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Rejected by Apple Developer Program

October 28, 2011 by

In order to spend more time making chocolate, we’ve been creating some technology to make the non-chocolate work easier and faster. For example, we built systems for tracking revenue, inventory, and demand. We realized, though, that there are a bunch of things we’d like to do while we’re mobile (e.g. tracking sales at markets). We applied to join the Apple Developer Program so we could starting trying things out with our actual phones. Unfortunately, I just found out we were rejected:

Thank you for your interest in the Apple Developer Program.

Please know that as the legal entity name (Cocoa Co, LLC ) provided in your enrollment contains an Apple trademark, we are unable to process your request and your enrollment has been withdrawn.

For a list of Apple trademarks, please visit:
<http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html>

Before we’d picked Dandelion Chocolate as our name, we created a placeholder name, Cocoa Co, LLC, to use while we figured out what to call ourselves. It rolled off the tongue and it was a nice play on cocoa vs company but we didn’t really plan on it being public. Once we picked our name, we filed a fictitious business name (aka a “doing business as” or DBA) statement and published it in a newspaper (thanks El Observador!), as required. And then we promptly forgot our first name… until we submitted our application to Apple. They make it clear it has to be your legal entity name (they don’t allow DBA names), so we used ours. Unfortunately, since Apple has a trademark on the word cocoa, they won’t allow us to join since our name contains cocoa.. even though we actually use the stuff?

I responded to Apple saying that it seems silly that a chocolate company isn’t allowed to use the word cocoa in their name, but I’m not holding my breath on getting a positive response back…

Roaster Surgery

October 13, 2011 by

We do all of our sample/test roasting in a little Behmor 1600  (and we do a loooot of test roasts):

During a roast yesterday, however, it started spewing out gray smoke. I wish I’d snapped a picture of it but we were busy unplugging it and grabbing a fire extinguisher. After the smoke cleared, we needed to do some quick roaster surgery or we’d have a serious kink in our testing pipeline. You can see all of the roaster guts below:

We figured out pretty quickly that one of the fan motors had burned out but the rest of it was fine. Here’s the failed component:

We replaced the part and Todd and Alice made short work of putting it all back together:

After that, we did a few tests and then we were back in business!

Cranking out bars on a Friday

September 16, 2011 by

With all of the events and orders we have coming our way, we’ve started making Friday a dedicated production day. I love seeing all of our hard work wrapped up in little bundles waiting for a new home. The next set of bars looks like it’s just about cooled so time to get back to work!

 

Before & After

August 28, 2011 by

We just started another batch of Venezuelan. Here’s what the ground up nibs (aka cocoa liquor) look like before adding the sugar:

And here’s what the chocolate looks like just after adding the sugar:

After a few days, the lumps will be gone and everything will be smooth and delicious.

Destiny?

August 23, 2011 by

I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for fortune cookies. There’s something about the bonus cookie at the end of a meal that I can’t resist. So, when fortune cookies were being passed out after dinner with my girlfriend and her family one night, I grabbed one, cracked it open, and saw the fortune above. I’m not superstitious and I’m not gonna play my “lucky numbers” in the lottery, but I wouldn’t mind if this one comes true :)

New first stage grinder

August 15, 2011 by

Rather than putting the nibs straight into a melanger (the machine we use to combine the nibs and sugar into chocolate), we use a peanut grinder to turn the nibs into a paste first. We recently upgraded this first stage grinder to a new one. The old one would occasionally seize on nibs with less fat (like our Costa Rican) so we had to feed it a scoop at a time. With the new one, though, we can fill the hopper and it’ll crank through everything. It came configured with an 24 second auto-shutoff but after opening it up and changing a few dip switches, we were all set.

Sample Invaders

July 25, 2011 by

Whenever we get new beans in, we do a bunch of different tests to find the flavors we like best. Since those test batches aren’t worth tempering, we use some flexible silicon molds (rather than the polycarbonate molds we use for our bars) because it’s easier to get them out after they’ve cooled. As a bonus, those silicone molds come in fun shapes, so now we’re swimming in fish shapes, staring at Moai, and munching on space invaders.

Beans, beans, beans

June 26, 2011 by

We just got a few new bags of beans in (we’re still trying to get as many different beans as we can). Obviously, the bags don’t come with roasting instructions so each time we get a new bag, it’s fun to try and coax out the best flavor. We have a lot of taste tests to do :)

Market Recap

June 17, 2011 by

We had a great time at both the Underground Market and the New Taste Market. As we mentioned previously, we recruited several friends to help us out. I had my friend Kat (left) and my girlfriend, Sandy (right), help me out at Underground:

They did an awesome job talking to everyone and explaining the whole process. There was a lot of energy at the market and we had a bunch of fun talking to everyone:

As we were looking at the photos, Alice pointed out that I made a lot of weird faces/poses while manning the booth:

Oh, and a special thanks to our friend Justin for taking all the photos!