Sales of Mast Brothers hipster chocolate have dropped 66 percent according to shop owners selling the product. The major driver of the decline is the controversial remelting of commercial chocolates that the bearded brothers do with their brand.
According to Business Insider, Brooklyn gourmet food restaurant Bklyn Larder saw the biggest decline in hipster chocolate sales. Its Co-owner, Sergio Hernandez, said it only sold $1,700 worth of Mast chocolate in December 2015, which is a 66 percent decrease from the $5,000 worth of sales from the same period in the previous year.
Meanwhile Brooklyn-based Bedford Cheese Shop and San Francisco's Bi-Rite Market saw a decline in sales by about 17 to 47 percent. Brooklyn Victory Garden in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn may not have experienced a slump in sales, but three of its customers returned the chocolate bars they bought.
New York-based food magazine Grub Street reported that the Mast Brothers were first hit by the scandal when Dallas blogger Scott Craig wrote an investigative article about their chocolate brand posted on December 7. The blogger claimed that Mast Brothers, who markets itself with the idea of "bean to bar" chocolate-making, were actually remelting other industrial ingredients.
The Mast Brothers first denied the allegations, but when the news became widespread, they resorted to admitting the fault and apologized.
Quartz wrote that Mast Brothers got the worst branded Martin Luther King Day tweet award. The chocolate makers were branded as one of the worst offenders by using Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have to stick with Love" message to sell their brand.
A Mast Brothers' representative said that sales were steady among its almost 1,000 retailers after December 18. The representative even said that the media attention only increased the company's revenue. During the three weeks after December 18, online sales doubled, while the company's total sales went up by "double digits."
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