Chances are many readers of this newsletter won’t recognize the name Gbagbo. After all, it’s not as if the Ivory Coast’s former president is a household name, even amongst chocolate makers and chocolatiers.
I have to admit, upon walking into Miroljub Aleksic’s office, I was immediately impressed. Now mind you, I’m not one to be that easily wowed by trappings of power. But not only was the size of the oval office (and yes, that’s not a coincidence) overwhelming, but the art that was hanging on the wall proved even more spectacular.
Will chocolate be worth its weight in gold? Will this
wonderful food of the gods become a luxury only the high priests of finance can
afford, something akin to caviar?
A recent article in the British newspaper, The Independent, recently speculated on
the possibility of such a scenario 20 years from now.
For those of you who follow the global political scene, you
might be thinking that my headline refers to the latest presidential elections
in Brazil, where former Marxist guerrilla Dilma Rousseff is in a runoff against
her closest rival, Jose Serra, a former mayor of Sao Paulo and one of the
county’s most experienced politicians.
Twizzlers or Red Vines? Never has a confectionery question
so divided the masses. While researching this month’s licorice trends feature,
I took an unscientific poll of my co-workers and Facebook friends regarding
their preferences and was bombarded with responses.
When Mars
Chocolate North America launched the M&M’S
Pretzel earlier this year, I’m sure
there were consumers out there who wondered what took them so long. After all,
it’s not like rocket science.
Sports fans look forward to Super Bowl commercials almost as much as they do the big game. They laugh and groan at the best and the worst ads (not to mention football plays), and often spend the next day chatting with coworkers and e-mailing friends about which ones were most memorable, sharing YouTube links to instant replays not of their favorite quarterback’s fancy footwork, but of Pepsi’s latest campaign, for example.
The global chocolate and cocoa industry, the U.S. Department of Labor, Senator Tom Harkin and U.S. Representative Eliot Engel, together with representatives from Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), launched a new “Framework of Action” in support of preventing child labor abuses prevalent in cocoa farming.