crooked spin
Member
You gotta be born with it.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Hipster frauds Mast Brothers peddling phony $10 "bean to bar" chocolate
- Thread starter TxdoHawk
- Start date
- Status
You gotta be born with it.
Not to single out this post but why is this so hard to get? The last picture spells it out explicitly. Generally people don't like it when someone is not genuine, especially when the image they are selling is based on being genuine.
Union Carbine
Member
Picked up by the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/21/nyregion/unwrapping-mast-brothers-chocolatier-mythos.html
I get where people are coming from when they say they are fake beards. Obviously they are real beards, as in they really grew them, but where they say fake, they mean inauthentic. Which is a fairly normal or standard criticism of hipsters (the oldest article I can recall that made that claim was this AdBusters one, I'm sure there are older ones).
A beard being "inauthentic" probably sounds sort of weird as well, but say you really liked Amish furniture. A lot. Enough to pay a premium for it. Say you went to the people who claimed to have made it, and they were dressed like they were Amish, beards and all.
But say they weren't actually Amish. And they were selling someone else's furniture they took apart and put back together.
When people think about artisanal food, there's an idea in their head about what that is and who that comes from. "Artisanal" implies things. Something not mass produced with a higher quality than what has been mass produced, with a lot of expertise and care put into it, seen potentially as somewhat unique; products not coming from business men and machine assembly lines.
So when someone says they've always done bean to bar chocolate (they haven't), that their chocolate is the best (it isn't), that they re-purposed equipment not intended for chocolate to make chocolate (they didn't), claimed to have discovered/invented "two ingredient" chocolate (they didn't), claiming to be transparent about who they are, what they do, and what their product is (lol), and they took up hipster styling to try to better convey what their brand and product is? To sell over-priced chocolate bars?
Not even the beards are real.
Anton Sugar
Member
TBH, this is more a general discussion on cultural appropriation for fashion. The entire "lumbersexual" movement, as well as a lot of other trendy "hipster" fashion, is lifted from the working class. Everyone wants to look "genuine", if not "tough".
The Albatross
Member
I really love when shit like this happens. I also love this:
What would probably be the best chocolate I'd ever eat is "simply inedible" by somebody else's standards
What would probably be the best chocolate I'd ever eat is "simply inedible" by somebody else's standards
Snkfanatic
Banned
I don't get it
Exposures do nothing these days.
Has Tabris weighed in on the experiential world of chocolate eating?
...I'm sure Bill Cosby would disagree.
2 Slice Toaster
Member
Growing a beard is an aesthetic choice. End of. Every part style choices are that. You choose to do it because you want to draw attention to the fact that you've done it. I just don't see the relevance here, and it just comes off as petty.
Dumb as fuck analogy but I'll tell you why they aren't comparable. Billy boy lost his limelight years ago, those rapist rumours persisted at his peak, now he's simply an old 70- 80s sitcom star - how many of those are still remain the same popularity as before?
ElectricThunder
Member
Protip: If your local area has a Marshall's and/or Home Goods to a lesser extent---make a point of going there at least from time to time to have excellent/random access to a often discounted wide variety of quality chocolate, fair trade and otherwise, from around the world as opposed to this Mast nonsense.
Copper Monkey(get the dark), Galler("filled bars" are insanely good), Lindt of all sorts, Taza...it goes on and on with new stuff throughout the year.
Copper Monkey(get the dark), Galler("filled bars" are insanely good), Lindt of all sorts, Taza...it goes on and on with new stuff throughout the year.
What kind of bullshit comment is that. Williamsburg is awesome and theres no need to single out "shitty white men"
ZackieChan
Member
But a genuine beard? What does having a beard signify, exactly, that growing one for the wrong reasons means they're not genuine?
Ninja Scooter
Member
Even the beards are fake.
Their Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/_UU1n1vxn6/
How they see themselves
From a Twitter account. https://twitter.com/extramsg/status/676935067864858624?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
A pair of Biz Frat Bros realized the future, and it was beards.
They grew beards when beards became trendy? Hang'em.
They're not directly comparable, but the idea that exposés don't have any impact is blatantly false with any number of counter-examples. It's sort of insulting, since you're essentially saying "don't bring up iniquities, that won't do anything."
I get what you guys are objecting to, but it's not just the beard. You can see every part of their wardrobe and styling is calibrated to exude a certain look for business. It's one of those weird tensions where people crave what's "genuine" but that sentiment is based on very artificial approaches to the world—the whole "I look like I'm too poor to buy jeans" clothes sold for hundreds of dollars, that sort of thing. There's certainly plenty to object to without getting into a discussion of their clothing (or turning it into a potshot at an entire race like the OP.)
Show me one example of an expose where they negatively impacted the sales of a product, a very popular product mind you - what about the countless stories regarding the poor working condition of factory workers who produce Apple products? Yet they keep breaking records. Apathy takes center stage when is comes to cultivated products like this.
Beer Monkey
Member
An indie record label accountant once told me that the band Bright Light Social Hour got hair and beard weaves when they were starting out to rapidly change their look to match their targeted demographic. I don't know if it's true, but I'd imagine it happens sometimes. Maybe sometimes a fake beard really is a fake beard, at least initially.
Gravy Boat
Member
Beards like that weren't even that trendy in 2008. They really only became super popular in the last 2 or 3 years, at least over here. Hipsters used to look like this.
http://youtu.be/o_5uVdy5YmA
So I don't get how people are saying they jumped in the beard bandwagon.
1) Many of those stories were flat-out made up, and 2) The discussions about Foxconn and such did result in changes at Foxconn and at Apple, and they provide yearly updates on their progress.
You seem to be justifying your own apathy. But this is getting off-topic from the admittedly minor infraction of some hipsters selling overpriced chocolate.
The issue here isn't the price so much as it is promoting the idea that they're "bean to bar" and that they started from nothing and have made everything from scratch. If they want to be open and say "we buy from better chocolatiers, melt their product down to provide our base, and then resell it to at an exorbitant price" then that's their prerogative.
Beer Monkey
Member
Can't stop thinking of Broken Age hipsters.
You need pictures of yourself with a full beard that date all the way back to middle school. If you grew it any later than that, you're a phony.
I don't think anyone is seriously annoyed that they didn't shave for a while but rather are using that a shorthand for the entire aesthetic they as people have adopted outwardly to somehow give legitimacy to their product which is also peddling the post-modern, "pure" qualities.
Of course in reality how they dress doesn't mean anything in terms of the product but they clearly banked on it so it's not surprising when there is backlash when it turns out to be a facade. People don't like being tricked. That's the point since it apparently needs to spelt out.
I'm not a huge fan of chocolate except when it's on Michelin star restaurant desserts. That's an experience though
Oh I do like chocolate-covered strawberries with champagne.
lol. yeah i was wondering this.
when is the acceptable time to actually grow a beard? because apparently if you go from clean to straight hipster beard you're a phony.
i've had a beard for about 5 years now, if people find my picks from 2010 without one am i a fake?
Yes, because it's a form of signaling. That they chose to do it to draw attention to the fact the did it is entirely the point. It's to reinforce the image of the product they're selling - it being artisanal. A couple of frat-ish guys don't portray this narrative. A couple of hipster lumbersexuals do.
$10 for a bar of chocolate sounds expensive at first... but the cacao beans that small-batch chocolate makers use aren't the same thing as in your $1 Hersheys/Cadbury/grocery store checkout aisle stuff. Those beans are pretty nasty, from a child labor & bugs-in-your-food perspective. Bean-to-bar makers use small batches of cacao that are produced with greater care (I won't get into the details) and cost 10x as much as the Hersheys industrial grade stuff.
I'm friends with a bean-to-bar chocolate maker, and his costs for beans, equipment, labor, etc. work out to $4.50-6 per bar. Add in the rent for his shop and a modest profit so he can pay himself a sustainable wage/reinvest in the business, and you get to the $7 wholesale/$10 retail price pretty quickly.
Using other people's chocolate is considered ok in the small-batch chocolatier (people who make truffles and stuff), but is never ok in the bean-to-bar world. Especially since these clowns made up all this crap about basically inventing no-additive bean-to-bar chocolate at the same they were using industrial chocolate with exactly the additives they disavow.
I'm friends with a bean-to-bar chocolate maker, and his costs for beans, equipment, labor, etc. work out to $4.50-6 per bar. Add in the rent for his shop and a modest profit so he can pay himself a sustainable wage/reinvest in the business, and you get to the $7 wholesale/$10 retail price pretty quickly.
Using other people's chocolate is considered ok in the small-batch chocolatier (people who make truffles and stuff), but is never ok in the bean-to-bar world. Especially since these clowns made up all this crap about basically inventing no-additive bean-to-bar chocolate at the same they were using industrial chocolate with exactly the additives they disavow.
If it's like most farmed products I don't believe this. Unless the chocolatier is flying to the country of origin and contracting directly with a grower they are getting it from a wholesaler. The wholesaler is probably buying from a co-op or smaller wholesaler so there is little to no connection to the individual producers.
ZackieChan
Member
I, for one, prefer to find a stray beard hair or two in my artisanal chocolate. "Bean to bar," indeed.
XiaNaphryz
LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
Some specialty chocolatiers actually do just that, sourcing directly from farmers and overseeing the entire process from harvest to fermentation to roasting to shipment.
- Status