Why Good Chocolate Costs More
Most of the world's chocolate is made from commodity cocoa: beans traded by the tonne, blended for consistency, priced on an exchange. Fine chocolate starts from a different raw material — ‘fine flavour’ cocoa varieties, often bought directly from named farms at multiples of the commodity price. Before anyone has roasted anything, the expensive bar has already cost more.
Fermentation is the hidden step. After harvest, cocoa beans ferment for days in boxes on the farm, and this — more than anything the chocolate maker does later — creates the flavour. Doing it well takes skill, time and money, which is exactly what a farm being paid commodity rates can't afford. Direct-trade premiums aren't charity; they're paying for the fermentation.
Then the making. Small-batch makers roast lighter and slower to keep origin character, conche for hours or days to refine texture, and use real cocoa butter rather than cheaper substitute fats. Every one of those choices costs machine-time and yield. The supermarket bar isn't doing it wrong — it's optimising for a different thing: an identical, reliable, £1.80 product.
What you actually taste for the extra money is place. A good single-origin bar has acidity, fruit, sometimes an almost wine-like finish — Pump Street's Ecuadorian bars taste of citrus nobody added. Commodity chocolate tastes, deliberately, of chocolate and nothing else. Whether that difference is worth 5× is a personal question; that the difference is real isn't.
Where does it stop being about the chocolate? Somewhere between a £9 bar and a £91 box. The £91 box can still be genuinely superb — but you're increasingly paying for freshness (real ganache has a shelf life of weeks), craft labour, and packaging designed to make someone feel something when the lid comes off. As a gift, that's the entire job. For your own top drawer, the £9 bar is where the taste-per-pound peaks.
