The ultimate education in taste, flavour and chocolate

Last week was the launch of our new craft chocolate education programme!

After several months of planning and development, we embarked on what we hope will be an important new part of Cocoa Runners’ mission and, maybe even more importantly, a significant way to add momentum to the craft chocolate movement.

Anyone who follows Cocoa Runners knows that we are passionate about advocating for craft chocolate. Our regular chocolate tastings are a vehicle we use to teach people how to savour flavour, and unwrap the powerful positive stories of craft chocolate. But, learning lessons from other industries such as speciality coffee and fine wine, we knew that people need more; people need to become knowledgeable and confident in chocolate and flavour more broadly. That’s going to be the ticket to success for the craft chocolate movement.

Before coming into the world of craft chocolate I was a teacher; I taught wildlife ecology and behaviour to animal management students (it’s a bit of a winding story about how I’ve ended up here!). And any teacher will tell you how much they love putting together curriculum plans, schemes of work, and lesson plans. …Or maybe that’s just me! But Spencer tasked me with developing some curriculum that we could start with and build on, and I fancied the challenge.

I wanted to make sure that we approached this seriously, and used educational principles. And I may have cobbled it all together into (what I hope) is an effective structure for learning, but many of the individual learning activities, and the knowledge behind them, have been begged and borrowed from luminaries in the world of chocolate and flavour.

I’m particularly grateful to Valentina from Cacao Latitudes, who was the ingenious instigator of exercises including ‘flash roasting’ cocoa beans in a popcorn maker and calibrating tastebuds using mystery-tasting drinks. She also co-taught the course along with Spencer.

Indeed, this whole endeavour has been a collaboration between Cocoa Runners and Cacao Latitudes. We’re hoping that our education programme will dovetail nicely into their professional masterclasses on cocoa sourcing and quality.

We’ve also had support from Peter McCombie; a Master of Wine who teaches on WSET programmes (formal wine education). His understanding of the biochemistry of flavour, and techniques to demonstrate it, helped inform some of the structure of our own curriculum.

Then, with everything planned out, we had a room full of guinea pigs, or eager-beavers (depending on your preferred rodent reference), who went on a learning journey with us for our first course.

So… did it go well!? I think it was a great success; the instructors created a great learning environment, and the learners were engaged and enthusiastic throughout.

But what’s the main thing that teachers care about? Why, measuring attainment against learning objectives of course! I jest, but if we do want to take education seriously, we need to assess learners’ progress. And for this introductory course, we asked the group to self-assess themselves against the objectives, and were delighted at the progress they had made. Everyone had developed knowledge and confidence in the subjects we covered.

The big area for improvement was that a lot of learners felt that they needed to make more progress in their practical application of ‘savouring’. That’s perhaps to be expected; something that will develop with practice. But what I hope we’ve achieved is to give people the strongest possible basis and framework to start with.

I do think that what we’ve ended up with here is the basis for something truly impactful and inspiring. Through a rigorous but enjoyable learning experience, people will gain the foundational understanding of how flavour works, how they can detect and analyse it, and how all of this relates to a more profound appreciation of great chocolate and cocoa. We’ve learned a lot from this launch, and we’ll be making continual improvements to our curriculum, but what a roaring start!

Find out more about the course and book tickets here.