About
About Me
I fell in love with dark chocolate as a kid. 2 years ago I went off the deep end and started an LLC to buy and sell chocolate, mostly on the Whatnot app. I’ve sold thousands of bars and eat dozens a year.
About the chocolate
CacaoCritique is all about bean-to-bar and craft chocolate from around the world. Bean-to-bar just means one maker handles the whole process, from sourcing the raw cacao beans to producing the final packaged bar. I’m partial to it for a few reasons: it tends to be healthier (higher cacao content, less sugar), higher wages for farmers (up to 4x even fair-trade wages), and the fermentation + drying methods each maker uses give you nuanced flavors and tasting notes to geek out about.
About the rating
At some point I got tired of scoring things against each other. While everyone has their preferences, ultimately some things are just a matter of taste and there’s not a real difference between ranking something a 9.8 out of 10 or a 9.6. What I care about, and what my chocolate customers care about is: is this bar worth trying or not? Not only that, but is it something that I would bet my reputation on?
Every bar on this site gets one of three verdicts, and nothing more precise than that.
- GoldenStrong recommend
- Reserved for bars I would give as a party favor as a wedding. These are the cream of the crop, and are bars that I go back to again and again. These are rare on purpose: if everything were golden, the label would mean nothing.
- RecommendRecommended
- Solid and worth buying. It’s distinctively good, it passes the bar (pun intended) but not a bar I would stake my reputation on.
- SkipNot recommended
- Not recommended. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s poorly made — it’s more likely it just doesn’t bring anything unique or noteworthy to the table.