The Reverse Pareto bar.
You know that 80/20 rule? The one that's the mantra of corporate meeting speak?
Where 80% of results (or output) comes from 20% of effort (or inputs)?
Whenever I heard this rolled out in (way too many) meetings a lifetime ago, it was always in the context of launching something when it was "good enough".
Not when it was "as good as it could be" - just when it was 80% good.
At that point development stopped, the thing was launched and well, that was pretty much as good as it ever got.
This bar isn't that.
This is the second of our three brand new bars - a relentlessly iterated, Vietnam 70%. Just as sweet as our other new Asian bar (the Indonesian), but lighter, more accessible, a little friendlier.
Ever-ready-with-an-insightful-opinion, Mark of Fika in Norwich summed it up thus "it's the bar I'd give to someone who only eats milk chocolate. And I wouldn't tell them it was dark".
This cacao is fabulous - we have no idea how - but it actually tastes of toffee and apple. We're hoping to dive deeper into terroir and fermentation next year, because we'd just love to know how and why this natural flavour arises, but for now - we'll just appreciate the fact that it exists.
As usual, during development of this, we brutally benchmarked ourselves against other craft makers' bars from Vietnam, and ever-so-humbly speaking - this has way more swagger.
Maybe it's the specific cacao we're using.
Maybe we're aiming for something different (we love that slightly edgy, triangular, flavour bounce that other makers must be conching away?).
Or maybe it's that we don't stop at 80% and just keep going deep into the 20%*
Either way - this is now available as stand-alone bars or as part of the new Asia Collection.
Enjoy
M
* we can confirm this is a terrible strategy for building a nice, easy-to-manage, profitable business
