Allegations are flying that the company bought chocolate from a French luxury supplier, melted it down with their own ingredients and resold it as handmade

The aroma drifting past the murals, designer lofts and chichi boutiques of Williamsburg was alluring and intriguing. Cocoa. Notes of vanilla and maple blended into one of the world’s sexiest smells: expensive chocolate.

On a damp Friday in New York, young and trendy festive shoppers were drawn to its source: an inviting factory shop. To some, however, the scent was laced with a whiff of scandal.

Mast Brothers, the little chocolate company that has made a big claim, to be the best in the world, has been accused of starting off by buying in some of its chocolate ready made, instead of making it all on its own.

According to a number of reports, some gourmet experts therefore doubt Rick and Michael Mast’s “bean to bar” philosophy.

The Mast brothers, handsome, bearded and quintessentially hipster, are from Iowa. They started their company – according to their own legend, with little but a burlap sack of cocoa beans and some sugar – in their kitchen in Brooklyn 2006.

Now their sumptuously wrapped bars grace stores across America and, since February 2015, their own shop in London’s Shoreditch, the front line in that city’s gentrification wars.

But now allegations are flying that in the early years of their company Rick Mast, 38, and Michael Mast, 35, bought chocolate from a French luxury supplier, Valrhona, and melted it down with their own ingredients before packaging and selling the chocolate as their own entirely handmade fare.



Earlier in December, food blogger Scott Craig published an excoriating article on dallasfood.org, in which he wrote that the Masts were thought to have launched their brand “with a fundamental fraud” by only “pretending to be a bean to bar company”.

The brothers were vague when he questioned them early on, Craig told the Washington Post, adding that some experts thought Mast Brothers chocolate was not even very good.

On Friday, the brothers were not in the flagship factory and shop.

“They were here this morning, you just missed them,” said the general manager, Diana Donohue.

All was calm in the store, which looks more like an art gallery. Designer-wrapped bars sat in neat piles on cool plinths and rustic bags of cocoa beans from Madagascar, Tanzania and Peru slumped atmospherically on the floor nearby.

The standard bars, 70g in flavours ranging from goats milk to sea salt, retail for $10 or more elsewhere. In the shop, they cost a mere $9. Behind windows at the back of the retail section, giant grinders crushed cocoa nibs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Mast Brothers shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Photograph: Flickr

Customers Erin and Allister Will, visiting from their home in San Francisco, browsed, sniffed, nibbled, chose, paid and kissed. Then they emerged from the shop.

“We bought a bar with olive oil, one with coffee and one with vanilla,” said Erin, 23. “We were just walking up the street and we smelt the chocolate, it was irresistible.”

Erin, a suicide prevention worker, had not heard of Mast Brothers. Her husband, Will, 24, who works for a financial software company, had. They had bought some chocolate for themselves and some for their parents for Christmas.

“We’ve been to a couple of bean to bar places in San Francisco,” Erin said. “It’s really cool. I like the whole idea. It justifies the higher price and the fact that it’s simple ingredients.”

What did they make of suggestions that the company may have started out making some of its chocolate “bar to bar”, not bean to bar?

“I’m not surprised,” Will said. “Places say they do a lot of things, there isn’t much regulation. Oh well. I like this stuff, it’s more distinct and complex than standard chocolate, that’s why you pay more.”

Minutes later, another young woman came out of the store, carrying a paper bag.

“I liked the taste, and the ambience and the presentation,” said Noe Miró, 25, a nurse from Brooklyn. “It’s really hipster. I want to impress my Dad with it when I go home to Spain for Christmas and I like that it’s homemade here in New York.”

Back in the shop, Donohue showed the Guardian around, explaining the roasting and grinding machines, talking about the company’s relationship with its cocoa farmers.



She said: “The brothers have always been able to make the chocolate in their own way. They’ve kept it bean to bar from the very beginning.”

Had she read about the controversy surrounding the Masts’ early endeavours?



“Not yet, I heard something about it,” she said. “But that would have been before my time working for them anyway.”

Rick and Michael Mast did not immediately return a request for comment. A statement on the company website said: “We have been open and transparent about our experimentation, techniques and recipes since day one.

“Any insinuation that Mast Brothers was not, is not or will not be a bean to bar chocolate maker is incorrect and misinformed. We have been making chocolate from bean to bar since the beginning and will continue to do so.”