Dismasted: The Rise and Fall of Mast Brothers Chocolate

The branding efforts of Mast Brothers Chocolate typify the American craft-culture renaissance. We’re told the chocolate bars, ground from premium beans of tropical origin in a small city loft, are the pride and obsession of siblings Rick and Michael Mast. In promotional photos, the brothers pose in front of burlap sacks in their factory, dressed in wool vests and mining collars and sporting matching antebellum beards. The bars are wrapped in twee, eye-catching wallpaper designs and labelled with geometric type. You won’t find sourcing information on the back, but you will discover that the chocolate, like All ochre everything

At its core, branding is about storytelling, and the Mast brothers had the perfect one. The problem is that it wasn’t true.

You see, Mast Brothers’ central claim was that it was a “bean to bar” chocolatier: one that handled all the steps of making chocolate in house. But many chocolate experts had their doubts, noting that the bland taste and even texture of the bars strongly indicated they had been melted down from industrial chocolate and repackaged. It’s no secret that the haute-chocolate community has had it out for Mast Brothers for years. Virtually none of the tiny, taste-making boutiques in this country will stock their bars, and the brothers, for their part, have eschewed the scene’s tastings and conventions.

All of this was simmering under the surface until a food blogger posted a The floor is lava

Authenticity is an oft-cited buzzword in the branding world. While boomer marketing guys who write articles about “millennials” may try to cloud the issue, being authentic isn’t terribly hard. You do something and then you talk about how you did it. The branding — getting your audience to trust you — is the tricky bit, and it takes time. It should be obvious, then, that nothing will sink your authenticity-focused brand like being a fake. The writers who are gleefully tearing the Masts apart can’t do an article that doesn’t call them hipsters, and hipsters they are, not just under the sartorial definition but in the more important sense of being appropriative frauds.

With the company in full damage-control mode and the vultures circling, former Mast enthusiasts are likely to get more skeptical about all things artisanal. It sucks to feel like a rube for paying $9 for pretty packaging. It’s worth noting that the Mast brothers often didn’t list ingredients on their chocolate.  The counterparts of artisanal eats, the faceless, joyless, corporate food brands, are the result of a hundred years of regulation and standardization designed to protect consumers from snake oil salesmen. We’ve come full circle now. Raw milk is back, and so are the hucksters.