Inland Empire restaurant owner and chocolatier Ryan Berk is featured in a new documentary that follows him and other chocolate makers travelling to Peru to trade directly with cocoa farmers.
Purper: Let's talk about the documentary. It's called Setting the Bar: A Craft Chocolate Origin Story. How did you first get involved in this?
Berk: So I opened a company called Parliament Chocolate in 2013 and the whole basis of that company is sourcing direct. So it's a sourcing form called direct trade, so you go direct to the farmers where the farmers are working and you work directly with them, which means that you can control your own purchasing power, that kind of stuff. Which also entitles you to bring up a higher price for cocoa beans and this team, this documentary team that follows different organizations around decided to follow us down to Peru and do a documentary about us.
Purper: So what about your personal history? I mean, you kind of went into this, but how did you go from opening an ice cream shop in Redlands to travelling around the world being featured in documentaries?
Berk: Yeah, so we opened an ice cream shop called A La Minute in 2012 and the whole basis of that was to source from our local farmers, local vendors, work with coffee shops, that kind of stuff, and really have knowledge about the food and the product that we're giving to the consumer. And we wanted to have respect for those ingredients and the people behind those ingredients. And so that sort of took us back into why we didn't at first do a chocolate flavor at A La Minute. And because there was, the chocolate industry is one of the most disrespected industries utilizing slave labor, not paying farmers fair wages, and so I didn't really want to do a chocolate flavor. And so at the time people kept coming to me and saying well we love chocolate, is there any way you could somehow figure out a niche or a way around how to do a chocolate flavor. And that brought me to the idea, well why don't I start making my own chocolate? I literally found somebody online, I googled sourcing your own cocoa beans, and flew down to Guatemala the next week. And did this big sourcing trip down in Guatemala and Belize, and purchased some cocoa beans through a good friend of mine, and built up a great relationship with these farmers just like I built up really good relationships within Southern California for our strawberries and our oranges and started sourcing cocoa beans, started making chocolate on a small scale, making it for the ice cream shop, fell in love with the process and decided to open up Parliament a year later.
Purper: And I think I read that while you were in Belize and Guatemala, you had to go through two different translators?
Berk: Yes, so we were working with farmers who were Kekchi, so Kekchi is the ancient Mayans, so we went from Spanish to Kekchi and negotiated different selling prices. When we negotiate selling prices, we don't look at the market value because cocoa beans are on the market trade and so what we look for is the quality of the cocoa beans. So if they're good quality, they're fermented properly, which we can get into in very long depth another time, but if they're fermented properly, which they're fermented like beer or wine, they're dried properly, there's no mold, they're really clean cocoa beans, then it can make really good chocolate. So we look beyond that market value of the cocoa beans and usually pay 3 to 400 percent above that market value because of the quality of the beans. Which in turn pays farmers fair wages and looks beyond it as a commodity project.
Purper: So it's fair trade, then.
Berk: Beyond fair trade. So fair trade still goes through an organization, so fair trade is a fair trade organization. We do what's called direct trade, so direct trade is me cutting out that middle-man and not having to pay a third party organization and me being able to take that money and put it directly back into the farmer's hands. So we're practicing what's called direct trade. Pretty much exactly what I'm practicing and doing in Redlands when it comes to purchasing strawberries, or oranges, except we're not going two to three blocks away to purchase our produce items, we're going thousands of miles away to purchase our cocoa beans.
Purper: When and where will the documentary be screened again?
Berk: We're going to be showing a few more hopefully in Redlands, just really small showings, free hopefully, where we're going to show - we're talking to Augie's and possibly doing one in their courtyard in the next couple weeks. So stay tuned to us on Instagram, either Augie's or a la Minute or Parliament, and you'll have some knowledge when we're going to do that free festival or free filming of it. And it's a full feature, it's an hour and thirty minutes, so get ready to sit down and really have your mind blown.
You can find the full interview on an upcoming episode of KVC-Arts.
