and use the product. Their perceived value of their iPhone one year after purchase is greater than if they have not seen any advertisements, because they keep associating the product in their hands with the very high quality image on TV.
This is what's happening here with Mast Brothers chocolate. The high price itself can increase perceived value ("If it's expensive, then it must make me happy!"), appeal to values held by the consumer ("I support small businesses so I value the purchase more!"), and the packaging or storefront proximity ("Imagine how much value the product is since the packaging is such high quality, or the presentation on the shelf is high quality"). None of these have anything to do with the edible substance they're buying (the "end product").
In fact, I would argue that the end product matters the least for this particular product. Beyond some point, the quality of product does not affect its intrinsic value. Mast Brothers is beyond that point. The marketer therefore must use the above methods to further increase perceived value.
If you are a business owner yourself, you can choose to increase perceived value of your product in ethical or unethical ways. Some customers will detect unethical practices, some won't notice (such as people who don't read this article), and some won't care.
Oh, and because wide bread is now "artisanal", long-slot toasters have acquired luxury pricing and are more expensive than four-slot toasters. Even though they have identical heating elements.
I still think white bread makes a better grilled cheese, pb&j, and brioche makes superior french toast. Those are all terrible on multi grain bread, which has its own uses.
"When you want to bake as much bread as possible, you need robotic assistance. You have to get out of the way. If you have 12 or 15 oven decks, you can't physically load it fast enough."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qm_iHgFsPw
I just can’t imagine anyone even thinking that holding expensive chocolate is going to signal their status, and can’t imagine that anyone is so insecure that they would even feel a need to. A lot of people buy overpriced items because they actually believe they are higher quality (whether true or not, like with wine).
Yet, jewelry and expensive watches exist seemingly only for that purpose, so I have to call my own assumptions about others behavior into question on this.
Apple products are qualitatively different from its competitors products. Whether that makes them better is a personal preference. The same can absolutely be said about wine, and expensive watches. Watches can be used to signal status, or satisfy some aesthetic tastes, but they are also some of the most beautiful examples of high-precision mechanical engineering you can find. If I was filthy rich I’d absolutely by a nice watch with an exposed tourbillon, there’s no such thing as a cheap version of that.
Really? You can't imagine some hipsters having an "all artisanal" food gathering? Or a restaurant serving "all artisanal" dessert?
Some people do things because they are genuine. Far more people do things because they are a fad. Far more do things because it's profitable.
The business argument doesn’t apply, I’m talking about the consumer side. Of course a business would sell something if it’s profitable, regardless of why.
I guess many luxury goods are just good marketing and advertising.
It's actually deeper than that. It imprints the image into our collective minds. Even if YOU don't think iPhones are better, it may still be rational for you to buy one if you know that people will think more highly of you when they see you holding one.
In this specific case, and others like it where a truly common good is priced into a truly niche market, the marketing is the value.
* If you are willing to spend $10 on chocolate, well then you deserve to open yourself up to being hoodwinked by marketing and branding.
* More and more people are buying stuff not for its intrinsic value but as a status symbol. From the super smug colleague showing off their Oat milk in the fridge and artisanal roasted beans. To the person buying bespokoe sunglasses (which are sourced from the same factory as Ray Ban). Not forgetting the Avocado on toast hipster, whose appetite is causing drought and deforestation across the world.
Crazy times we are living in...
Disagree. If you get $10 worth of enjoyment out of a really good chocolate bar, and you can afford it, then it's perfectly reasonable to do so.
> Not forgetting the Avocado on toast hipster, whose appetite is causing drought and deforestation across the world.
Are you aware that the "avocado toast millennial" thing is nonsense? You've only heard of it because an out-of-touch millionaire claimed that millennials are only poor because they spend all their money on Starbucks and avocado toast, and the mockery he received went viral.
I think the insinuation here is that the purchasers of this chocolate are deriving their enjoyment of the product from the knowledge that they paid $10 for it, or from being able to tell somebody they paid $10 for it, not from the quality of the actual chocolate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBb9O-aW4zI
And the 'crappy' label is a bit harsh?
can't you say this about almost any high volume popular luxury brand?
So they started out reselling (remelting) it for 3x the price. Fake it till you make it, indeed.
It seems the primary charge is that 'some, but not all, of their earliest sold chocolate bars were made from mass-produced chocolate,' referencing bars sold at a flea market (wherein they allegedly acknowledged to a buyer that some-but-not-all were made from mass-produced chocolate).
The article then criticizes them for browsing the largest Chocolatier forum on the Internet for advice... Is this supposed to be a serious criticism?
Then it goes into the quality of the chocolate and alleges that it's overpriced. I would argue that it's subjective, and there isn't anything inherently wrong with strong marketing. Maybe their chocolate isn't that good (I've never heard of Mast before reading this) and they're just convinced it is?
Finally, the article ends with attacks based on mere speculation and attacks on the general chocolate industry as a whole.
I'm not making any judgment on Mast Brothers chocolate one way or the other. It's just that this article has a whole lot of aggressive language propping up some pretty weak evidence.
[1] https://manoachocolate.com
Fake it until you make it
It's not like they were faking blood tests or fake solar roads that cause harm. It's just chocolate.
I'd hope this old article is highly rated for that, or trying to understand how humans work and what they value, rather than the dopamine rush from trying to see people fail.