Mott Green

Mott Green (April 15, 1966 — June 1, 2013) was an American businessman and chocolatier, who founded the Grenada Chocolate Company in 1999. 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 and raised in Staten Island, New York. He would later adopted the name Mott Green, with "Mott" being a variation of his nickname "Moth", and "Green" representing his support of environmentalism. 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 on the island each winter, often bringing his family along.

He was the valedictorian of his class at Curtis High School in Staten Island. Mott was accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but chose the University of Pennsylvania instead. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, but did not complete his degree, dropping out in 1988 during his senior year.

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.

Testimonial by Cat Black

"With action and an uncommon force of nature he quietly revolutionised chocolate making. With his determination to keep production of chocolate and cocoa at home in Grenada he rethought the old model of chocolate making. No longer would cocoa farmers and their community and country merely wave their precious bounty goodbye, underpaid for it and divorced from the final product. Mott changed everything, building a factory and developing chocolate of excellence. From its beginnings in the Grenadian market the chocolate has now taken its place on the world stage, where this deep fruity chocolate, rich in the fine cacao of which he was so proud, is appreciated and celebrated."