Chocolate makers in Grasse and São Tomé

Maison Duplanteur. The display to the right publicises the many chefs whom they supply.

Along rue Droite, at the corner of rue de la Reve Vieille, sits the Maison Duplanteur chocolate shop. They make chocolate on-site from cacao beans sourced from all over the world, including Sierra Leone where they have their own plantation.

Beans also come from Madagascar, Venezuela, Bali, Peru, Ecuador, and even Thailand. The common factor is that they only buy the beans directly from the growers, never via third parties.

Cacao sacks from Venezuala, Peru and Ecuador displayed in Maison Duplanteur shop

Inside, Géraldine will show you how they create chocolate and other products from cacao, starting with the sacks of sun-dried beans arriving from the plantations.

The premises on rue Droite are a real contrast to another high-quality chocolate maker whom I recently visited while on holiday, Claudio Corallo in São Tomé, Africa’s second smallest country.

Like Duplanteur, Claudio supplies some of Europe’s great chefs with both chocolate and cacao-related products, but there’s really not much point in his advertising outside his premises. He’s on a nondescript beach-side main road in a country whose total tourist visits are more than a magnitude lower than those of Grasse alone!

Claudio Corallo chocolate factory, São Tomé Town

But when we visited Duplanteur after returning from São Tomé recently, I saw some definite parallels with Corallo in their joint commitment to high quality chocolate.

São Tomé and Principe

São Tomé and Principe, which consists of two islands in the Gulf of Guinea, was once the world’s largest producer of cacao. It was introduced to the islands by Portuguese colonialists from Brazil in the 1820s.

Position of São Tomé and Principe in the Gulf of Guinea

Continual innovation in chocolate by manufacturers such as Joseph Fry, Philippe Suchard, Casparus van Houten and Antoine Menier drove European demand skywards during the nineteenth century. There were once over 200 plantations ('roça' in Portuguese) in São Tomé and Principe, and their remains are still dotted around the islands. The larger ones are extensive, covering 2,000 hectares and more - they once employed thousands of people. Their central factories, where cacao was fermented and dried, comprised many buildings, including drying areas, sorting rooms, ovens, workers’ housing and even stables (for horses used on light railways).

Some had their own schools and hospitals, which were mostly built in the early twentieth century ‘for the British to see’.

The entrance to the abandoned hospital at Roça Agua Izé, at one time the largest plantation in the country with over 4,000 workers

That happened because the three great British chocolate making businesses, Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree, all of them controlled by Quaker families, heard that conditions for the workers (‘indentured’ labourers, which amounted virtually to slavery) were poor. They sent an under-cover investigator to report back to them in 1910. The hospitals were the Portuguese colonial managers’ attempt to persuade them, rather unsuccessfully, not to switch to sourcing cacao from other countries, such as Ghana and Sierre Leone.

Most of the plantations were abandoned between 1975, when the country became independent, and the 1990s. First the Portuguese managers left, taking their expertise with them, and later the plantations were broken up into co-operatives in which workers were allowed to grow whatever they wished – which usually wasn’t cacao.

Roça Sundy chocolate factory, Principe island

While many of the buildings are still occupied today, especially the schools and the old workers’ housing, only a very few plantations still operate. Those that do, like the one owned by Claudio Corallo, focus on organic and high quality products.

Production process

Cacao is harvested twice per year. On plantations all over the tropical world, the beans in the pod are extracted and allowed to ferment for several days, after which they are dried, usually on large racks in the sun.

Cacao pod, with beans exposed

The sun-dried beans arrive at chocolate makers like Maison Duplanteur in sacks and there they are sorted, roasted, crushed and sieved to remove the shells, then ground into paste. Finally they are ‘conched’, a technical term for a method initiated by Rodolphe Lindt to smooth the paste. You can read about the whole process here on Duplanteur’s website (click on the flag at the top for English).

Claudio Corallo and one or two other São Tomé plantation owners, such as Roça Sundy on Principe island, grow and dry the beans but then go on to make chocolate themselves, using the same process as Duplanteur.

Workers at Roça Sundy manually shelling cacao beans

The main difference which we saw between them and Duplanteur is that the former use manual labour to separate the dried beans from their shells and stalks to produce ‘nibs’ of pure chocolate. Duplanteur uses mechanical sieving to do so.

Other products from cacao

Both Duplanteur and Claudio Corallo explain that the whole of the cacao pod is used – even the shell becomes fertiliser for the trees. We are all familiar with chocolate bars, filled chocolates and coated nuts and also with chocolate powders. But the pulp from the beans becomes a jelly used by chefs or can even be spread on bread or pancakes, while the otherwise discarded shells make a caffeine-free infusion.

'Nibs' of chocolate from Roça Diego Vaz

You can also buy the roasted beans or the separated ‘nibs’ of pure chocolate, while Corallo even distils the pulp, with raisins added, for special bars.

Packaging

The other notable difference between the two companies is in their packaging. You can buy Duplanteur’s many varieties of bars ‘loose’ over the counter, but they also sell their products in high quality packaging.

Duplanteur 'Grasse' chocolate bar

Claudio Corallo, on the other hand, says that only the product matters, and his packaging is perhaps best described as sustainable but utilitarian! He told us that he lost business from a major London store because of his refusal to compromise.

Tasting the chocolate

Having tried both, I can only say that each of them produces some of the world’s very best chocolate. In Claudio Corallo’s case, don’t make assumptions from the packaging: the flavour is extraordinary.

A packet of chocolate nibs from Claudio Corallo

If you’re in Grasse, get along to Maison Duplanteur: you’ll immediately smell the aromas (very appropriately, in Grasse of all places). And assuming you’re not going to be in São Tome any time soon, Claudio Corallo’s online shop is here.

Whichever you buy, whatever you do eat slowly and let the flavours develop in your mouth. The experience is amazing: there is just no comparison with ordinary chocolate – especially the British variety!