GOURMET
6 of the world’s most expensive chocolates Most couture chocolates feature a little je ne sais quoi. Sprinkled with flakes of 24-karat gold, or stuffed with a French truffle, or crafted from rare, exquisitely sourced cacao, they will not be found in your typical box of heartshaped chocolates. From Switzerland to Connecticut, from France to Ecuador, here are some of the world’s most expensive chocolates, many from the world’s most famous chocolatiers.
1. To’ak Chocolate’s 2014-harvest 50-gram bar
How much: $260 Only 574 bars of this Fair Trade, USDA-organic, 81-percent dark chocolate were made from the 2014 harvest, and each comes packaged with a 116page booklet in a Spanish elm box engraved with the bar number. It’s a love letter from To’ak co-founder Jerry Toth, a Chicago native who has a house in Ecuador. It was there that he got the idea for To’ak, the cacao culled from a 1,000-acre forest featuring trees that survived the 1916 “Witch’s Broom” disease, a fungi-causing deformity that makes the tree grow clusters of shoots by fungi that look like brooms.
1
To’ak uses the oldest and rarest cacao variety on earth to make extremely limited editions of single-origin Ecuadorian dark chocolate. It’s flagship edition was aged for three years in a French Oak Cognac Cask and retails for $365 per bar, considered the most expensive chocolate in the world. Each bar is packaged in a hand-crafted Spanish Elm wood box with the individual bar number engraved on the back. It includes a 116-page booklet and specially designed tasting utensils that are used to explore the signature aroma of heirloom Ecuadorian cacao. To’ak is also working on-the-ground in Ecuador to conserve history’s most prized variety of cacao before it goes extinct. To’ak has been featured in Forbes, L.A. Times, Robb Report, Fortune Magazine, TV channels such as BBC, CNBC, CNN, and FOX, and over a hundred other publications across six continents.
info@toakchocolate.com
toakchocolate.com