Belgium and Switzerland may be the current kings of chocolate, but Syrian confectioners believe another country deserves to be up there too, and already they are feeding an international sweet tooth.
Syria’s traditional Arabic sweets are loved across the Middle East, and its people are famed for their culinary skills, with a rich cuisine built on the abundant produce of Damascus’ fertile green belt, the Ghouta, but few realize it also makes first-class chocolate, with an export industry that is booming as the Syrian economy opens up to the world.
Despite long having had a reputation as the bad boy of Middle East politics, Syria is slowly emerging from international isolation, and among those taking the lead are Syrian confectioners.
PHOTO: AFP
“Why Syrian chocolate? Why not? What do countries like Switzerland and Belgium have that we in Syria don’t have to make chocolate?” said Bassam Ghraoui, who heads Syria’s most famous chocolate maker.
“It’s a big challenge, but the fact that we produce luxury chocolate which is double the price of Belgian chocolate, for example, is a sweet surprise for many people” because the high price reflects its high quality, he said.
The civil-engineer-turned-entrepreneur said his father, Sadek, was the first to manufacture chocolate in the Middle East in the early 1930s.
Ghraoui, which also has shops in Arab countries, also sells dried fruits in Europe, including in outlets such as Harrods department store in London, and in Russia.
Now, however, the family firm is facing competition from others such as Zenbarakji and Art Chocolate, which have also made forays into the global market.
“The Syrians have a rich heritage. We import cocoa from Africa, hazelnuts from Turkey and the rest is all Syrian,” Ghraoui said of other local ingredients such as fruit and more nuts.
In 2005, his firm won the prestigious Prix d’Honneur for “best foreign chocolate” at the Salon du Chocolat in Paris, the world’s largest annual chocolate show.
“At one Paris show, we ran out of chocolate samples because people loved our products,” Ghraoui said, adding that 60 percent of the firm’s production is exported — and that figure could hit 80 percent in the future.
Ghraoui says it sells more than 30 tonnes of chocolate a year to online customers in France alone through the Web sites of European partners.
No government figures are available about the size of Syria’s chocolate industry.
Other Syrian chocolatiers and confectioners are also making their mark.
“My father started to produce chocolate and other sweets in 1936, and our business has developed to this day,” said Said Zenbarakji, owner of the Damascus-based Zenbarakji Company for Processing and Developing Chocolate and Sweets.
“The real competition started in 1990, when the company began to export chocolate to Arab countries like Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar,” he said of the family firm’s decision to take on other local firms.
About 10 years ago, Zenbarakji also began sending its wares abroad to Europe, Canada, Brazil and Hong Kong.
“Our products are entirely made in Syria, and there is no doubt that Syrian chocolate can compete and is in demand abroad,” he said.
Khalid Sammani, owner of the Aleppo-based Art Chocolate company, another family business that was launched in 1923, said “we face strong competition locally and internationally.”
“We sell our chocolate in Arab countries, America and Canada, and it’s not an easy thing to do, but Syrian chocolate is still in demand and we are making progress,” he said.
At home, the customer base remains strong.
“It’s so good, and I am almost addicted to it,” said one cheerful woman at a Ghraoui shop in Damascus as she ate a piece of palmyra — dates filled with almond and coated with dark chocolate.
“It doesn’t help me diet as you can see, but I can’t help it,” she said of the luscious specialty, named after Syria’s ruined and famed desert city on the ancient Silk Road from China to the Mediterranean.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
CHINA REACTS: The patrol and reconnaissance plane ‘transited the Taiwan Strait in international airspace,’ the 7th Fleet said, while Taipei said it saw nothing unusual The US 7th Fleet yesterday said that a US Navy P-8A Poseidon flew through the Taiwan Strait, a day after US and Chinese defense heads held their first talks since November 2022 in an effort to reduce regional tensions. The patrol and reconnaissance plane “transited the Taiwan Strait in international airspace,” the 7th Fleet said in a news release. “By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations.” In a separate statement, the Ministry of National Defense said that it monitored nearby waters and airspace as the aircraft
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique