Bean to Barstool
A podcast exploring the intersections of craft beer and craft chocolate.
Bean to Barstool
Redux: Spencer Hyman of Cocoa Runners
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Bean to Barstool Redux: Vintage but still relevant conversations from the archives without all the extra narration. Just classic interviews from really cool people in craft chocolate, craft beer, and other food and beverage fields.
In this edition, we talk with Spencer Hyman, co-founder of Cocoa Runners. Spencer and I discuss the similarities between music and flavor, how understanding different types of music listeners informs his work at Cocoa Runners, and how we can learn from tasting chocolate with other people of different backgrounds.
Check out David's book Pairing Beer & Chocolate: A Guide to Bringing the Flavors of Craft Beer and Craft Chocolate Together.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Bean to Barstool. I'm your host, David Nilsen. Today is a Redux episode. That's when we take an older but still relevant interview from the Bean to Barstool archives, strip away all my narration from the beginning and the end, and just share with you a really great conversation. Today we're going to hear from Spencer Hyman of Cocoa Runners. In this conversation, Spencer and I discuss the similarities between music and flavor, how understanding different types of music listeners informs his work at Cocoa Runners, and how we can learn from tasting chocolate with other people of different backgrounds. Enjoy. Spencer, tell us a little bit about Cocoa Runners. What is the site and how does this work?
SPEAKER_00Well, first and foremost, thank you very much for having me on. So love what you do. So Cocoa Runners was the sort of uh idea of my business partner, Simon Plailthorpe, and I, what seems many, many moons ago, which was to try and help people find the world's best chocolate and provide them with a curated playlist every month as part of that service. And since then, we've tasted thousands and thousands and thousands of bars. And uh we don't just do a monthly discovery service of a box of different chocolates, but we also now sell gifts and we do virtual tastings and lots of other stuff.
SPEAKER_01So you mentioned the idea of a curated playlist and you have a background in music. Can you tell us a little bit about that background in music and then we'll talk about how that ties into what you're doing with Coco Runners?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it might be worth actually going even back a little bit further than that because the insight wasn't just my background in music, it was also both Simon and I have a background in e-commerce. So a long, long, long time ago, he launched Buy.com over here, and I launched Amazon's software video games, electronics, and toy stores here and in France and in Germany, here it's the UK. Um, one of the observations that we both had pretty quickly is that if the secret of physical retail is location, location, location, you know, you you shop at a store because it's convenient and it's there. The secret of ETEL really was all around search, search, search. Basically, back in the day before we all had broadband, but also back in the day before we really understood very much about e-commerce, you shopped for things that you knew you wanted that you could type into a search engine box, like a book, like a video game, or like a piece of software. And also, those were the only um sites which actually had catalogs. So Amazon's great genius was to start with product categories where you had catalogs. So music and books and DVDs. When we started software and video games, actually one of the biggest things we had to do was to build a catalog. But anyway, so so think about that search issue and put that to one side. In music, what I did was something called Last FM, which for people who are real died-in-the-wall, old school music guys, will know that before Spotify, actually, Last FM was the first place on the web where you could stream music in the clear, which now sounds like obvious stuff, but it back in the day you all had to have DRM and lots of other stuff. But Last FM originally started actually as a recommendation service. And the reason for that is that if you think about music, music actually has one of the best forms of discovery anybody's ever come up with for any form of media. And that was called radio and DJs and playlists. So think about as a kid how you discover new music back in the day, my day, I'm a bit older than you. So back in the day, it was, you know, you'd listen to the top 40, or more likely you'd find a DJ who you really liked, or you'd swap a mixtape in the you know, yard with your with your mates and go from there. And effectively, that's what LastFM did. Last FM basically helped people make playlists. And that's where uh Simon and I learned about the power of recommendations as a tool of discovery, in particular for categories where you don't necessarily know what you want. So there are lots of things where people do know what they want to buy. Like, for example, you know, books, most of the time people have a reasonable idea. And once you've heard something on the radio, you can then go onto the internet and buy it. But for something like chocolate, especially something like craft chocolate, which was just appearing, we basically thought, well, there is a role for DJs here. So that's a very long-winded way of explaining to you that what we're trying to do is help people find great craft chocolate.
SPEAKER_01So, what does that actually mean in practice? How do you DJ good chocolate for people?
SPEAKER_00That's a great question. So I think the first thing is you actually have to have a definition of craft chocolate, which is uh strange and very different, I think, to other specialty foods and drinks for one of a better name. So, for example, I know that you know a hundred million times more than I will ever know about beer, but you're well aware of how craft beer defines itself. And similarly, specialty coffee has a pretty good definition of what it's about, you know, with cube creating and everything else like that. Chocolate doesn't really have that. So actually, ironically, one of the first things we did was we have our own definition of what we mean by craft chocolate, which essentially is chocolate which is based around flavor and based around being very transparent and ethical and paying farmers and makers appropriately. So, what we look for is chocolate, which is based around stuff you want to savor because the focus is on flavor, as opposed to stuff that you want to scoff, where it's basically tastes, and I'm deliberately distinguishing taste and flavor, tastes which are made in the factory by using fundamentally bliss point technology. In other words, combining sugar, salt, and fat and just getting you to scoff that chocolate. So we have a definition of craft chocolate, which means that we have to know, first of all, where the beans come from, because that's going to be key to having great flavor. And then secondly, we have to understand how they've been fermented, how they've been dried, how they've been farmed, and how they are made. So, for example, we don't sell bars which are made out of nib roasting processes, which you know, most people don't even think about this. But actually, because chocolate's been commoditized and it's just used, most mass-produced chocolate is just used as a vector for other flavors of sugar. Most of the time, actually, the chocolate is made out of a couverture. In other words, the maker hasn't actually made their own chocolate. But much of that chocolate, too, instead of being whole bean roasted, which gives you all the flavor, is actually nib roasted. And then there'll be sorts of all sorts of other ingredients in there. So we basically look for great flavor and length, and we can talk a bit more about what we mean by that in chocolate. And then we also really want to understand about the beans and about the makers. So we will not sell a bar unless we know where the beans come from, how it's been crafted.
SPEAKER_01So while you're providing this discovery service for chocolate tasters, you also have to discover this chocolate at some point too. So, how does that work? Where are you finding good chocolate and deciding that it's going to be something that's worthy of selling on your site?
SPEAKER_00That's another great question. So I think there are two elements to that. So the first one is, you know, what do we do to discover grape bars? And there are sort of like three different avenues that we've got. One of which is one of the sort of interesting facets of chocolate is that, unlike, for example, wine, where most people who make wine actually, you know, have direct access to their grapes and don't give it to other people. In chocolate's case, there are a small number of farms, you know, probably less than a couple of hundred, which supply all the craft chocolate makers in the world. And once you know who they are, you can ask them who they're selling to. And we do a bit of that. Now, obviously, that's not true of everybody, because there are some people who are completely vertically integrated in the sense that they're treated bar, so they don't sell their beans to other people. But in a lot of cases, you know, you find, for example, you know, Coco Camille are a great example of this, or Bertel Akerson is another great example of this. They know who's making great craft chocolate because they're selling on their beans. And then the other way is we do rely extensively actually on our fans and on the consumers at craft chocolate, of, of cocoa runners craft chocolate to tell us. So we're regularly getting emails and we sort of have a promise, which is that if anyone finds a maker that we sell, we will, you know, basically gift them to thank them for introducing them to us a couple of boxes of those chocolates. And then the third is we go out hunting ourselves. Um, but it's basically talking to the farmers, um, talking to our consumers and going out ourselves. And then on the other hand, what we've done is we've worked with people at the wine and the coffee world and the flavor world to actually come up with a way of trying to articulate what we think will make a bar that people will enjoy. And that that sort of this idea of the flavor wave of basically, you know, the initial flavors and sensations you get from the chocolate melting in your mouth and the heat, and then how it emerges with more balance and more length and more intensity and complexity. So we we look for this sort of wave of flavor, which is this thing that we did with Professor Barry Smith and James Hoffman of Coffee Fame and then Rebecca Palmer of Wine Fame, which is sort of something which we use a lot in our tastings too, because one of the weird things about flavor is that unlike color, which most people can sort of immediately sort of you know identify lots of different colors, the flavor is sort of on the tip of your tongue. So we've had to work pretty hard to develop this. Um, and in wine's case, you know, Davis did it, and in coffee's case, the SCIA did it. But in chocolate's case, lots of people are trying to do it, and we're one of those. But what we really try and focus on is the length, the balance, the intensity, the complexity, because that's what you really want. Because taste is something you get very much up front, and that's what we're looking for in our makers bars.
SPEAKER_01So, with the importance of these bars tasting good beyond all the back-end principles that you're also looking at, are you personally tasting all these bars? What is that process like for deciding?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we taste them all. So, what we do is we have a huge database. Um, every time we get a bar sent in, we put it in the database. We have like five or six people internally who taste it. If anyone comes around for a cup of tea, they'll be given it to taste and get their impressions too. Um, and we we repeatedly taste. We don't rely on one taste. We we generally, you know, we'll taste something three or four times before it goes in. And we we probably taste two to five thousand bars a year. It's a lot. I mean, but you know, if you go to if you go to one of the big chocolate furs, you'll taste a lot of bars anyhow. And and sadly, a lot of them won't be very good.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was gonna ask. Obviously, I'm not gonna ask you to name names here, but I assume you get bars or makers that are prominent that you probably don't feel like past that. I mean, does that come up quite often for you?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it does come up more often than you would think. I mean, one of the opportunities I think craft chocolate has is that a lot of makers haven't tasted that many other makers' bars. And I think that you know, the best way to get good at something is to do lots of it. We get a lot of people sending us in bars, which they think are really great, but actually, you know, when you get them to taste some other bars and you explain a little bit more about how the the length and the intensity, the complexity, and what you're looking for in the flavor release, they start to get it. So yeah, we get a lot of bars, nine out of ten or more. I would say we basically recommend they work on something or the other.
SPEAKER_01You've talked about the curation factor of this, where you are picking great bars and putting them in front of people. Obviously, someone could come to your site, never learn anything about chocolate, and just trust you that this bar is good and they're gonna have a good experience with it. Some people obviously want to develop for themselves the ability to recognize what is good and what isn't and and gain knowledge in that way. And you try to do some of that also with the education stuff on your site. Can you talk a little bit about the education component and those different customers who are looking for curation versus looking for education?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's another really good question. I mean, I mean, candidly, I don't think we do an amazing job actually of all the curation. We have one service which is very much aimed at curation, which is the monthly delivery service. And we give you a little bit of flexibility. We sort of say, look, do you want dark only, do you want mixed, three dark and one milk, or do you want milk only or 100%? And then we basically, you know, just guarantee that we'll find the best bars we possibly can in there. And for the dark and the mixed, we basically guarantee never to repeat a bar. So so that is a real discovery. We have a couple of other discovery tools which I think work reasonably well, but we definitely need to improve. So, for example, we have an ability if you tell us some bars that you like, we should be able to tell you other bars that you like by using the sort of collaborative filtering stuff that we did at Last FM too. But in terms of real curation, I think we've got ways to go. So, for example, like matching wine and chocolate or matching coffee and chocolate, we do a lot of that in the real world and we put up some pairings, but I think we could do more of that. In the education sense, I think what we're trying to do more is get people to think about chocolate. You know, we spend more on chocolate than we do, at least in the UK, on books or music. In the US, you spend about as much on chocolate as you do on books, but nobody knows anything about chocolate. So what we try and do is explain a little bit about, first of all, how do you taste chocolate? What are you looking for? How do you do that? Then we try and explain a little bit about how do you understand where those flavors are coming from, you know, how much it's down to fermentation, how much it's down to drying, what, what, what's going on there. And then we try and also give you a bit of the history of chocolate because that's really important to understand where it's come from. Because the other angle to chocolate, which everybody forgets, is that this isn't something which just tastes better. This is also something which is much better for you from a health perspective, but it's also much better for the farmers and the planet. There's a great chart that we have at the bottom of all of our emails, which shows you some work which came out of COP26, not COP27, but the one before, whereby it shows you how much greenhouse gas emissions you get from eating an average serving of any product. And obviously, beef is right up there as being one of the worst and farm fish and everything. What's extraordinary about chocolate is how bad it can be for the planet, but also that it can be really, really good for the planet. So, this environmental angle, we also talk a lot about in the education angle, just to get people to think about it. I mean, you know, most people don't realize that it takes one and a half to 2,000 liters of water to grow the chocolate in a bar of chocolate. That's a lot, you know, an avocado's 300. And what people don't think about is that if you destroy the rainforest, which is what's happening with most bass-produced chocolate, you're going to get not just deforestation, but you also get desertification. And then on top of that, there's also all the socioeconomic issues, which people don't realize. And so when we tell the history of chocolate, one of the things we point out is that it's not just today that we've got a problem with Harkin Engel and kids not being able to go to school and farmers getting paid less than, you know, a dollar a day, and if they're women less than 50 cents a day. This actually happened a hundred years ago, and Cadbury's got caught doing it. And ironically, then we actually found a way to address the issues, which we're not doing so well today. So the education bit is a little bit about the science of tasting and understanding flavor, but it's also telling you a little bit about why this is so important and then also what to look for when you buy a bar of chocolate. I mean, you know, everybody can tell the difference between chicken nuggets and roast chicken. What we'll tell you as well is very simply how do you tell if it's going to be good chocolate and if it's going to be craft chocolate? Just look for where the beans come from, look for its made and look at the ingredients.
SPEAKER_01I want to talk a little bit about your experience with tasting chocolate. I think in any field, whether it's chocolate, beer, wine, coffee, you do so much tasting if you're professional in this that it can become very technical, somewhat rote. What is your experience of actually sitting down and enjoying chocolate? What is that process like to actually be able to enjoy this thing that you're wrapped up in all day?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a really great question. And you I love the way you ask this to lots of different people. And lots of people give much better answers than one I will do. But I think I think one thing is don't rush it. I think one problem I have is that a lot of chocolate tasting, because people are used to scoffing chocolate, they think they can do it fast. But actually, you're looking for the 20 to 30 second wave. You're looking for actually, you know, like how do those flavors, those bonded volatiles, actually get released in your mouth. So take your time with that. I think another angle to it is that it should be social. You should delight. I mean, I passionately believe that the best way to taste chocolate is to taste a couple of bars with a couple of friends with a couple of other products too. So, you know, I hugely admire what you do with beer. I'm not, for some reason, my palate, I love beer, but I don't, I'm much more used to drinking wine and chocolate. I mean, you have to, you're gonna have to educate me in beer and chocolate. I actually think it's a in some ways, I think it's an easier pairing than chocolate and wine. But but for me, for example, having chocolate and wine is just great fun, just red wine and a couple of bars of dark. But it also has to be with people and then to try and articulate it because it's delightful. I mean, chocolate should just be fun. It should be delightful, as well as you know, saving the planet and saving the farmers and being good for you.
SPEAKER_01On that note, you lead some tastings and pairings as well through Cocoa Runners. Talk a little bit about that side of what you do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so the the the tastings and the pairings are really aimed at just giving people a chance to see how well chocolate matches with other substances. I mean, ironically, chocolate is a victim of its own success here because, you know, chocolate is so often used as a vector and as an ingredient in other products. So we know that it pairs really, really well with you know, everything from to make cheesecake, to make chocolate cake, to make ice cream and everything. But chocolate is amazing for the variety of different flavors and textures that it can bear. And so it's a brilliant foil for lots and lots and lots of other products. And that's what we try and get people to think about. So, you know, when you when you're tasting something, you're looking for the mouthfeel, i.e. the texture, you're looking for the tastes, i.e. the sweet, sour, salty, bitter, etc. But you're also trying to match, for example, sometimes the tannins. And then you're trying to basically, you know, get two plus two to equal 55 with the different flavor profiles. Because, you know, again, flavor is very, I mean, it's it's very little understood. And trying to get people to even articulate flavor, you know, we don't have a vocabulary for flavor like we have for color, and and you can only detect two or three flavors at any one instant because of our lang limit. It's not like listening to music when you can hear lots of different instruments and they all sort of combine to hear one thing. Flavor is you actually need to be doing it with someone else, and you need other things to play off to actually get them. So we focus a lot on that. And you know, what makes a good pairing and how does it work? And we do a lot with wine, we've done a lot with whiskey. Um, we're gonna when I we persuade you to come to the UK, we'll try and do one with beer. And you know, the aim of it is to learn from everybody in the room. I mean, ironically, I think actually one of the best things about virtual tastings is that they're less intimidating. So, one of the things I don't like about, you know, when you go to one of these big formal sit-down tastings of anything is that it's very intimidating and you're told what you should be able to taste and enjoy. But actually, that's really a load of nonsense because I mean, if you just take chocolate, you know, the way that flavor is developed by chocolate initially is through the heat from your mouth. So we're all going to be able to more or less get those initial flavor notes. But the second wave, which comes afterwards, actually comes out of how bonded volatiles in the chocolate are released by enzymes and bacteria in your mouth. Sorry, it's sounding a bit graphic and a bit scientific, but it's it's not really meant to do that. But that's the reason why, you know, if you drink a beer and I drink a beer, initially we're probably going to get the same flavors, but after a bit, you may well get flavors that I don't get. But that's just because we've got different microbiomes in our mouth, and the same is true of chocolate. So, and people get really intimidated to think, well, why can't I taste the raspberry in here? Or why can't I taste the gooseberry and this and that everything? And the answer is because you just don't have the same enzymes in your mouth. But in a big formal setting when there's some person like, you know, pontificating, that's really your putting. But the nice thing about doing it online is that it's all anonymous. So it's much easier just to get people just to share what they're discovering on a screen anonymously with lots of other people, and then you can see if you can detect those nodes too, and not be worried if you can't.
SPEAKER_01Some of that I think comes down to vocabulary too, and the different experiences we've had. Talk a little bit about how the tasting experience, and I'll ask you this about chocolate, but it's it's true of other uh indulgences as well, how the tasting experience can be used to open doors and bring people in and bring people together from different backgrounds to talk about what they're tasting and what their stories are. Because I think for so long, our posture in leading tastings has been so I am going to educate whoever is here that sometimes for myself I know I can miss out on paying attention to what this other person who's maybe a less experienced taster, but has had different experiences than than I have, could teach me about that and could tell me something that they're recognizing there that I didn't have the language for. Can you talk a little bit about how that can apply to the chocolate tasting experience?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean, I think the trick, as you said, is helping people articulate what it is. And it's a great door opener too, and it's a great way of basically helping people do it. I I think that's one of the reasons why the virtual tastings actually, in a strange way, are better than the in-person ones for people who are a little bit shy. But you can work around that in a small group. I mean, when we do tastings in our office, you know, we can only fit 18 to 20 people in, and we put them around tables and we really encourage them just to talk to one another, and it's a great way of breaking the ice. So, but but I mean, I think what's happening here, as I sort of said, the weird thing about flavor is that unlike listening to some music, when there is, you know, you you can actually sort of tell what the beat is, you can tell what the rhythm is, you can tell what the tone is, what the key is, etc. There is, you know, that is agreed. And similarly with colours, you know, that is agreed since Newton we've grown what they are. With flavor, it doesn't work the same way. Not just because we don't have an accepted set of words and vocabs to do it, but because technically you can only identify any one instant, two or three. Different flavors. So everybody can teach everybody else something different by being able to identify those flavors. And that can create a nice atmosphere when lots of people can talk in lots of different ways about what it reminds them of. I mean, you know, you know, Proust is, you know, right in the sense that the way that flavor works is it goes straight into your brain in a way that doesn't go through conscious thought. So it brings back all sorts of different sensations. And if you can get people to talk about that, you know, it's a great way of getting them to talk about their childhood, for example. So I think that that's sort of quite a good door opener. What does it remind you of? What does it tell you about? It's a great way of sort of getting people to open their souls. The other trick, though, is that very often we try and have makers and sometimes even growers, and getting them to tell their story is super important because the big difference between what craft chocolate's trying to do, which is tell the story and bring the flavor out of the bean, big chocolate can't do that because they're trying to do consistency and they're basically dealing with a commodity ingredient. Because what they're trying to do is basically use taste, which is very different to flavor, and stuff that you can play with in the factory there. And you know, their aim is to give you the same consistent experience wherever you go. And they do that by commoditizing the ingredients and destroying the flavor. So, you know, getting the farmers to tell their story, I think, really happen, really helps as well.
SPEAKER_01We've mentioned music several times now. I feel like music can have that same sort of subliminal emotional impact that flavor and aroma can. Uh, talk a little bit about that. Do you feel like enjoying music and enjoying something like chocolate can hit some of the same places in our minds and our hearts?
SPEAKER_00Yes. But here's a question I'm gonna flip back on you. Is chocolate, enjoying chocolate like running or like swimming? And let me explain what I mean by that. If you give somebody a pair of running shoes and you tell them they've got to go for a run every day for a month, for the first couple of weeks, they're gonna be really irritated with you and not enjoy it at all. But most people by the end of a month will have got into it and be able to run. You know, it's the sort of born-to-run thing. Swimming is completely different. If you throw somebody in a pool every day for a month or into a pond every day for a month, by the end of that month, they're gonna hate you and never want to swim again unless you teach them how to do it. And so I think the the thing about you know music and um chocolate is where do they sit on that spectrum? I think, for example, in comparison between music and art, I think that music is probably more like running and art is probably a bit more like swimming. So, in other words, if you go around a museum, it really helps to have a docent or somebody telling you sometimes a little bit about the history behind that. Knowing the history behind the song, not so sure about it. Chocolate, I don't know where it sits on the spectrum. I think, though, that's what you said, David. You need a vocab, you need a little bit of a framework to be able to do it. So, in that sense, it's a bit like swimming. You know, once somebody's shown you the stroke, shown you how to breathe, you know, I'm a I'm a huge fan of swimming, um, which is why I've got a cold and everything at the moment. But it it's it, I just think if you show someone a little bit, then the world is their oyster.
SPEAKER_01I think there's a personality difference between people who want to dig in and gain that knowledge and be able to pick something apart and they're gonna enjoy it more the more they know about it, versus somebody who wants to be very experiential and just kind of receive that that sensory experience. My sister and I had a conversation about this uh for the podcast last year. She falls much more into that latter category. She consciously does not want to learn all the styles of beer or understand all the grape varietals or all that because she wants to be surprised. She wants somebody to give her something and then she tastes it and has this immediate experience, you know, this surprise experience. Whereas if I find that I'm enjoying something, I want to order all the books and read everything about it so I can understand it the most I can, and that's going to inform my enjoyment of that. So I wonder how much of that is just how do people enjoy anything in their lives? How do they approach things that they are going to enjoy?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's a very good music parallel in that too, which is that at Last of M, we used to have a segmentation of listeners. And and broadly you can sort of divide people who listening to music into four categories. There's um a tiny, tiny minority of people who actually trying to find new music, just the actual hunting of it, is the most important thing. It's even more important than the listening to it. At the other end of the spectrum, there's a group of people for whom just it's just background. In between, there are people who are passionate about music, but they broadly break down between people who want to listen to music they've already heard and got used to and like, and they want those songs to be 70 to 80% of the songs they listen to, but they're happy to have 20%, for example, 20 or 30 percent new songs in that style injected into it. So they're more, you know, I know what I like, give me more of that. The opposite to that is, and this is sort of where Last FM was very good, was okay, I know what sort of music I like, but now I want some new stuff in that category. Pay me a little bit of stuff I've already heard before because I'm going to enjoy hearing it a couple of times, and put that there. And I think one of the interesting questions about any food or any drink is, you know, where does it fall? And a good example of that is, you know, are you a ketchup or are you a wine? So very, very, or I think chocolate falls into this, and I think beer falls into this too. You know, most people basically have got one or two ketchups. There aren't that many ketchups. I know they're trying to create more ketchups, but basically we've got used to one particular format. It's not much flavor, it's more about taste, etc. Nobody has the same wine every day. Nobody has, if they're into beer, outside of, I mean, I think there are some exceptions in beer, and the UK is a good example of that, where you get people who really just want one beer. But but most of the time, people like variety and experimentation. Actually, the most difficult thing, in a way, with chocolate, um, trying to get people to convert to chocolate, craft chocolate, is that if they've got addicted to sugar, they're in the catch-up category. It's very difficult to get them into flavor. So, so you know, those are the people who, when we're selling to, if the answer to the question is what sort of chocolate do you like is you know, X, Y, Z milk, we know that's going to be really hard because actually it's something different. It's taste that they enjoy, not flavor in that in chocolate. And I'm not saying saying the matter with you know, enjoying kids' chocolate and that sort of stuff. I'm just sort of saying that if that's what they've got into and used to, it's very difficult to break them off it because they're into sugar.
SPEAKER_01That's very interesting about the breakdown of types of listeners. If we apply that to tasting, do you know what kind of taster you are? Where do you fall in that spectrum?
SPEAKER_00I definitely fall into I want to try a lot of different varieties. I I for me, it's it's it's very, very much about variety. And the other thing is that I care passionately that that the makers make it. I mean, you know, one of the most difficult conversations we have, but in a way, it's got an upside to it, is when we do have to go back to our maker and say, look, we love what you're doing, we love your story, we love your enthusiasm and everything, but the bars just aren't quite there. Because for us, putting you in a subscription box is it's our chance to introduce you to, you know, all of our subscribers. And we don't want you to do that until you're ready for prime time. So but for me, the great fun is discovering new bars, new approaches, you know, new fermentations, new twists, whatever there is, and and helping people discover that themselves. I mean, that's that's the fun of it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I feel the same way. And I feel sometimes a tension with beer specifically, between I want to discover, I want to try every cool new beer that's out there, every new brewery that I come across, but it also can take me away then from great beer that I I already know is sitting right here. I could have this beer and it's awesome, or I already know this brewery and love them and I want to support them. Do you feel that same kind of tension between favorites versus discovery?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have, I mean, I think the sort of the easy way through it is there are lots of new favorites. But but there are also some old stalts who, you know, I'm I'm I'm always super excited when you know Hunt Street have got a new bar or when Duffy's got a new bar over here in the UK, or when Fiax have got some of their you know, great Christmas bars. But at the same time, I'm hugely excited when a new maker comes up, like you know, Pachero or like Liam or like Venti Lenti or something like that. You know, Salon was fantastic. There's a I mean, one thing I just didn't realize is there's a whole sort of new wave, new Valdague, if you like, of sort of like French new craft chocolate makers who are just completely different to all the old school French chocolate makers. And they're just gonna be fantastic fun to try. And that's just you know, it's just wonderful.
SPEAKER_01Can you share some of your favorite chocolates that you've had lately? Just pick a few that you've really been impressed by.
SPEAKER_00Uh, what have I been really, really impressed by? So um Talcali have just um so they're a great Swiss chocolate maker, and we've always wanted great Swiss milk chocolate. So this is actually, I'll send it to you. This is one they made just for us, which is an awesome milk chocolate bar. I think that Vinta Vinte, that this I'm just looking around, I'm literally just looking at our desk. They they've got some great new bars too. Who else is getting some new bars? FIAC have got some great new bars. Uh I'm looking forward to the new Casa Cacao bars. Standout are always just amazing over here. There are lots of great new makers as well coming up through. I mean, I'm very excited to try some new Brazilian makers, which will be coming onto the site next year. Uh and of course, um, we've also got Ukrainian chocolate makers.
SPEAKER_01Excellent.
SPEAKER_00We've actually we've got a box which we basically are which which every time we sell the bars, we basically you know support Ukrainians with it. And we've managed to sort of get um a company called Stranger. It's extraordinary. I don't know how they're still doing it, but they're still making bars for us for different origins.
SPEAKER_01That's amazing. How about music? What have you been listening to?
SPEAKER_00So I definitely fall back into the camp of I know what I like listening to, and I listen to a lot of that. So um I was a little bit, I have to be honest, I'm a huge Bruce Springsteen fan. I was not blown away by the latest album. I'm not, it's not going to be up there on my playlist for all the stuff that that I've got there. So, so um, you know, I like that. I also really like jazz. So there's been I I there's some really interesting Japanese jazz that's just sort of come through that that's sort of quite cool. Uh, I'm looking forward to going to go listen to my daughter, um, who is plays more classical music, um, plays some stuff up at university.
SPEAKER_01So, how do people get involved with Coco Runners if they wanted to do the subscription or however that works? How do they do that? And is that available, you know, around the world?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we ship all around the world. Uh, we we try not to ship to the hottest places in the world at the hottest times of the year, but we do ship all over the world. Uh, we've just about solved the issues with Brexit and being able to ship back to Europe, which is very exciting. But fundamentally, we ship everywhere. Um, we do a monthly subscription service, but come to the website. My strong suggestion is basically the two things which we really want everyone to get into is a virtual tasting. So come to the first masterclass and then also do think about subscribing or give people, you know, uh, the gift that keeps on giving. Give them a tasting course, three, six, twelve months, ship everywhere in the world for those. And it's just cocorunners.com.
SPEAKER_01That's awesome. So, one question I always ask of chocolate makers and brewers is what story is their chocolate or beer telling? You mentioned earlier that you're, you know, you're kind of bringing together so many different stories from all these different makers, and you you want to be able to boost the stories that they're telling. Is Cocoa Runners telling a story from all those voices together? What story is that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so that's a great question. So I'm not sure I'm articulated brilliantly, but I passionately believe that if you want to save the planet and be healthy, we have to go back to savoring and not scoffing. If there's one change that people can make to how they eat, they should do it with chocolate. It's the easiest thing to change. If you upgrade to craft chocolate, you'll learn about savoring, not scoffing. You will also understand the importance of ingredients, the importance of flavor, and you're also basically, there's no other product that you can make this simple switch, which helps save the farmers from a life of penury, save the rainforest from being destroyed, and save desertification. So it's just, you know, what we're just trying to do is just show chocolate, we spend more on it than we do on books or music, and yet people don't think about it. And if they could just think a little bit more, upgrade to these amazing makers, these amazing farmers, these amazing cooperatives, that really, really makes a difference for their own health, for the farmers, for the planet, and it's just the start of a much better journey.
SPEAKER_01All right, thank you, Spencer. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing your insight with us today.
SPEAKER_00Well, thank you. It's been fantastic. And we have to get you over to the UK. I would love that.