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Good Food Awards

November 15, 2011 by


We’re thrilled to hear that we were chosen as a finalist for the 2012 Good Food Awards. Nine bean-to-bar companies were chosen out of countless submissions and we are happy to be considered in such good company. Here’s the full list of chocolate finalists:

  • Amano Artisan Chocolate, Guayas Utah
  • Bittersweet, Rich Milk California
  • Dandelion Chocolate, 70% Costa Rica California
  • Escazu Artisan Chocolate, 60% Goat’s Milk & 65% Costa Rica North Carolina
  • Fresco Chocolate, 214 Madagascar 74% & 217 Chuao 70% Washington
  • Lillie Belle Farms, Perfect Illusion 65 Oregon
  • Patric Chocolate, LLC, PBJ OMG & Signature 70% Blend Missouri
  • Rogue Chocolatier, Inc., Hispaniola & Sambirano Massachusetts
  • Theo Chocolate, Theo and Jane Goodall 70% Dark Chocolate Washington

In other news, Cam and Alice are deep in the jungles of Madagascar visiting Bertil at the cacao farm. I wouldn’t say there’s a lot of internet out there, but I did manage to get a quick update from Cam that he made it there in one piece. Updates to follow.

Makin’ Plans

October 27, 2011 by

Ron, our landlord, has finally gotten the necessary approvals to complete his construction and move ahead with the build-out for our space. That means it’s time for us to start getting our plans in order and submit for building permits. Since it’s been a year since we designed the space — and we’ve learned a lot since then — we are now going through the plans outlet by outlet, duct by duct, in one final pass. It’s a lot of work, 62 pages in all, but we’re excited for this next step!

Hello Chocolopolis!

October 3, 2011 by


We’re pleased to announce that you can now find a selection of our bars outside of California. Lauren Adler and her team of chocolate lovers have been on a mission to track down the best chocolate from around the world and bring them to her store in Seattle, Chocolopolis. We’re proud to be considered in such great company.

You can find Chocolopolis at 1527 Queen Anne Ave North in Seattle. Lauren will also be hosting a chocolate happy hour with some of our samples this Thursday, October 6th, from 5-9pm. You can find out more info about the chocolate happy hours here.

70% Review

September 28, 2011 by

A few weeks back, we had the pleasure of meeting Alex Rast of seventypercent.com. Alex was visiting from England and met up with us at Sunita’s Chocolate Garage. Alex is a guy who really knows his chocolate. We spent many hours discussing his take on pretty much everything chocolate-related, like the best way ship chocolate (wrapped in wool), the best ways to cool (metal molds on a marble slab), and the best flavor notes (strawberry and treacle).

So we were pretty excited when he posted a positive review of one of our bars. We’ve been so focused on meeting demand and just making a chocolate bar that we like, that it’s always nice to hear that others like them too. Here’s a snippet from his review of our last Madagascar harvest:

Melt, too, is rather felicitously above Dandelion’s usual, being smooth and creamy, and providing the appropriate finishing touch to an excellent effort. In many ways Dandelion seems to be following a similar trajectory to Amano in the early days, a company which as we have seen has gone from strong initial promise to world-class maturity. In fact, the Madagascar, it must be said, is even more accomplished than Amano’s early efforts, and this bodes well for the future. Is there room for improvement with this chocolate? Perhaps slightly. The roast could be ever that bit lighter, perhaps balanced with a slightly longer conche, but these are very much small tweaks. As is, this chocolate sets something of a benchmark for up-and-coming manufacturers: Dandelion is clearly the company to beat in the third generation of artisan chocolate producers.

You can see his full review, plus reviews of many other great bars at seventypercent.com.

A rousing endorsement

September 8, 2011 by

We love getting fan mail about our chocolate and this one was too good not to share:

A friend introduced me to your chocolates and I must say, after consuming quite a good amount of it, I find the Madagascar bar to be the most Orgasmic (yes you read that right) bar I have ever had the pleasure of placing in my mouth.(I actually clawed my friends thigh when I had my first bite) That’s a pretty huge compliment seeing I’ve had some of the finest chocolates from around the world when I travel :) Anyway, thanks for keeping a girl happy!

 

Bean Olympics

August 31, 2011 by


We spent all week anxiously watching for tracking updates on our new bags of Madagascar beans as they made their way across the country. Finally, on Friday at 6pm, George, the freight truck driver, pulled up to our garage lab with five new bags. We were a little scared when he hopped down and told us “Amigos. We have a problem.” We had visions of bean explosions and hours of cleaning up our 375,000 beans that would be swimming around the truck.

After a tense moment, we luckily discovered that the bags were still intact and the crisis was that they were stuck behind all of George’s other palettes filled with giant deliveries. That, and he had a broken lift gate.

Since Cam is pretty skinny, he managed to squeeze through the crevices of boxes and pull the bags out one by one. We then found ourselves carrying the 750lbs about 150 feet by hand  all under 10 minutes– it was like the chocolate olympics.

Needless to say, we are pretty excited about these beans and can’t wait to roast them up and share them with you. Stay tuned!

Last Call for Madagascar

August 17, 2011 by

We’re down to our last 100 bars of Madagascar. We’ll have a few for sale at this Thursday’s Mission Community Market, but we will probably run out soon thereafter.  For a little while, you may be able to find some at nearby retail locations, including Fog City News where Adam has placed an order for our final supply.

We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the response from this bar. It’s fruity flavor is undeniable — maybe even overwhelming. At farmer’s markets, we watch for people’s eyes to bulge when the first fruity notes kick in. We’ve had people come up to us and buy every Madagascar bar on hand. At last week’s market, a woman approached us an hour before the market opened, even before we had unpacked our tent, to ask if we had any Madagascar.  We rummaged through our unpacked boxes to locate a bar for her.  Before we could even count her change, she had ripped open the wrapper and downed half the bar. It’s moments like these that make us really happy to be in the chocolate business.

Since this bar has been so popular, you may be wondering why we are discontinuing it. The answer is that our approach to making chocolate is a quite a bit different than most large chocolate makers. There can be a lot of variability between each bag of beans but for a large chocolate maker, variability is the enemy. Instead, they’re focused on flavor consistency and cost control. Every Hershey’s bar tastes the same and in some ways that’s great — it’s a sort of miracle of industrialization. However, to achieve consistency, it means you need a large supply of relatively similar beans that you roast heavily (and, in our opinion, over roast) to reduce individual flavor differences and add additional ingredients that cover up or soften whatever flavor is left (e.g. vanilla, cocoa butter, or worse).

We take the opposite approach — each bag of beans is different and we like to find the highest quality beans we can and then get out of the way. Rather than stamp out the individual flavors for the sake of consistency, we like to let the individual nuances shine through, unadulterated by additional ingredients other than pure cane sugar. We roast the beans as minimally as possible, trying to find the strongest and most interesting flavors that characterize the cacao bean’s individual personality.

For each bag of beans, including bags from the same farm as our last batch, we run a battery of taste tests — usually 2-3 rounds involving 3-4 batches each — until we are sure we’ve found the best flavor out of that bag. And after all of that work, usually about two weeks, if we are not 100% thrilled with what we’ve made and proud to put our name on it, we won’t bring it to market, even if it means eating the cost of that bag of beans. For anyone who’s optimizing cost, efficiency, or consistency, this approach is nuts — but it ensures that we always have something we are proud of.

This means each batch is essentially limited-edition — the flavors change with the season, the harvest, and the fermentation. So while this Summer 2011 Madagascar is coming to an end, fear not, as we have 5 new bags of new Madagascar on the way that we are looking forward to bringing out sometime next month. The early samples exhibit some of that same great fruit flavor and we are excited to bring it out for you all to try.

Raiding the Vault

August 3, 2011 by

With a bunch of wholesale orders coming in, it’s becoming a challenge to meet the demand. We have a pretty rigorous set of taste tests each new bag must go through before we press it into service, and we recently reached the bottom of all of our current bags simultaneously. While this is a great problem to have, it means we are a little low on chocolate for Thursday’s Mission Community Market.

Luckily, we have a “vault” where we keep about 20 unpackaged bars of past origins that have gone out of season. We had intended to keep these as a permanent record, but we don’t want to let any of our regular market-goers down. In order to solve this chocolate crunch, we’re bringing back two great bars we haven’t sold in months, but only for a limited time. We’ll have bars from Tanzania and the Dominican Republic.

These are two awesome bars and I’m happy they are going to good homes. The Tanzanian has a long, clean chocolate taste. It’s super mild and pleasant (even more so that the Costa Rican). The Dominican Republic bar has a wonderful citrus and raisin punch — it’s very strong and more of an advanced bar.

We’re really happy to show these off for a few final tastes, so if you are around this Thursday between 4-8pm, come see us at the Mission Community Market (22nd and Bartlett) and let us know what you think.

 

Goodbye Underground Market

July 15, 2011 by

You may have seen the news recently that the SF Underground Market was shut down by the city and might not happen again. Iso and team are working hard to bring it back, but it may be resurrected in a very different form — if it comes back at all. We feel particularly sad because the underground market had a special meaning to us: it was one of the few places we were able to sell our chocolate — and get early feedback from real customers — before going through the red tape to launch a company.

Just like tech, launching a new product (whether it’s food or software) takes a lot of energy and the earlier you can get your product in front of real people, the better. It’s very expensive and time consuming to become legal to sell at farmer’s markets and retail shops, so the underground market circumvented this by creating a members-only club. Members signed a waiver and paid a small fee, allowing their stomachs access to all sorts of new baked goods and food treats all in one spot.

It was a great event and attracted all sorts of new foodie vendors, created a community around the local food scene, and launched many new businesses. Eventually the health department noticed that thousands of people were showing up to these events (generating a lot of attention) and shut it down. To give you a sense of why the market worked, here’s what we needed to do to become legal:

  • Incorporation ($500-$1000)
  • Business license (~$300)
  • County health permit (~$300 + 1-2 month wait time + food safety class)
  • State health permit (~$300 + 1-2 month wait time)
  • State board of equalization letter
  • Commercial kitchen rental ($500-$1000 / month)
  • Farmer’s market permit (~$300)
  • Farmer’s market fees ($200-$400 application fee + $50/market)

This alone can easily add up to a few thousand dollars. On top of that, California law requires food processing machinery to be NSF certified, but there is no such thing as NSF certified chocolate-making equipment. There are a tiny number of manufacturers at this scale, and not one has gone through the hassle of getting their machinery approved for use in California. For us to become fully legal, this process took three to six months of back-and-forth, hiring consultants (from Canada of all places), and $3,000 – $5,000 per machine. No reasonable person is going to pay these costs until they know they are on the right track.

Some will rightly argue that these food safety practices are important — and we agree. We are happy that there is a system in place that protects the public and provides each vendor with a baseline education in proper food-handling. However, because each state has different food safety laws, the chocolate I can buy in my local shop could have been made outside of California, in a small maker’s home kitchen, as this is legal in many other states. This means that the local consumer is not protected by these laws, while at the same time, small, local vendors are put at a major disadvantage to the benefit of other businesses outside of California.

What might make more sense is to have some exclusions for smaller vendors and let the underground market operate as a food incubator. Let new vendors try out new ideas, ensure a base level of food safety knowledge, make sure people coming to the market are informed, and help the successful ideas graduate to real businesses. This is the de facto role the underground market was fulfilling, and the success of the market only confirmed that this is a very acute need.

In the tech start-up world, if you create something so valuable and interesting that it explodes in popularity and demand, people literally line up to give you start-up funding to help you grow. The underground market was clearly on to something good — it found a huge amount of latent demand, created excitement and community around food, and launched a number of new businesses — including ours. Rather than shutting down this great thing, I hope the city can find a way to make this work while keeping everyone safe.