How to sell a $300 chocolate bar
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
That said, I don't think that difference is worth an extra $290. Once you're over the $5-to-10 per bar mark, there's diminishing returns on quality (for me at least.) Anything over that and you're paying for the story and branding. A $7 single-origin fair trade bar tastes the same as a $300 one, and in both cases, they're probably sourcing from the same farmer.
On one hand, anyone who's spent the time to cultivate a preference can tell some bit of difference between "crappy" beer/wine/coffee/chocolate/etc. and "the good stuff". On the other hand, taste & smell in particular are so adjusted by expectation, visual presentation, and of course stories of bespoke products from old-world artisans.
But even if you're aware of all that, I'm the first to admit it's easy to get enveloped in the more "objective" ways to put food & drink on a magical pedestal (especially those with psychoactive properties like alcohol, caffeine, & other drugs). Learn how different hop varietals contribute different alpha-acid concentrations that affect the taste and smell of beer, or the flavor profile of coffee roasts, or the THC/CBD ratio of marijuana strains...
It's not that it's all bullshit, there's some truth there for sure, it's just interesting to me when I find myself geeking out about these things. I don't (think) I fall for stories behind products, but there are many ways humans essentially get lost in, for lack of a better word, the "magic" properties of substances we ingest.
I see it as a kind of glitch of the human mind that's both life-enriching and, sometimes, to the detriment of our wallets.
Knowing that, you just have to figure out how to reach them with the promise of a novel, luxurious experience.
There is really no predicted risk for anyone on a $300 chocolate bar. You spend the money and get a chocolate bar. If it’s the best chocolate bar in the world, great. If it’s junk, that sucks. Either way your $300 is gone.
For $300, I can get an incredible several-hours long meal in a fantastic space, with devoted, engaging service. I'll have a great experience, memories forever, and inspiration for my own cooking. My friends will want to hear all about it. It's practically a half-day vacation.
It's reasonable for people that aren't super wealthy to save a bit and splurge for an experience like that every now and then.
This is a fucking chocolate bar. If I tell me friends I spent $300 on a chocolate bar, they will think I'm a crazy person.
Maybe there are some restaurants for russian oligarchs and other people with bad taste and too much money, but unless you go crazy on the wine (which they keep around for just such guests) all the 2 and 3-star restaurants I've been to have been 10-25 times more expensive than mcDonalds,not 100-250 times.
Wine is tricky, the taste is complex,the experience depends so much on what you are or have been eating, temperature, the glass, and I suppose the ambience, and is a rather strong (upper-middle) class marker,so even so-so expensive wines are given much benefit of a doubt.
I think a $300 candy bar is stupid, but it’s objectively got no less utility than a $300 meal. You could eat a meal of rice and beans with a $300 candy bar for dessert and from a health and satiety standpoint you’ve probably equaled the $300 meal. The difference is the subjective experience.
A really small group with a lot of money is still worth paying attention to. Think about it like this, you wouldn't want to miss giving them a chance to spend that money. As the article says "To’ak chocolates—requires good storytelling". At that point it is all about storytelling. If you're selling a phone case, they are not buying just a wooden phone case, they are buying a hand crafted and polished product that came from an ancient jungles of South America, it was blessed by the shamans, and painted with pigment from crushed beetles etc.
Rich people will often look for ways (not necessarily conspicuous) of asserting their status. Spending money of frivolities like these is giving them a chance to do so. Many will understand that maybe all those claims are mostly bullshit, but they'll still buy it. Maybe just to show it off to their friends, give it as a gift, or flash it around their poor relatives and remind them what they'll never be able to afford.
The point is that non-rich do that, too. Most people buying luxuries are not ultra-rich. $300 dollar chocolate is not out of reach for the upper-middle class, or really even the regular middle class. It might be a dumb purchase, but you could realistically earn less than $50k/year and still buy a bar of this.
I would imagine that my peers make up a much larger portion of To’ak's clientele than Warren Buffet's peers.
The trick is too keep your price just under what someone living paycheck to paycheck might decide to spend on a special occassion. 300 is right in the middle of that range, the sort of thing one might buy as a special present.
I think the ultra wealthy abhor those restaurants. I would imagine by that amount of money you would have private cooks.
Maybe not. But people will pay for a story.
Charles Shaw wines (sold at Trader Joe's stores, and affectionately known as "Three Buck Chuck") has won numerous blind competitions over wines costing a hundred times more.
And the famous Stradivarius instruments, valued at north of $1,000,000 cannot easily be discerned from high-end modern violins. But the mystique of the brand, the imagery of these little singing cabinets scraped out of wood 200 years ago, continues to fuel the market.
People pay $60 for a single ice cube carved from a glacier. That 100,000 year old ice sure must be yummy.
Kimmy asks a rich boyfriend to bring ice for a party, and he arrives carrying a hinged, dovetail-jointed wooden box, lined with velvet, containing ornate ice tongs and six perfect ice cubes. The only way it could possibly be funnier is if they were all perfect ice spheres.
An acquaintance of his was carrying a Stradivarius, on loan from some foundation or other which had it insured for a silly amount of money. The acquaintance played it during a performance at this event. To my friend's somewhat experienced ears, it actually sounded pretty flat (not poorly tuned, but rather dull), relative to so many of the other instruments he's heard. In telling me about this, he didn't seem particularly surprised by that.
It's anecdata, but it clearly supports the notion that people will pay mightily for a name and attendant reputation, over actual quality.
I'm reminded of the Judgement of Paris:
But blind testing is also hard, maybe you need to listen or taste for days,not just a few minutes.
I suspect a lot of sugar and artificial flavours are added to products as people are reacting favourably in 30 second blind tests, but given a chance they would appreciate the nuances of less engineered products. The sugar and the esters are getting old fast.
A sense is anything that happen involuntarily. Gathering data from the environment.
Food is mostly nose/tongue senses but also very visual. The tongue also has touch. However stories also implant thoughts and is perhaps the most advanced form of making food taste good as eventually all non-thought sense BECOME thought.
Stories however are limited because they create thought only in the form of whatever language is used, say English. It is also the method of gauging quality. "That was great".
The highly personal experience must snap to pre-existing words. Subtlety and thus more exact and truer meaning requires combinations of different words. Say a poem.
Food itself falls prey to the consumerism feedback loop that creates experiences that try to titillate the senses more and more in an absolute way rather than through subtlety. Spicier and spicier food is an example. As is more and more violent TV.
There's nothing wrong with this persay. It's just that the hedonistic treadmill ratchets upwards and eventually you run out of stuff and end up so numbed to subtlety that the small but beautiful things are difficult to appreciate because you've dampened your resolution capabilities.
High-food has the same problem as high-art. It takes too much discipline to appreciate and no one has the time. We're all too busy trying to one up the world.
I still put thought in a different realm since (at least for the cases where the price tag is bullshit) informed thoughts have the potential to counteract a purely sensory illusion... A different realm, but definitely an overlapping one.
Is that a typo or someone being cute? :-)
(I live in Raleigh and hadn't heard of it so I looked it up.)
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If that's so, I would love to buy chocolate from them. I only suggest to price the 3-pack lower than $20 (if a single is $7, a 3 pack should be closer to $16-$17).
At the end of the tour they do a tasting of bars made from single-origin beans. With the only additives being varying amounts of milk and sugar, one bar tasted bright and citrusy, another was earthy and nutty, and another was rich and (for lack of a better term) “chocolatey”.
It makes total sense in retrospect, but I’d never considered how much the flavor of beans by themselves can make such a difference.
The first time I tried it was in Mexico at a chocolate workshop. The instructor got freshly roasted beans, ground it on a stone along with other ingredients that I got to pick - Sugar (common), pepper (uncommon), Star Anise (uncommon) and eat the buttery thick paste.
These guys seem to know what they are talking about : http://chocolatealchemy.com/how-to-make-chocolate-the-comple...
The audio industry is particularly bad with this kind of thing, only a few people actually looking at numbers and doing blind ABX tests.
For example: you can get cheap boots for $80, that will fall apart in a year. Double the cost: $160, and that might yield an okay pair of boots that would at least last 5 years. Etc.
A similar good thing to know is the price floor of goods. You can't really make a good bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon in the US for under $20. If you're under that, it's almost certainly not good. If you're way over that, you're probably beyond the point where you're paying for quality.
Obligatory link to friends shop: http://www.mokayagr.com/
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That said, I have no concrete evidence that they're frauds. For all I know, everything they say about their chocolate could be true (which, arguably, would be the best scam of them all; I just can't see a rational argument to be made for a $300 chocolate bar).
This is some 'shaken but not stirred' nonsense. How do you break something into small pieces with your teeth without chewing?
You don't need a $300 or even $10 chocolate bar to benefit from this technique - it brings out the flavors of a $3 Trader Joe's 85% cacao Colombian bar just as nicely.
Huh.
FYI Trader Frank's has the Pound Plus Bar for IIRC about $5.
Probably less fancy than the 85% one, but cheaper.
Going to sell a pen? No! Sell a pen that appeals to someone's sense of a adventure, even if it (and the person buying it) will spend its entire life sitting on the desk at the office.
That is the whole no-chew thing - the gimmick.
If you don’t think this makes a difference… even if you’re right, you’re wrong. As Serious Eats points out with their articles on Mexicoke[1] and eggs[2], our enjoyment of food is inextricably linked with our emotional perspective on where the food came from and how we’re eating it. The simple act of caring about how you chew a bar of chocolate actually increases your subjective enjoyment of it, even if a hypothetical double-blind experiment would show no discernible difference.
You could immediately follow that tasting with another bar for which you give exactly opposite instructions: macerate quickly, trying to expose as much of the chocolate’s surface area as possible in order to maximize the evaporation of volatile oils. I would wager heavily that the explicit difference in instruction and focus on a different aspect of the experience would heighten the taster’s appreciation of both bars.
[1]: https://drinks.seriouseats.com/2011/09/the-food-lab-drinks-e...
[2]: https://www.seriouseats.com/2010/08/what-are-the-best-eggs-c...
Simple, you merely palp it with your teeth.
/s
Entrepreneurs are often reluctant to charge more for their products in the early days, and articles like this show that customer interest doesn't require low prices. If you can demonstrate value and differentation, people will pay more than you might expect. Sometimes much, much more.
I mean I get where they’re going [edit: and they have a good story] but this is within an order of magnitude of what already exists so the setup is a little flat IMO.
From how I see it, the long term strategy would have to be to develop the brand name, then sell more bars at a lower price, and then ALSO create an extra-premium bar at an even larger premium price. It all leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
https://decider.com/2016/12/06/sour-grapes-on-netflix-wine-s...
Sadly, they destroyed his counterfeits. I think they could've actually sold them (all his wine was sold off to compensate those he defrauded), I certainly would've been interested in a hosted tasting comparing some real rare wines to his counterfeits.
https://www.winemag.com/2017/08/14/how-rudy-kurniawan-fooled...
If that can be done cheaply and fools experts, I would buy it.
did a good job of producing fake wines that were both palate
pleasing and mimicked elements of the wine being counterfeited.
Again, it's sad they destroyed his counterfeits, a blind tasting between them and the real thing would've been great fun.
[0] https://www.eater.com/2015/12/23/10657022/what-the-mast-brot...
"Yes," said the customer, "and you tell it so well too."
(OK basically what they quote Christopher Olivola saying)
Its made from rare Peruvian Pure Nacional dark chocolate. Despite what I thought was an outrageous price of $12.95 it sells out almost immediately. Perhaps it's a bargain after all?
I cut chocolate out of my diet for health reasons. I used to buy it 50 percent off after each holiday but gave up on that as well. I'm trying Apple Sauce instead and other healthy alternatives. I am trying to give up soda as well.
I guess I'm not the target demographic.
https://www.c-spot.com/chocolate-census/daily-review/?pid=24...
In short, status signaling people with more money than sense.
Obchocolate: my favorite chocolate used to be Lindt Mocha. Now it's Dove Dark.
Plus, most bottles of wine that are $250+ have some age on them, so you're really paying a premium for provenance too. The same wine can sell for double the price if it's still in the crate, has original paperwork, and has a verifiable storage history in appropriate conditions.
There's nothing wrong with independent bottlers and blending houses (that has a very long tradition in Scotland, for instance), and MGP does make a good product. Just don't try to BS the customers.
For rye, at least, a good tip-off that a rye whiskey is likely to be MGP is if it touts a mash bill of 95% rye. [1]
[0] https://chuckcowdery.blogspot.com/2014/08/ and many other articles there
[1] http://www.mgpingredients.com/product-list/Rye-Whiskey.html