Mott Green (April 15, 1966 — June 1, 2013) was an American businessman and chocolatier, who founded the Grenada Chocolate Company in 1999. Its slogan was “tree to bar”. Joining with a friend from Eugene, Ore., Doug Brown, he studied chocolate production in San Francisco. Working in Eugene, the men restored old machines from Europe and built new ones themselves. By the late ’90s they had shipped everything to Grenada. By the mid-1990s he had moved to Grenada, where he initially lived in a remote hut he had built himself. It, too, relied on solar energy, in part to power Mr. Green’s passion for music.
The Grenada Chocolate Company goes from strength to strength, making lots of chocolate bars and supporting the cocoa farmers as Mott would have wanted…
Sustainable manufacturing
Mr. Green dried cocoa beans in the sun; built, maintained and powered the machinery to make chocolate; packaged the finished product; and cobbled together an international network of distributors, including volunteer cargo cyclists in the Netherlands.
International recognition
In 2011, the company received recognition from the State Department for its “contribution to the sustainable growth of rural economies by establishing Grenadian products in international markets; pioneering agrotourism; outstanding environmental conservation efforts; and promotion of organic farming.”
Fair Transport
Last year the company delivered tens of thousands of chocolate bars to Europe on a sail-powered Dutch ship, the Brigantine Tres Hombres, operated by a company called Fairtransport. A team of volunteer cyclists in Amsterdam helped handle distribution on the ground.
Mr. Green called it “the first carbon-neutral trans-Atlantic mass chocolate delivery.”
Source: Wikipedia
Eulogy by Cat Black
“With action and an uncommon force of nature he quietly revolutionised chocolate making. With his determination to keep production of chocolate and cocoa at home in Grenada he rethought the old model of chocolate making. No longer would cocoa farmers and their community and country merely wave their precious bounty goodbye, underpaid for it and divorced from the final product. Mott changed everything, building a factory and developing chocolate of excellence. From its beginnings in the Grenadian market the chocolate has now taken its place on the world stage, where this deep fruity chocolate, rich in the fine cacao of which he was so proud, is appreciated and celebrated.”