“Artisan” as Brand: Adding Value In A Craft Chocolate Community

Abstract

Building upon the finding that the term “artisan” is a floating signifier in contemporary US chocolate marketing, this paper suggests that “artisan” functions similarly to brands for craft chocolate. This function is specific to the US post-Fordist creative economy and the rise of craft chocolate since 1997. Based on textual analysis of craft chocolate websites and packaging; comparisons between historical and contemporary uses of “artisan”; and results of a consumer survey on meanings of the term, this paper demonstrates that “artisan” has shifted away from denoting a labor class. Instead, it now suggests a community of producers and consumers who perceive shared priorities for this value chain. In this market reframing, “artisan” as a brand word has opened up new possibilities for value addition for chocolate.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.