Cadbury Bourneville Hazelnut: India

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Cadbury Bourneville Almond: India

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Casino White Caramelized Coconut: France

Less than two weeks ago, I was at a holiday party held by the hotel where my wife works. It was a Christmas party and everyone attending selected in advance a gift recipient at random out of a hat. My selection was a pastry chef. I went on the internet and did a little research about him ahead of time in order to discern what sort of gift he might enjoy. He described himself as a chocoholic, so I knew immediately that I could not buy him a chocolate collection.

At the party when I met him for the first time, I mentioned the Chocolate Republic. He wasn’t much interested. He kept a sort of chocolate blog himself, more like a food and lifestyle assessment. In conversing with him, I realized a pastry chef was no man to helm the Chocolate Republic. This man recounted the fine cacaos he used in his pastry confections, most of which I never heard of and would have no ready access to buy in the retail markets. He judged everything from a professional chef’s standpoint. He didn’t or couldn’t see it from the consumers’. First and foremost, consumers don’t care if chocolate is made from rare Arriba beans from Ecuador. They only delight in those obscure facts if the chocolate offers a unique taste treat and is sold at a price commensurate with its quality, and that’s only if they have any interest whatsoever in eating better quality chocolate. It’s only in the last twenty years there’s been a real market among the commoners for premium chocolates.

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Tesco Organic Ecuadorean 39% Milk Chocolate: UK

Since the Chocolate Republic’s inception fifteen months ago, I’ve watched the chocolate landscape change for the better in Thailand. Prices haven’t fallen for the Lindts and Guylians and Freys. In the luxury end, there’s really not more and better chocolates available. No, what’s changed is that the big retail marketing powerhouses in Thailand, with their headquarters in Europe, have started offering in-house brands at very attractive prices.

Carrefour started doing it before they leapt out of Thailand completely. Big C has started to offer their Casino bars. And now marketing mammoth from the UK, Tesco, through its Thai operations of Tesco-Lotus, is selling Tesco branded chocolate bars in Thailand at about the same price as Big C is selling Casino bars at its stores.

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Casino Dark Tanzania 85% with Split Almonds: France

Could it be because Casino is from France, the nation most closely associated with epicureans, that their food products take on a luxury air? Casino goes all out on this one, part of their Delices range. They’re offering a dark, dark chocolate, at 85% cocoa solids, with cacao sourced from Tanzania, and filled with 10% split almonds, an ambitious undertaking indeed.

Green & Black’s and Carrefour did quite acceptable jobs with their 80%+ bars. The reason you don’t see many 80%+ bars on the shelves, especially among mainstream producers, is that they’re not easy to pull off. The darker the chocolate, the more important the cacao that’s been sourced and the manufacturer’s chocolate producing techniques in dealing with the higher expected bitterness. Here’s a analogy that could better explain it. The quality and freshness of fish stands is more evident when that fish is eaten as sashimi. Served as a fried fish filet sandwich at McDonald’s and drenched in cheese, it’s not so easy to discern — or all that important — what grade dish you’re eating.

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Casino Milk Chocolate Caramel: France

I’d spun the roulette wheel once with this Casino, trying the French chocolate brand’s dark chocolate with hints of cacao bean, sourced from Caribbean cacao. The verdict from that bar (and a few Casino pizzas) was that retail behemoth Casino was using its sales clout to produce some decent quality home brands.

I picked up three chocolate bars that day I was strolling through Casino’s Thai-subsidiary Big C. Two were dark bars. My wife and step-son are anti-dark. Not as vociferously anti-dark as the white supremacists running South Africa in the 1980′s and before, but close. Milk chocolates are the name of their game, as they are of most amateur chocolate tasters. The little leaguers seem to have an obsession with caramel as well, all the more so if the caramel is mixed with milk chocolate. I love caramel as much as the next guy. Whenever we go to Swensen’s for a sundae, I’ll go out of my way to order a sundae drenched in caramel. But in the Chocolate Republic’s sphere of influence, I’ve found that caramel is usually added to chocolate to cover up the taste of inferior product. Caramel has such a tasty flavor and texture that the quality of the chocolate the caramel is packed into drifts into the background for consideration. I remember the Marathon bars I used to eat as a kid. They made better rulers than they did quality chocolate bars, and Mars discontinued them over 30 years ago, probably to save lives. At the time I ate them in the mid- and late-70′s, these braided bars were treated like fine champagne. My palate was distracted by the caramel. I didn’t get a chance to comprehend how bad the chocolate really was.

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Casino Dark With Bits Of Cacao Bean: France

I was moseying on through the local Big C supermarket to do some grocery shopping, and my eyes came across several of these Casino brand bars, all made in France. I’d only heard of Casino a month or two prior. My wife had come home from Big C with several Casino brand pizzas in hand, purchased for very reasonable prices by Thai standards. The quality of these frozen pizzas was superb, and we’d regularly serve them to guests as a snack.

It was only from doing research for these French chocolate bars that I discovered the Casino Group is a humungous food conglomerate, not just some small regional food producer.  Casino consists of 11,663 stores and 230,000 employees. In 2010, the Group had over €29bn in revenues and €1.3bn in trading profits.

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