What you are paying for in luxury chocolate

One kind is about sourcing and making: named beans, small batches, careful post-harvest handling, bean costs at multiples of the commodity price. The other is about presentation: the box, the ribbon, the shop, the brand and the occasion.

Both are legitimate and they answer different questions. A hundred-euro box from a luxury house may contain excellent confectionery made from ordinary bought-in couverture. A twelve-euro craft bar in a paper wrapper may represent far more unusual sourcing. Neither is better.

It reliably indicates the cost of the packaging, the retail position and the labour in the confectionery. It sometimes indicates the bean cost. It does not indicate the farmer's share, which is a separate arrangement and is not correlated with retail price in any way readable from a box.

The reliable signals of unusual sourcing are specific and checkable: a named farm or cooperative, a harvest year, a stated price paid. Makers who source unusually generally say so in that form, because it is expensive and it is the point.

These are genuinely different purchases and it is worth deciding which you are making. For yourself, the packaging is waste and the money is better spent on the chocolate. For a gift, the packaging is part of the function and a bare craft bar can read as insufficient effort regardless of what is in it.

The compromise most enthusiasts settle on is a well-made selection from a maker who does both — and asking the shop what the couverture is, which works as well in a luxury boutique as it does in Brussels.