Price and value

I actually got into bean-to-bar chocolate and coffee before I fell in love with sake, and although I am not and will never be any kind of wine expert (I don’t even drink it) I keep an eye on the IWC’s Canopy magazine as they often feature sake. So bear with me while I take a little detour through both of these wonderful things. 

Spencer Hyman, founder of bean-to-bar chocolate retailer and educator Cocoa Runners, is a passionate advocate for eating minimally processed food that delights because of its flavour and nutrition and not because it was engineered to trigger instant “bliss” without real satisfaction (leading eaters or drinkers to consume compulsively and mindlessly). He writes an excellent newsletter and blog, and recently mused on a phenomenon that I’ve seen in many different guises – the middle is not holding. 

You have mass-produced, cheap and ethically questionable chocolate on one end of the scale, and small-lot, carefully selected but more expensive bars on the other. And he sees a similar division in consumers themselves and what they can afford: larger numbers of people who have to spend most of their income on essentials in contrast to a tiny but growing number of minor millionaires who start to wield a disproportionate influence on producers because they are the ones who buy. This is more clearly visible in wine and speciality coffee, and he hopes chocolate will not go the same way.

As I mentioned earlier when talking about economics, many breweries have already had to pivot from mass production of something that used to be an essential that basically sold itself, to small scale production of high added value products in a competitive market that hasn’t (yet?) adjusted to the higher prices this kind of sake should be sold for. And one of the ways in which they appeal to the higher value of their products is through environmental certifications such as organic or at least minimal use of agrochemicals and pesticides – something that Henry Jeffreys casts doubt on sustainability as something consumers are willing to actually pay for in the wine industry. (Sake is not wine, but a lot of people come to sake through wine, or sell sake alongside wine, and I’m assuming are thinking in similar ways.)

Where does this leave sake breweries who may have already successfully made the leap from lots, cheap and cheerful to less, more expensive and higher added value? Again, I don’t have an answer for this one, but I think this mismatch between strategy and consumer preferences – especially as consumers come under more economic pressure – will weigh heavily on the industry for a long time to come.

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Rare chocolate bars and beans (Spencer Hyman on the Cocoa Runners blog)
Savouring strikes back (Spencer Hyman on the Cocoa Runners blog)
Why Consumers Aren’t Paying More for Sustainable Wine (Henry Jeffreys for Canopy Magazine, 7 Oct 2025)