LEVERAGING on their experience in roasting coffee beans, Michael Wilson and his wife Amirah Mohamad have co-founded a chocolate company called Seniman Kakao, which sources cacao beans from local farmers.
“We use cacao beans from local smallholder farmers in Malaysia and carefully sort them, roast them, break them, grind them, conch them for a couple of days, add as little sugar as possible, temper it and serve it with pride,” shares Wilson.
HOW DID YOU END UP IN MALAYSIA?
We moved here from Scotland, where I’d started the original Artisan Roast company, when Amirah became pregnant with our second child in 2010. I’m originally from New Zealand, so we had no family in Scotland to help out with the children.
WHAT WAS YOUR STRATEGY FOR GOING UP AGAINST THE BIG COFFEE CHAINS LIKE STARBUCKS AND COFFEE BEAN?
There was and is no strategy for competing with Starbucks and the like because I don’t consider them to be direct competitors. They’re awesome at what they do but the product and services we offer are very different. What we provide is a place where people can arrive as customers, lepak, drink speciality coffee and leave as friends.
Starbucks will always do well in providing a great space to park your laptop and do some work, but it won’t ever provide the same level of humanity that we can.
ARE YOU BOTH A COFFEE LOVER AND CHOCOLATE LOVER?
When setting up Artisan Roast, TTDI in 2012 with Amirah, I wanted to start doing chocolate too, but the cafe got very busy and we didn’t have time to figure out the chocolate side of things. I used to travel a lot looking for green coffee beans and along the way, I’d see cacao pods and wonder what we could do with them if we applied our coffee roasting expertise on them.
WHAT’S YOUR WIFE’S MAIN ROLE IN THE BUSINESS AND WHAT’S YOUR’S?
In business parlance, she’s the chief financial officer (CFO) and I’m the managing director (MD), but I prefer being a tinkerer. We both have a scientific education, which helps a lot in the development of our products. Chocolate production involves many steps: each one necessitates experimentation to establish how it changes the flavours in the bar.
DO YOU TWO EVER ARGUE OVER BUSINESS MATTERS?
Amirah makes sure that we make money and I spend all my time trying to spend any money we make! No, we don’t really argue. She just ignores any ideas that I have until I start buying equipment for them. Then she’ll take a look at the plans.
HOW IS SETTING UP A CHOCOLATE BUSINESS DIFFERENT FROM A COFFEE BUSINESS?
There’s a lot more to making great chocolate than there is to making great coffee. There are many variables that affect the flavour of the chocolate than with coffee, starting with the harvesting and fermentation of the cacao beans. This is important for coffee too, but the speciality coffee industry is more advanced than the speciality cacao industry.
In addition to roasting, we need to winnow, grind, conche and temper chocolate. Each stage has its own issues and because we’re using craft chocolate, the industry standards are different at every stage.
WHY DO YOU SOURCE YOUR CACAO BEANS LOCALLY BUT NOT YOUR COFFEE BEANS?
We wanted to use Malaysian cacao from the beginning. We spent a fair bit of time travelling all over the country from Tawau to Perak, and we were delighted to find cacao in Malaysia that rivals any cacao in the rest of the world. It’s also grown by some remarkably passionate people.
Cacao is quite labour-intensive compared to palm oil and the return that the farmer gets for standard quality cacao per hectare is less. So, these guys who are growing cacao are nostalgically growing cacao because they love the crop. It was this passion that originally got me excited about Malaysian chocolate and making Seniman Kakao an ambassador for Malaysian cacao.
As for coffee beans, well, the best places for growing high quality coffee in Malaysia are all taken up by tea plantations. The coffee that’s grown in Malaysia isn’t so nice to drink so we order our coffee beans from overseas.
WHICH ONE DO YOU THINK HAS MORE POTENTIAL FOR GROWTH: COFFEE BUSINESS OR CHOCOLATE BUSINESS?
Both are huge markets that are still growing but craft chocolate probably has more potential for growth because it’s way behind coffee.
IF THE CHOCOLATE BUSINESS TAKES OFF AND DOES WELL, WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU?
Amirah says I’m not allowed to do anything else until we’ve gotten our investment back on the chocolate factory. That’s going to be a while but I’m very interested in fermented products and aquaculture at the moment. Our house has all sorts of yeasts and bacterial cultures bubbling away on various schedules.
HOW IS SENIMAN KAKAO DIFFERENT FROM THE FAMOUS CHOCOLATE BRANDS YOU CAN FIND IN THE SUPERMARKETS?
Our chocolate only has two ingredients: cacao and as little sugar as we can get away with. If you look at the ingredients in most supermarket chocolates, you’ll see that there are a lot of other ingredients with long names that go into their bars.
Cacao has the potential to provide many health benefits, including combating Parkinson’s disease and sleep disorders and improving cell health, but much of the goodness is lost through poor roasting and substitute ingredients. Most cacao is roasted quite dark to mask the off flavours inherent in defective beans. However, cacao is a fruit and some of that fruitiness should come through into the chocolate.
We spend a lot of time hand-sorting out the beans after we get them to our factory — sorting out the good beans from the defective beans. Defective beans taste really bad when roasted lightly and are also very unhealthy. By sorting out the beans and roasting lighter, we can get the fruity flavours inherent in cacao and keep the chocolate healthy.
HOW WELL HAVE YOU ADAPTED TO LIFE IN MALAYSIA?
The cultural mix here is fascinating and I enjoy the different languages and cultural practices that people indulge in. I have to run every few days or I turn into a gremlin, so I love that there are still places like Bukit Kiara, Bukit Gasing and Bukit Tabur so close by.
I couldn’t live in KL if it weren’t for the jungle in Bukit Kiara. I die a little bit inside whenever a developer bulldozes another plot out of the gazetted jungle in Bukit Kiara. Usually I dislike seeing other people while I’m running, but I love seeing lots of Malaysians on the jungle trails because it makes it less likely that we’ll lose these amazing amenities.