Craft Chocolate Has Its Craft Beer Moment
by David Nilsen
When I read Mackenzie Rivers’ Next Batch newsletter this week, I immediately had a case of craft deja vu. It seems craft chocolate might be experiencing something the craft beer world dealt with a decade ago.
As Mackenzie explains, corporate giant Cadbury recently released an ad campaign for their Bournville chocolate line that pokes direct fun at craft chocolate’s perceived pretentiousness and what the ad implies are its unenjoyably challenging flavors. In the ad, an average Joe sits at a table with two friends and offers them some Bournville dark chocolate. The other two guffaw and immediately pull out their own craft chocolate bars, competing over which is more “complicated”. One says theirs tastes like glue, the other like tree bark. When our “normal” character says he enjoys his bar, one of the two snobs laughs and tells him “you’re not meant to enjoy dark chocolate.”
I’ll be honest: I chuckled. Partly because it’s always good to be reminded we need to avoid snobbery at all costs, but also because I’ve been through this before…with craft beer.
Back in early 2015, Budweiser released a minute-long TV commercial during the Super Bowl openly making fun of the absurdity and—problematically—the implied effeteness of craft beer. While bearded, flannel-clad hipsters peered into and joylessly drank undisclosed beer styles in tulip glasses, lines of text appeared on screen:
“Budweiser is proudly a macro beer.”
”It’s not to be fussed over.”
“It’s brewed for drinking, not for dissecting”
And the most memorable line of all: “Let them have their pumpkin peach ale—we’ll be brewing us some golden suds.”
The ad spot cost Budweiser’s parent company, Anheuser Busch InBev (ABI), nearly $10 million, and 114 million people saw it live. Unfortunately, the ad doesn’t appear to be available online anymore (I can’t even find screenshots).
Most of us in and around craft beer shook it off with a laugh, because what else could we do? It wasn’t quite so easy to laugh off for some though, in particular Elysian Brewing, a Seattle-area craft brand ABI had just purchased. See, Elysian was perhaps best known for their beloved seasonal pumpkin beers, and hosted an annual pumpkin beer festival (and still does). ABI wanted to have its cake and eat it too—make fun of craft beer while buying directly into it. Elysian’s crew was stung by both the in-house dig and the hypocrisy itself.
The bright side of this silly campaign for the craft beer industry was the awareness that the world’s biggest beer company wasn’t going to waste money during the most significant advertising event of the year on something they didn’t see as a threat. It meant craft beer had arrived, that it was economically and culturally relevant, and that Big Beer didn’t love that.
The same can be said for this Cadbury ad. While way fewer people are going to see it than saw the pumpkin peach ale commercial, and craft chocolate is still a long way from claiming as large of a chunk of the chocolate market as craft beer has of the beer market, this campaign means Big Chocolate has noticed you. That’s both good and bad. It’s good because it means craft chocolate is growing in cultural awareness and market relevance, and the biggest players are acknowledging on at least some level that you could erode their market hegemony. It’s bad because they have a lot of tools at their disposable for slowing you down beyond humorous ad campaigns.
If macro beer’s response to craft beer is any roadmap, that means acquisitions of craft companies (these are coming sooner rather than later), “craftwashing” and intentional confusion of consumer terminology (we’ve been seeing this for a while), underselling craft’s price point on shelves (yep), lip service to craft ideals and a “we’re all on the same team” type of weaponized camaraderie (in whatever craft segment you’re in, the corporate end of your industry does not have your photo taped up in their locker—it’s more likely on a dartboard), and behind the scenes legislative efforts to give themselves advantages in the marketplace (this doesn’t apply so much without alcohol involved).
It’s important to note the distinctives between craft and macro chocolate are not all the same as those between craft and macro beer, nor are the stakes. There are significant ecological, economic, and human rights-related issues in the cacao industry that we just don’t have corollaries for in the beer space. That makes the consequences of the above efforts from Big Chocolate that much more important to identify and address.
That said, as Mackenzie points out, there are some lighthearted lessons to be learned from Cadbury’s smear campaign. Most importantly, don’t be snobs. Don’t gatekeep. Don’t shame people for what they like, or what they’ve liked before, or what they remember liking. Most likely no adult you know was raised from childhood on craft chocolate, and nostalgia is a powerful thing. Yes, the stakes are high (child slavery is involved, after all), but we won’t make change by shaming someone who just wants to enjoy a Dove bar after a long day, or by trying to convince them they don’t enjoy it after all. We make change by enthusiastically introducing them to something better.
As Angi from ChocolateSpiel explains in a recent episode of Bean to Barstool, sharing craft chocolate isn’t about trying to replace anyone’s childhood memories. It’s about adding better chocolate into their lives.
Chocolate should be fun. And no matter how high our ideals and how serious the stakes, it has to be about flavor. It has to taste good. Contrary to the ad above, you are supposed to enjoy dark chocolate (and every other kind as well). Let’s help people do that.