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.

At the time I picked these French chocolate bars off the shelves, I did so largely because the price was right for Fairtrade European-made chocolate. I was also desperate to add new brands to the Chocolate Republic. I didn't realize then that I was really picking up the store's self-branded bar since I wasn't yet aware Big C is owned by the Casino Group.  Why then can't I find the Casino pizzas in stock anymore at the local Big C's?    

It's nothing new for me to review a self-branded bar at the Chocolate Republic.  The very Big C where I purchased these bars was a Carrefour store just six months ago.  Before the changeover, I bought a few Carrefour self-branded bars.  Australia's supermarket giant Coles offers its own self-branded bars at significant discounts.  The UK supermarket hotshot Tesco has started selling its Tesco-branded bars at its Tesco-Lotus supermarkets in Thailand.  Casino sells its bars with a twist.  Carrefour, Coles, Tesco, and the other big boys have other companies manufacture the bars for them.  Carrefour consulted different multinational bigwigs in France and Germany to manufacturer their bars.  Coles went to Belgium.  Tesco to Italy.   Casino?  As far as I know, the Casino bars are made by Casino for Casino.  There was no information on the back label to suggest that the bars were made in France for Casino.       

Trying to make out the French writing on the label, I noticed that this bar contained cacao from the region of Saint-Domingue.  Saint-Domingue would be a new taste experience, if I only knew where the hell it was.  A quick look online lent some clues.  Saint-Domingue was a French colony on the western side of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola until 1804, after which it became Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas. Saint-Domingue also happens to be the French translation of Santo Domingo, which is the capital city of the Dominican Republic, the nation occupying the eastern side of Hispaniola.  So where is this bar's cacao sourced from?  Let's just be safe and say somewhere on the island of Hispaniola.   

The Casino 72% dark chocolate bar with bits of cacao bean was my first taste experiment. Is it good? The chocolate had a nice snap, wasn't too bitter for a 72%, and had an adequate amount of cacao bean bits, listed at 10%. I still don't know why more manufacturers aren't introducing bars with bits of cacao bean. I didn't bite into this bar with any great expectations of reaching chocolate heaven, much the same way I felt about Casino's pizzas before biting into those. Perhaps over in France, Casino's name on a label lends the product some prestige. Over here in Thailand, unfamiliar with the brand, I went into this as I would any self branded grocery store chocolate and was very pleasantly surprised.

This wasn't the taste sensation that Scharfen Berger's Nibby bar was, but come to your senses. This Casino bar was less than half the price. I'll keep rolling the die at this Casino if the company can keep delivering this quality at this price.