Mott Green, 1966–2013

last updated 8 January 2015

Just last year, Mott Green achieved his dream of making what he called “the first carbon-neutral trans-Atlantic mass chocolate delivery.” A 105-foot Dutch sailing ship carried 50,000 of his hand-crafted dark chocolate bars from the Caribbean island of Grenada to Amsterdam, where cyclists distributed them to retailers. After more than a decade of shoestring operations, Green’s Grenada Chocolate Co. only turned a profit this year. But as Green might have said before his death in an electrical accident this month, profit was never the point.

Born David Friedman in Washington, D.C., Green grew up in Staten Island, N.Y., and attended the University of Pennsylvania, but dropped out because he felt graduating “would be capitulating to a corrupt social structure,” said The New York Times. After serving as a “master tinkerer” and activist among anarchist squatters in Philadelphia and New York, he moved into a solar-powered hut in Grenada, where he took a version of his nickname, Moth, as his first name and Green as his last “to reflect his environmental interests.”

Green “could almost sound like a caricature of an anarchist-idealist-environment-fanatic—if you didn’t actually know the person,” said Haaretz.com. Over time he organized some of the island’s impoverished cocoa farmers into a 150-acre cooperative and learned the chocolate business from the ground up. Green built or bought the equipment needed to grind and ferment cocoa on-site, making chocolate bars that repeatedly won industry awards. His “tree to bar” approach gave Grenadians a fuller share of revenue from one of the world’s favorite foods.