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“There is a certain kind of jealousy,” Bernardini told Quartz over email, “but more of an anger.” “But (chocolate makers) should also be angry with the media as it is the fault and responsibility of the media that Mast Brothers became so famous (with a mediocre and sometimes also bad quality). Only because they wore clothes like Amish people with long beards.”
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—-Oops pwnt!
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The best part about a chocolate bar is unwrapping it, and in this the Mast Brothers are geniuses: The thick, artisanal paper, printed by a single lonely cowboy living with three blind nuns, is well worth the $10 price tag. It’s what lies underneath that’s in question.
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—-From the New Republic
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But “Scott,” an unknown blogger who recently published a series of exposés on their practices, and Quartz, which followed up with a survey of chocolate-industry insiders, both report that the Mast brothers actually began their company by selling commercially produced, French chocolate, which was melted down, re-wrapped in pretty paper, and sold for $10 a bar. (They also marketed themselves as the first chocolatier in America and the first chocolatier to make small-batch chocolate, claims that Quartz shot down.) As their company grew and, according to Quartz, they actually attempted to become single-source chocolatiers, however, their peers in the chocolate industry began noticing that the quality of their fancy chocolate had dropped precipitously. Aubrey Lindley of Cacao in Portland, Oregon, initially noted that Mast Brothers chocolate “had an overly refined, smooth texture that is a trademark of industrial chocolate. No small equipment was achieving a texture like that. It also tasted like industrial chocolate: balanced, flavorless, dark roast, and vanilla.” But by 2010, when they switched to single-source, “most of the chocolate [became] simply inedible, by my standards,” said Lindley.
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—-Vanity Fair
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Scott and Quartz — which independently verified many of the blog’s claims — say that the company refused to answer specific questions related to the company’s production and sourcing process. Neither Scott nor Quartz claim that the Mast Brothers have never made bean to bar chocolate. In fact, the blog chalks up a major decline in the taste of Mast Brothers offerings, from smooth and “blandly competent” to "coarse" and "muddy", to the switch from remelting to the more difficult process of handcrafting their own chocolate.
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—-"A scandal is erupting in the world of hipster chocolate"
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Likewise, in trying to find cacao sources in Trinidad, he had run into dead ends. Cacao production in the country was low—the workers drawn away from cacao plantations to more lucrative oil field work—and nearly all of that was under contract to major French and Italian makers. Impressed and curious, he asked, “Where were you able to get cacao in Trinidad?” Rick Mast replied, “Oh, these three we make,” pointing to the flavored bars of unspecified cacao origin, “and the other three are Valrhona,” referring to the single-origin bars and dark milk chocolate...... Rick and Michael Mast were the Milli Vanilli of chocolate. They costumed themselves with quaint clothing and showy beards. (In the fall of 2008, Michael Mast even dyed his hair and beard red to better match his brother in photographs.) They talked the talk of authenticity and “reconnecting” the public to lost foodways. By May of 2008, they publicly proclaimed themselves the “Leaders of the Chocolate Revolution.” They won over celebrity chefs, then piggybacked on their credibility. Packaging trumped product. They crafted their public image magnificently. To this day, you can’t read an article about the Masts that doesn’t effuse about the beards and the paper. (When they calculate optimal media-ripeness, count on the beards to be shaven, generating more Mast mania!) Though an appealing façade, the early Mast Brothers was a Potemkin chocolate factory, churning out remolded, repackaged industrial couverture. With lies that foundational, a cloud of doubt descends on every claim. After the sweeping deception that the Masts made the chocolate that they sold under their family name, even the confessions of using Valrhona must be independently verified. While we can confirm that they remelted some Valrhona, that doesn’t mean they didn’t also use Belcolade (with which Rick Mast became familiar in the weeks he spent “apprenticing” in Jacque Torres’s shop), Callebaut, or other then-common and affordable couvertures. Who really made the chocolate that Dan and David Barber tasted when the brothers visited Blue Hill at Stone Barns in early 2008? Were the many retailers who carried Mast Brothers bars complicit in the charade or were they as clueless as their customers?
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—-The rant by the original blogger; same guy who took down "Noka Chocolates" in 2006
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Rick Mast
Mike Mast
How to eat their chockies
