The Chocolate Explorer

Welcome to the first chocolate exploration! Today's chocolate is Lacmi, produced by ROSHEN in Ukraine. A brand I was not familiar with myself, I'm excited to dig in! I have split the categories into the broad areas they fall under, in case you'd like to go straight to a certain topic (country of manufacture, vendor, the product itself and finally the sustainability of the manufacturer) Disclaimer: The bar I purchased did not fare well in the hot Bulgarian weather. The normally sleek bar was - for lack of a better word - munted by the time I got back to my AirBnB. Please excuse the lumps and bumps of the bar in these photos (although we can agree that chocolate is beautiful in all shapes and sizes). Producer Country Ukraine? This is what immediately stood out to me! Not to mention that they, as of the publishing of this blog, are in the midst of a brutal war from Russian invasion, Ukraine isn't a manufacturer of chocolate that immediately comes to mind. Indeed, a large p...

Hello and welcome! I'm LRB, a cocoa expert and curious mind . I want to begin writing primarily about chocolate brands and their associated sustainability credentials for you as a consumer to learn new ways to think critically about your food. I'm sure, however, that this will follow tangents into sustainable food systems, agriculture, commodities, and more. Having worked on the Chocolate Scorecard , and written some academic articles on the matter, alongside focussing my Master's thesis on the topic, I'd love to share these findings in a casual format and bring a passion for sustainable chocolate to more people! What should you expect from these blogs? My primary intention is to examine chocolates and chocolate companies under a lens of sustainability - that is, economics, society, and environment - alongside politics and trade . Each of these concepts does not exist in isolation to the others, meaning that unravelling a brand can be infinitely fascinating, so come al...