Charles Gomersall was born in Hong Kong and it has always been home for him. Most of his formal education was undertaken in the UK. After graduating from medical school, Charles worked for the National Health Service in London before returning to Hong Kong in 1993. Charles is married with two children and spent most of his working life in intensive care medicine. We discuss the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong and the current COVID-19 epidemic in the podcast.
Charles recognized a very long time ago, that doing nothing after he retired would not suit him. He toyed with the idea of becoming a chef and he shares this story in the podcast. A few years ago someone told him that he shouldn’t eat chocolate because most chocolate involves child slavery. That produced a dilemma. His solution was to make his own chocolate from slavery-free cocoa. As chance would have it his own chocolate tasted better than chocolate commonly available. “Cacao” was conceived. Taste, ethics and sustainability are at the core of “Cacao” and we go into detail of this and other stories the podcast.
Timings
03:47 I was a medical doctor… medicine, anesthesia, intensive care…full time intensive care specialist for the last 25 years
05:24 Somebody said to me “You shouldn’t eat chocolate because of child slavery”…
07:06 We made it, it tasted better than what we can buy...
08:59 The three tenets of our business are taste, ethical sourcing and minimal environmental impact…
09:41[COVID] Well actually it wasn’t so bad because we’d done SARS before… SARS was harder…
11:20 Hong Kong people helped fantastically…
13:26 Almost all my career in medicine I felt like someone was paying me to do my hobby…
16:11 I looked at medicine… like a relay race…
17:30 The best bits about doing chocolate is that people are happy… in intensive care about 15% of our patients die…
18:58 We can focus on producing a high quality product…
21:41 The interesting thing for chocolate, it’s actually very very simple…
22:30 Good cocoa ... use an old-fashioned technique – you get good chocolate…
23:43 We live in Hong Kong.. my furthest customer lives 45m drive away… fresh chocolate tastes so much better…
26:33 The longer the supply chain… the harder it is to identify…unethical practices in the product.
32:03 [Luxury] There are two things… the product itself and the service that goes with it … we deliver personally…
35:27 If you run a luxury product you have an obligation to do it ethically… intensive care is like the luxury end of medicine…
37:54 The sugar percentage[In Chocolate] is the inverse of the percentage of cocoa solids…
39:28 [65% to 85% chocolate] the main thing is the sugar changes… the higher percentage …less sugar…
41:09 The sugar can also make a difference… we use Arenga sugar from the Arenga Palm… has a lower glycemic index…
45:31[Health benefits] There are a lot of claimed benefits but …. These things are quite complex…
49:40 Life expectancy in Hong Kong 84 for a male….
52:40 How important is it to know definitively…
55:34 It’s quite nice to just do something creative… I quite enjoy the business part of it…intellectual challenge…
57:20 If we can make the business successful we would like to make it into a social enterprise…
58:45 [Story] – [Social Enterprise – Social Conscience]
MTR Quote – The major discriminator between success and failure is luck.
Contact Charles
Http://www.cacao.hk/
Tel:+852 9780 7360
Email:carolyn@cacao.hk
FB: https://www.facebook.com/cacaohk
IG:https://www.instagram.com/cacaohk/
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