If you're looking for a gift to tempt someone's taste buds, choose Venezuelan "single bean origin" chocolates, renowned among international gourmets for aroma and purity.
Just like exclusive wines and single-malt whiskeys, chocolate, made from cocoa or cacao beans, has its distinctive pedigrees and Venezuela has been a pioneer in promoting them.
"People know that Venezuela is the source of the finest [cacao] beans in the world, there's no disputing that," said Maricel Presilla, a food historian and chocolate expert in the US.
Chocolates El Rey, a family firm founded in 1929, has carved out a niche for Venezuelan "single bean" chocolates in the fiercely competitive world market, where giants like Hershey and Nestle compete to conquer supermarket shelves.
"This is like the appellation controlee of cacao," said Jorge Redmond, president of El Rey, the country's leading chocolate produce, referring to the French term that guarantees the exclusive origin of a fine wine. "We've been working very hard to establish these designated origins," he added.
While most big manufacturers blend their chocolate using cacao from a variety of national origins -- West Africa, Ecuador, Brazil or Indonesia -- El Rey has made a point of using Venezuelan beans from specific growing areas and farms.
El Rey's products, which are exported to the US, Europe and Japan, include its flagship Carenero Superior range produced from beans grown on the coast east of Caracas.
It was a traditional cacao growing zone in Spanish colonial times.
The Carenero Superior line includes six types of chocolate, from white ranging up to a dark variety containing 73.5 percent cacao, for those who like their chocolate bitter-sweet.
Venezuela was once the world's biggest cacao producer -- wealthy individuals are still mockingly dubbed gran cacaos (Big Cocoas) -- but it has slipped far down in the producers' ranking as its oil boom displaced such traditional exports.
Presilla described El Rey's launch of the Carenero "single bean" line in the mid-1990s as "the keystone of a chocolate revolution".
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Chizuko Kimura has become the first female sushi chef in the world to win a Michelin star, fulfilling a promise she made to her dying husband to continue his legacy. The 54-year-old Japanese chef regained the Michelin star her late husband, Shunei Kimura, won three years ago for their Sushi Shunei restaurant in Paris. For Shunei Kimura, the star was a dream come true. However, the joy was short-lived. He died from cancer just three months later in June 2022. He was 65. The following year, the restaurant in the heart of Montmartre lost its star rating. Chizuko Kimura insisted that the new star is still down
While China’s leaders use their economic and political might to fight US President Donald Trump’s trade war “to the end,” its army of social media soldiers are embarking on a more humorous campaign online. Trump’s tariff blitz has seen Washington and Beijing impose eye-watering duties on imports from the other, fanning a standoff between the economic superpowers that has sparked global recession fears and sent markets into a tailspin. Trump says his policy is a response to years of being “ripped off” by other countries and aims to bring manufacturing to the US, forcing companies to employ US workers. However, China’s online warriors