Introducing the Maloney Brothers of Sol Cacao / Harlem Craft Chocolate.

The address on their package puts them in the middle of the Union Theological Seminary on upper Broadway (that’s some holy shit). The actual chocolate factory is somewhere on the other side of the river in The Bronx. Probably a function of economics.

Downtown Manhattan, where a hole-in-the wall rents for $30,000+/month, sits pretty much off limits for any enterprise that isn't a bank, franchise, or laundering front. Call it the Manhattan Mall FX.

With affordable properties, The Bronx attracts start-ups. Does it really matter where a label crafts chocolate? No.

Plus Harlem USA still carries cultural caché despite shifting sands of demographics, waves of gentrification & tides of social ferment… all the price of multi-cultural diversity & the mixology dilemna of The Other aspiring to the “non-Other” while neither wishing to get close to it nor relinquish its Otherness. Change, always, the constant variable; & its flipsidekick, Intolerance, unless a 0-sum 1-way benefit accrues, as the recipient. Who knew such academic theory could hurt, even torture.

Literally.

The aorta in the New World to the African Diaspora – West 125th Street, home to the Apollo Theater, The Studio Museum of Harlem, & the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Fed Bldg – now encroached upon by massive re-development as landlord (or landlady? how’s trans-neutral landed-gentry?) Columbia University overruns & appropriates black mecca. Selling out has its costs. Subsidized by student loan-debt re-invested via institutional endowment funds, the confluence of deep cash flows to corporate colleges. Smart. A quarter million per for room, board, tuition & all expenses paid. The education of fuck education.

Dunno if a li’l craft chocolate op here preserves or destroys heritage in the ‘hood. (Please, no chocolate Harlem tropes.)

Whatever, everyone could use a marketing hook in 21st century branding.

The chocolate hooks too: solid.