As the most popular sweet treat in the world, chocolate is commonly perceived as a delicious dessert, a mood elevator, and even a healthy snack. But its lesser known historical value and manufacturing practices reveal an alternate reality.
Chocolate bars and chocolate syrup are used in Bittersweet as mediums to skew common perspectives. A book and digital poster document significant moments in chocolate’s sweet and bitter history. Learning more about chocolate expands our awareness and breaks common associations of how we perceive chocolate.
A custom 3x5 inch chocolate bar with laser printed type "CHILD LABOR" boldy confronts the use of child labor in the chocolate industry. The type is heavy, large, and consumes the entire bar.
The back side of the child labor bar addresses the uneven earnings of the chocolate industry ($140 Billion dollars) compared to the wages provided to their laborers.
This animated poster brings awareness to the continual failure of the major chocolate companies to meet child labor eradication deadlines.
Chocolate bar packaging titled "Chocolatears" confronts the billionaires of the industry who fail to take sufficient action toward ending child labor. The packaging was created with copper foiling.
Edible Currency is a booklet detailing ancient food currencies. The final book was Riso printed.
Food of the Gods poster series documents chocolate's early usage in ancient civilizations through Mayan and Aztec codex illustrations. Images were screen printed with chocolate syrup.
The Edible Currency covers printed on the Riso Printer.
Laser Cutting Chocolate bars. 4 passes were required to get the desired imprint. One bar took 30 mins, this video is sped up by 20x.
The front and back of the CHILD LABOR bar.
A typography study for Edible Currency.
Making the chocolate bars themselves took a little over a week. The process came with its challenges of bars snapping, sticking to the wax paper, having uneven or broken edges, and having rough surfaces but luckily it's just chocolate so I was able to re-melt and re-mold the bars until they were just right.
Iterations of the Protocol Poster.
Identity proposals for Bittersweet. The typeface is the same one printed on the chocolate bars. The colors encompass all the colors used in the 4 projects.
Illustrations were manipulated from their original form into high contrast images that would yield better results with screenprinting.
Making editions with chocolate syrup
