This is one of the more interesting articles I’ve read recently. It’s pretty much a takedown of a specialty chocolatier that trades, essentially, in fraud.
It’s an interesting read if you’re interested in chocolate, or basically how someone can pull the wool over someone’s eyes to the tune of almost a 7,000% markup over the retail price of their source materials, with essentially no added “craft.” Hell, you could probably make a good argument that what NoKA provides is actually that they actively make the product *worse*.
This fascinates me, in large part because one of the companies I’ve worked with in the recent past was essentially also in the business of pulling the wool over people’s eyes. It interested me how this guy – a real salesman’s salesman – could dupe relatively intelligent people by exploiting their insecurities, and their perception of value or quality.
It all basically comes down to exploiting perception. In the case of my personal experience with fraud, it had to do with the notion of experience, and knowledge. In NoKA’s case, it has to do with source ingredients and process.
This probably has some tie-in to a discussion last night about renovating the house, and the concept of paying $300/sqft for renovations, when that’s more than normal estimated *initial construction* costs, though while those numbers make my jaw hang open, I didn’t get the impression that the person we talked to was a fraud – this is more just a statement on what people are willing to pay in the Bay Area for something of perceived value.
I dunno.
That article is fantastic! Thanks for sharing it. I had often contemplated buying NoKa’s chocolates at Whole Foods, but I always passed because something seemed lacking. Now I know what it was that my brain (in Blink style) was responding to.
And I totally know what you mean about companies selling snake oil…enough said. 😉
Nuts! I had a really sarcastic “walking dinosaurs” comment about that article since I blogged about it, but my archive is fucked.
So, I stew here frustrated in my inability to drop a certifiable zinger in your general direction!
You win this round!1!!!
And yeah, it’s a great article. I love that kind of stuff. *stews*
A_B
Weird. I bought Chocolat Bonnat at a store in France because there were tons of it in the aisle, and the labeling was in French. Never ate it, though, as I gave it to a co-worker. Guess I should have Google’d the shit before giving it away, eh?
Oh well. Nestle and Hershey’s for me.
A_B, when did you blog about it?? I read every blog entry and I can’t remember it at all… Hmm. Will search and see what’s up.
If you go into blogger’s edit posts screen, you can search there, even if your archives are broken. I did a bunch of searches through your “search this blog” entry box but I didn’t get a hit.