Clay Gordon (clay [at] claygordon.com) is an internationally recognized independent authority on chocolate. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD, BFA, Photo), Clay is a serial entrepreneur, veteran of more than a half–dozen high–tech startups, and a small business owner for more than a dozen years.
Since 2001, Clay has combined his passion for chocolate, his understanding of digital technologies, his experience with cacao and chocolate from the farm to consumers’ mouths, and his abilities as a writer and storyteller to educate people around the world about cacao, chocolate, and pairing. He has produced and delivered hundreds of chocolate tasting and “sophisticated pairings” (which can include chocolate, wine, spirits, craft beers, cheeses, charcuterie, and more) since 2001 for private clients (including the New York chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier hosted at Harriet Lembeck’s school of wine), at major international chocolate conferences, and also as an adjunct faculty member in NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, where he hosted a popular series of wine and chocolate pairing classes in conjunction with the James Beard Society in 2008/09.
Clay is also active as a consultant working with chocolate makers and confectioners in the areas of product development, marketing and market positioning, equipment and ingredient sourcing, facilities design, distribution, and related business challenges.
Clay Gordon—On the farm of Eladio Pop, Belize, February 2010.
Clay is probably best known for:
- The pioneering chocolate blog chocophile.com (founded May, 2001 and the first professional chocolate review blog);
- His book Discover Chocolate (published by Gotham Books in 2007 with a first print run of 25,00 copies and was finalist in the reference/technical section of the 2008 IACP cookbook awards), which covered chocolate appreciation and connoisseurship from the same perspective as wine appreciation and connoisseurship;
- And for the on–line community TheChocolateLife.com, the largest purposeful community focusing solely on chocolate in the world, counting (as of the end of March, 2012) over 5700 members in more than 140 countries on six continents.
He was an invited speaker at the second “International Congress on Fine Flavor Cacao in the Andean Region” in La Paz, Bolivia in 2010, and in April 2012, he was invited to speak to an NYU graduate class on Sustainable Food Systems on the subject of Fair trade—notes from that class can be found here.
Clay’s media CV includes appearances on Oprah, Food Network, and History Channel, and in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Business Week, People, and many more.
He is working on a new book, How Chocolate Gets Its Taste, which will be self–published in 2012.
(Updated: April 9, 2012)