The passing away of a pioneer

Today we heard with great sadness of the untimely accidental death of Mott Green, founder of the Grenada Chocolate Company.

Mott, whom we got to know only too little in person, was in many ways a pioneer of the Bean-to-Bar movement and without a doubt the purest example of the subset of this culture where we find ourselves, what we could call ‘Origin Chocolate’: the production of fine chocolate in a country that grows cocoa, and only with the cocoa grown locally.

In this sense we regarded him as a kind of prophet, going boldly where no-one had been before, and where very few will ever be able to follow: from overcoming the technical hurdles of making a finished chocolate in a climate that, being fit for growing cocoa, was by definition too hot to keep cocoa from melting, to sharing equally the profits of selling the chocolate wit the cocoa growers on his funky Caribbean island of adoption, and to rigging up his machines on solar panels or shipping the chocolate to Europe on sailing boats or using bicycle delivery in an unsurpassable effort to offer 0-carbon emission chocolate.

Mott Green represented that spark of inventiveness, that revolutionary urge to rewrite the rulebook of chocolate-making as it had been in place for the past 200 years; cool reggae vibes could be felt all the way through the lush tropical landscape on the wrappers of the Grenada bars, to us they spoke of a new world of chocolate, it was adventure with a cocoa flavour…

Our heartfelt sympathy goes to Mott’s family and friends and to all those working at or with the Grenada Chocolate Company, long may they continue his legacy.