Takatsugu Yamashita: "Making Chocolate New" Through a Three-Way Win

I started writing this text in a rural town called Sabalos in the Republic of Nicaragua. For the chocolate brand I founded, "Minimal – Bean to Bar Chocolate –," I travel to cacao farms around the world in search of high-quality beans. As a buyer, I spend about four months a year in countries directly on the equator.

Broadly speaking, chocolate has previously been a choice between two options: inexpensive snacks or luxury brands. A third pole may emerge there—a world where people enjoy limited quantities of special chocolate specified by origin or farm, similar to the world of Romanée-Conti in wine. That is our brand vision: "Making Chocolate New." I make chocolate believing that such a future will arrive in 10 or 20 years.

What surprises me when I visit farms is that there are still cacao farmers who have never eaten chocolate. The industrial structure of the old colonial trade era remains deeply rooted. By offering the option of direct trade at prices higher than the market rate, we can return price-setting authority to farmers who were dominated by a volume-based economy. The important thing here is to help them understand what quality is, and for that, it is very important to go and talk to them in person.

Equally important is to thoroughly understand the individuality of the cacao beans that the farmers have poured their souls into and to express that through chocolate. Cacao beans from the same farm and the same tree taste different depending on the season. To understand those differences, I eat chocolate every day until I feel sick, change the recipe for each bean, and create over 3,000 recipes a year. As a result, we have received many awards, including the Grand Prize in various categories at international competitions. However, this is not the goal; what matters is that we are providing customers with a rich culinary experience through chocolate. If it isn't delicious, we cannot continue to receive payment, and we cannot sustain purchases from farmers. That is why we continue to pursue deliciousness. There is a long way to go, but we are continuing our efforts to create chocolate where consumers can understand the individuality of the farm with just one bite.

If we can create a "Sanpo-yoshi" (three-way win) relationship where we pay farmers a fair price, make good chocolate, and customers are satisfied and pay us, we can create a new ecosystem. This is not mere support; by growing the business, global disparities are corrected, and things get just a little bit better. I want to continue working hard, believing in such a future.