Tokyo/Hanoi: Naoko Otsuka didn't think twice about paying the equivalent of $23 for five ounces of chocolate. The dark-brown slivers of sweetness weren't just a treat, the Japanese homemaker said, but an opportunity to learn more about a superfood.
The six bars Otsuka bought from a store in Tokyo's bustling Shibuya shopping district were made by an artisan manufacturer each from a different batch of cocoa beans grown in Vietnam.
"I want to taste the difference between each bar," said Otsuka, 55. "Before coming to this shop, I didn't know beans could taste different depending on their origin."
Priced at 17,500 yen a kilogram ($72 a pound), her purchases were about eight times dearer than supermarket-bought chocolates, often made from fewer cocoa beans supplied in bulk from various sources.
Consumers like Otsuka are helping to drive demand for premium chocolates, a niche whose sales are outpacing the mass market dominated by companies such as Hershey Co and Cadbury owner Mondelez International Inc.
Marou Chocolate Co, which made the bars Otsuka bought, has doubled its sales in Japan every year since entering Asia's biggest chocolate market three years ago.
"That growth reflects increasing consumer demand for products that identify the source of their cocoa beans,'' said Jonathan Parkman, co-head of agriculture at brokerage Marex Spectron Group in London.
Even Meiji Holdings Co, which began selling chocolate in Japan in 1918 and says it has a 23.8% hold on the domestic market, began offering so called bean-to-bar lines in September 2014 made with cocoa from Brazil and Venezuela. It's namesake milk chocolates sell in supermarkets for about 2,200 yen a kilogram, or $9 a pound.
"Bean-to-bar, started by artisan chocolate manufacturers, is a trend we cannot ignore," said Yuko Nakamura, a spokeswoman at Tokyo-based Meiji Co, the confectionery unit of Meiji Holdings. "By adding it to our product lines, we want to catch new customers and expand sales."
Demand has probably accelerated in the last few years, Parkman said. "Manufacturers and consumers require greater and greater transparency in not just the countries that the cocoa comes from, but more and more traceability -- where exactly it comes from, how it's produced."
The worldwide retail market for chocolate increased 6.7% to $101 billion last year, according to researcher Euromonitor International. Globally, consumers pay an average of $14 a kilogram, compared with $22 in Japan.
A decade ago, Japanese consumers were paying double the global average. The differential has narrowed as premium-chocolate sales have taken off in other markets, with the trend helping to reverse a slide in demand for so-called fine or flavor cocoa made from the less-common Criollo and Trinitario cocoa trees.
In recent decades, major chocolate manufacturers had used more "bulk" or "ordinary" cocoa from beans harvested from Forastero trees because the flavours worked better with the nuts, fruit and cream centers popular with consumers, the International Cocoa Organization says on its website.
"Only very recently has the demand for fine or flavor cocoa started to grow very rapidly," it said.
"At a time when demand for conventional chocolates in mature markets like the US and Europe is weak, consumers are showing they're willing to buy premium cocoa products,'' Jack Skelly, a food analyst at Euromonitor, said in an interview this week at the World Cocoa Conference in the Dominican Republic.
"Consumers are realising there's a variety on flavour, especially with higher-end products made from a single type of bean,'' Gary Guittard, the president at Burlingame, California-based Guittard Chocolate Co, said on Tuesday at the cocoa conference. "They were raised to only think of chocolate as being one flavour."
"Chocolate-buying patterns in Japan are reminiscent of the coffee market,'' said Hiroshi Sasaki, who acts as a sales agent for Vietnam-based Marou.
In recent years, consumer preference has shifted to aromatic brews made from specific beans, and away from instant coffee manufactured from blends of cheaper beans.
"The change reflects the perception of coffee being an affordable luxury rather than a daily necessity,'' said Sasaki.
Meiji sees chocolate going the same way. "We expect more and more consumers to take chocolate as a luxury, rather than as a food," spokeswoman Nakamura said.
"They will taste it as they do when taking wine and coffee."