A Perfect Job
I’m Lyndon Coolidge, and I was born to spread to the word about the powers of cocoa. This blog brings you the latest and greatest chocolate trivia.
There are some great jobs out there. For instance, the guy who rubs body oil on swimsuit models is just about the best job ever, though it very likely doesn’t exist. One job that does exist that fits my version of a fantasy is the bean tester. A bean tester is a person who travels the world in search of the best cocoa bean. There are only twelve actual chocolate factories in America, and each one has a highly paid bean tester.
Cocoa beans grow in tropical climates, so the bean tester spends most of his days in the sunny latitudes, traveling between beaches and jungles, conversing with local cocoa farmers. The main tool of the bean tester is called the Bean Guillotine. It is a small device that chops a cocoa bean in half so the tester can tell how ripe and how rich the cocoa beans are. He also carries with him a simple kit (think easy-bake oven, coffee grinder, and blow dryer) to create actual chocolate from the beans. Once he finds a farm with a good stock, he buys the entire lot and ships it back to the states. Because of this power to make or break a small town, bean testers are often treated as honored guests in the towns they visit. They mingle with the haute culture of elite chocolate connoisseurs and pastry chefs, and they mingle with the most down-to-earth cultures of the field workers and farmers of South America and Africa.
The bean tester isn’t necessarily the artist of the chocolate world, but he is the man the artists depend on.
