It’s time we tell you the story about MUU and the Chocolate Factory.
Do you remember the smell of a bakery as you passed by? The melted butter, the caramelized sugar, and freshly baked bread that tempts you to just mash your whole face into it. Now, try imagining if the smell of the bread were replaced by the aroma of chocolate.
That’s the exact experience you’ll have when you enter Pridi Cacaofevier’s office. Sounds magical, isn’t it? Let’s delve into it
Daniel Bucher is a chef-turned-chocolatier who founded Pridi Cacaofevier five years ago as alaboratory hobby and a location for making chocolates for hotels and restaurants. It all started with Daniel taking sustainability in food seriously, and as a chef, he was told that coffee, beef, and chocolate are forbidden to support such ideology. However, as he went down the rabbit hole, he discovered that there are ways to improve sustainability in beef and coffee, but he had little knowledge of chocolate sustainability, and that is considered a challenge to him.
How could he make great chocolate while adhering to his food sustainability philosophy?
As he experiments with his chocolate, he realized that in order to produce great quality chocolate, it requires great quality tools that will do the job right. The hobby gets more and more expensive and now that he has all the tools he needed, he realized that he just had himself a small chocolate factory. “Since I have all the necessary tools, why don’t we just establish our own chocolate company?” Daniel told us in a contagious cheery tone that, despite the fact that his hobby has cost him a lot of money, he has no remorse about any of the decisions he has made. “This cost me around 800,000 baht, coming straight from Germany, and it’s the best decision we’ve ever made.” he said, pointing to the oven he uses to roast the cacao nibs adjacent to the rumbling cacao grinding machine.
Daniel chose Thai cocoa over any other type mainly because he lives in Thailand and wanted to take the ideology of sustainability that he believes in to the next level; In addition, he believes that Thai cocoa has something that he or the majority has never experienced before, given the fruitiness and acidic characteristics of Thai cocoa, it has a particular sour flavor and tropical fruit scent unlike other cocoa from South America or Africa.
However, selling chocolates that taste different from the mainstream is difficult; and the difficulty resides in how people, both Thai and expat, remember their chocolate, which is often creamy and bittersweet. In order to make a sustainable growth for Pridi Cacaofevier, it is their duty to educate people that there are more flavors than just creamy and bittersweet, that there are natural flavors that need to be discovered in each cacao, and one of Daniel’s creative solutions is to make sophisticate matter seem fairly simple. First, he comes up with the notion of offering something familiar to the people’s taste buds, by developing chocolate bars with parodic titles and designs like “Tawick,” “Cashew Krup,” “Sanicka,” or “Maprownty.” Not to ridicule popular chocolate bar brands like Twix, Reese’s Cup, Snickers, or Bounty, but to provide people with the comfort of expectation and providing their own version of chocolate bar that tastes similar to what they used to have but crafted entirely in Thailand.
“Many companies tried to make their product appear sophisticated,” Daniel asserted as he handed us a tasty bon bon stuffed with marshmellow and caramel (made from coconut sugar) to sample, “I just want to spread happiness.”
For more information, follow them on.
Official website: https://www.pridicacaofevier.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PridiCacaofevier
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pridi_cacao/
Location: https://goo.gl/maps/6zKSBHQNg2mXvtJw6
