Free chocolate Friday!! (Green & Black's)

Member Name: yabbadabbadoo

Product:	Green & Black's
Date:	07/11/08 (577 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great customer service, great tasting chocolate

Disadvantages: 1 bar of chocolate straight out of halloween

My wife and I are both big fans of dark chocolate, and Green and Black's Organic with 70% cocoa has always been one of our favourite premium brands, delivering quality every time.

So you can imagine our disappointment when as a little treat for the car journey home we bought two small bars of Green and Blacks Organic chocolate from a visitors shop on a day out, only to find on unwrapping one of them that the whole bar was cracked, pale and dusty looking, almost like it had melted away in parts. (Fortunately the other one was fine, so we wolfed it down to console ourselves!!)

Mystified by our discovery, we looked up Green and Black's customer service details on the web when we got home, and then my wife drafted up an email to register our complaint. We got a response back within hours, offering to send us a pre-paid envelope so that we could send it off to them for further analysis. And true to their word the envelope arrived the next business day, so we packaged it up and awaited their response

And in this afternoon's post we received a package. Not only was there a very detailed letter explaining what had happened to the bar, but also more than a little 'compensation' - we'll come to that shortly....

Apparently it had "bloomed" - here comes the science part!! - which meant that the cocoa butter had moved to the surface of the chocolate causing the discoloration , in this case resulting in a very pale and chalky surface. The bar had melted and reformed and so had lost some of its original shape. While the chocolate is perfectly edible, they added that the cocoa butter seeping out of the bar would leave the taste dry and somewhat stale.

The likely cause was the temperature stored in the shop had changed, or it had been stored in direct light, and they stressed that they always advise retailers on the storage conditions expected for the products, but at this point to be fair our attention was drawn to the two large chocolate bars enclosed as compensation as well as vouchers to the value of £4 towards our next purchases - we are so easily bought!!!

So I really have to give them full credit for the way their customer service have handled this - they reacted very quickly and delivered us a very satisfactory outcome. Plus, now that we've had a chance to try the Cherry flavoured bar that they sent us to try they've convinced us to branch out from just the plain bars and try some of the other versions, and of course here I am singing their praises instead of ripping them to pieces....

So if you've never tried one of these Green and Blacks bars, would highly recommend them, they also offer a range of other products including a delicious ice cream range and biscuits. Granted, you will pay a slightly higher price than other alternatives such as Bournville etc, but in my view the quality is there to see, and its also worth noting that they operate a pro-active FairTrade policy. You can also order online at

http://www.greenandblacksdirect.com/

So I say "thank green and blacks its Friday" and somehow the "credit crunchie" tastes a lot better all of a sudden :)

Summary: Brilliant turn around, rich compensation...