Mott Green

David Lawrence Friedman was born on April 15, 1966, in Washington. His family moved to Staten Island shortly before he turned 2.

Mott Green (April 15, 1966 — June 1, 2013) was an American businessman and chocolatier, who founded the Grenada Chocolate Company in 1999. He died in an accident, electrocuting himself during work on machinery to cool chocolate while being transported. An edition of The Food Programme was devoted to Mott Green in June 2013.

Early life

Mott Green was born David Lawrence Friedman in Washington, DC in 1966. He later adopted the name Mott Green, with "Mott" being a variation of his nickname "Moth", and "Green" representing his support of environmentalism. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, but did not complete his degree.

Morr tended to flit about as a child, but with focus: he built go-karts using lawn mower engines; he ran the New York City Marathon when he was 16; he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania just months before graduation — accepting a degree, he felt, would be capitulating to a corrupt social structure — and he spent much of his 20s squatting with a community of anarchists in abandoned homes in west Philadelphia, where he “rescued” food that restaurants had planned to throw away and distributed it to homeless people.

As a boy Mott was a frequent visitor to Grenada as his father, Dr. Sandor Friedman, the director of medical services at [Coney Island Hospital], taught there each winter, often bringing his family along.

Education

He was the valedictorian of his class at Curtis High School. He was accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but chose Pennsylvania instead. He dropped out in the spring of 1988, his senior year.

“He was repulsed by the prison of privilege,” Tim Dunn, a friend, said in an interview. “He was looking for real life. And he found it.”

Mr. Green spent several years after college as a kind of master tinkerer, forager and activist among homeless anarchists in Philadelphia. He helped route electricity into abandoned houses for squatters, and he converted a Volkswagen bus to run on electricity. He helped develop a free lunch program that is still in place. He later moved to the East Village in Manhattan and made solar-powered hot-water showers for a group of squatters there.

Grenada Chocolate Company Foundation

Fair Trade

Mr. Green founded the [Grenada Chocolate Company] in 1999. Its slogan was “tree to bar”. Joining with a friend from Eugene, Ore., Doug Brown, he studied chocolate production in San Francisco. Working in Eugene, the men restored old machines from Europe and built new ones themselves. By the late ’90s they had shipped everything to Grenada.

Working with small cocoa farmers in Grenada and as many as 50 factory employees during peak operations, all of whom earned the same salary. By keeping the processing and packaging of chocolate within Grenada, he appears to have created the first and only chocolate-making company in a cocoa-producing country.

Sustainable manufacturing

Mr. Green dried cocoa beans in the sun; built, maintained and powered the machinery to make chocolate; packaged the finished product; and cobbled together an international network of distributors, including volunteer cargo cyclists in the Netherlands.

international recognition

In 2011, the company received recognition from the State Department for its “contribution to the sustainable growth of rural economies by establishing Grenadian products in international markets; pioneering agrotourism; outstanding environmental conservation efforts; and promotion of organic farming.”

Fair Transport

Last year the company delivered tens of thousands of chocolate bars to Europe on a sail-powered Dutch ship, the Brigantine Tres Hombres, operated by a company called Fairtransport. A team of volunteer cyclists in Amsterdam helped handle distribution on the ground.

Mr. Green called it “the first carbon-neutral trans-Atlantic mass chocolate delivery.”

In 2008, 2011 and 2013, the Academy of Chocolate in London awarded silver medals to Grenada’s dark chocolate bars. A documentary film about the company, “Nothing Like Chocolate,” directed by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, was released last year and has been shown at film festivals.

Life and Death in Grenada

By the mid-1990s he had moved to Grenada, where he initially lived in a remote hut he had built himself. It, too, relied on solar energy, in part to power Mr. Green’s passion for music.