Karine is an INDI PhD candidate whose research is at the confluent of food marketing, food pedagogies, social economy and anthropology. She studies, from the supplier’s perspective, the educational strategies that can help foster an enduring change in food consumption habits. More precisely, she wants to understand which tools are useful to raise awareness about the ethical issues and the power relations hidden behind the food products we eat, with a focus on craft chocolate.

An unconventional path lead Karine to enrol in the PhD project she is doing now. After a master in Second Language Teaching at the University du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) on the teaching strategies used in second language literacy, she started an academic career in education as a researcher and a lecturer. During the same period, she discovered the new craft chocolate movement, and it rapidly became an important part of her life. This is why she founded in 2012 her own business, Miss Choco. Combining her two passions, education and chocolate, she hosted many educational tasting-workshops and conferences, in Canada and worldwide. While keeping education at the center, Karine’s business rapidly split in other directions, such as retail and distribution. She soon realized how difficult it was to communicate to customers the ethical issues and the complex dimensions of a chocolate bar (political, economical, etc.). During her numerous trips to visit chocolate makers and cacao producers around the world, she understood that many of them were facing the same difficulties.

Drawing on her past experiences in business and education, Karine is now doing research to find innovative solutions that could help small-scale ethical food producers facing the same challenges. The senses are at the heart of her work. In fact, chocolate is a highly sensorial product, the tasting of which is a source of pleasure for many consumers. The question Karine is asking is whether the senses can be a gateway to start understanding the complex dimensions of a food product such as chocolate, then leading to a change in consumption habits. In that perspective, she is trying to understand the role of the chocolate makers and the tools they can use to guide their consumers in that transformative journey.