A sprawling Los Angeles factory location, once thought to represent a new start for the Mast Brothers chocolate company after a food-world scandal, has shuttered after just 10 months.
The artisan chocolate company opened a 6,000-square-foot production facility in the Arts District of Downtown L.A. in May of 2016, but the cloud of controversy seemed to follow the Brooklyn-based brand west.
Just months before the debut of the massive, gallery-like space, the brand had been caught in an exposé that revealed early in the company’s history, they misled customers about the source of their chocolate. What Mast Brothers passed off as bean-to-bar was in fact melted-down industrial chocolate—a stop-gap until they grew to a point where they could actually sustain the truly bean-to-bar operation they were in fact running by the time of the L.A. opening.
The Arts District facility seemed to be built to reassure curious customers of their commitment to the bean-to-bar process, offering public tours and windowed stations that allowed visitors to peek in on each stage of the production for themselves. But apparently that wasn’t enough to sustain the facility in one of L.A.’s most desirable and, thus, expensive neighborhoods, as Forbes reports. An additional facility in London has also been closed.
All Mast Brothers operations will now be consolidated back into their primary headquarters in New York, a 65,000-square-foot factory in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard. The company will also be switching a bit of their emphasis off of their signature 2.5-ounce chocolate bars, ringing in at prices around $7 to $10, in favor of producing more of their smaller-sized bars, which retail for just $3.
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