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Still busy, busy, busy!

September 14, 2011 by

The warm weather’s just arriving in San Francisco, but we’re getting back to work with the start of fall! We’re back from all our summer vacations and catching up on production. We have a round of wholesale re-orders to fulfill, so we’ll be busy for the next week or so. We’ll definitely let you know all the new places you can find our bars.

We have one piece of exciting wholesale news now. Last night, I dropped off our first round or bars at Bi-Rite. The Bi-Rite Market is a San Francisco institution, and we’re excited to have our chocolate stocked on their shelves. If you stop by 18th Street to pick up a few groceries or a scoop of ice cream, you can also grab one of our bars from Madagascar, Venezuela, or Costa Rica!

Also, our bars from Madagascar are back! The bars at Bi-Rite and the bars we’ll have at tomorrow’s Mission Community Market are from our latest batch. The flavor is fruity and a little sour like we’ve come to love, but the notes are distinctly different than those in our last set of bars.

Finally, we’ll be back at the New Taste Marketplace this weekend. Over the past year, the New Taste has helped us get feedback about our chocolate and find a market in the city. If you’re free on Saturday, I hope you can come by. It’s a great place to check new food businesses, and we’ll be there with lots of bars to try! It’s 12-5 PM at 500 DeHaro Street.

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.

State of the Union

August 13, 2011 by

We’re out on Bartlett every Thursday night at the Mission Community Market. It’s been a fantastic way to meet customers in the factory’s neighborhood. We’re really looking forward to the day when we have our doors open in the Mission! Every Thursday night we get a few of the same questions. I thought I’d take a minute to give you all an update.

The most common question, and the one we’re most eager to answer ourselves: when will the factory be open? You may remember, we put our 312 notice up in the window of 740 Valencia Street a few months ago. Thankfully, that process is complete, and we’re working on the next series of permits we need to open our space. We found out a week or so ago that we’ve received the Change of Use permit for the building. Now our landlord’s waiting on some building permits before he can start the initial construction. A short time after that, we should be able to start our construction. Fingers crossed!

We also have exciting news about our packaging. A few months ago, we hired two incredibly talented graphic designers, and we’re working toward a new iteration of our packaging. We get a lot of compliments on our current version, but we think we can take it up a notch. There are things we love about what we have now, especially the overall aesthetic and the color scheme. But, the first designs we’ve seen from our graphic designers have blown us away. As soon as we have things ready, we’ll give you a peek.

Things are also busy on the wholesale front and we’re keeping extremely busy making chocolate. We always say that it’s a great problem to have, but we can’t seem to make bars fast enough these days. You can pick up or try a bar at Chocolate Covered, Fog City News, Mission Cheese, The Chocolate Garage, and Serendipity. We’ve heard that our Madagascar bars seem to be the most popular in lots of these shops.

Also, we’re making great headway on sourcing our next set of beans. As I write, I’m sitting in front of a roaster testing out some new Ecuadorian beans. It smells a little like chocolate poptarts in the room as the beans roast, and I’m excited to taste our first batch from this sample! In the next few months, we should have a few new bars to add to our lineup.

Finally, like most summers, we’ve all been busy traveling. Cam just got back from the muggy east coast. In a few days, Todd and Cam are both taking heading off to Vermont and then Hawaii for friends’ weddings, and I’ll be in Texas later this month. While Todd and Cam are in Hawaii they’re hoping to meet Seneca of Koka Chocolate. Seneca is one of the founders of Bittersweet Cafe in San Francisco and Oakland. Now he’s growing cacao and making chocolate on Oahu. While they’re gone, I get to take care of Cam’s very snuggly dog, Tatsu.

 

That’s all for now, back to making chocolate!

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.

 

Around town

July 21, 2011 by

We’re keeping incredibly busy these days. We’ve had a few events that have connected us to San Francisco chocolate lovers with great palettes. And, there are more coming up soon!

Tuesday night, Adam of Fog City News hosted a tasting event in his space. He brought in customers who have tasted as many as 200 different bars of chocolate. We introduced them to our bars from Tanzania, Costa Rica, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Madagascar. We also asked for their help tasting different roasting profiles for a new batch of beans we have from the Dominican Republic. We were happy to have honest feedback from people who have tried a lot of chocolate and know what they look for in an excellent bar. They offered their opinions of our bars, our concept, and our packaging. It was a great opportunity for us.

Next, we’ll be at the Mission Community Market as usual today from 4-8 PM out on Bartlett Street. Last week we sold out of bars from Madagascar before 5 PM, but we promise to have more this afternoon.

Then, on Sunday, we’ll be at Pot + Pantry in the Mission for a great event hosted by FARMcurious. You can read more about the event here. We’ll be participating with Punk Domestics and Karen Solomon, author of Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It. It should be a great morning- you’ll be able to learn to make cheese and cocktail infusions, taste some chocolate, and walk away with a signed copy of Karen’s book. We’ll be there from 11 AM – 3 PM. Hope you can come by!

Last but not least, we finished putting together our wholesaling package. You can now find us on the dessert menu at Mission Cheese. Hopefully, in the next few weeks you’ll be able to pick up our bars at a few other shops in the area. We’ll let you know where, but keep your eyes out!

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.

Busy, busy, busy

July 12, 2011 by

You may have noticed that we haven’t posted in a while. We’ve been busier and busier making chocolate. It’s a great problem to have. There are orders pouring in, and we’re working hard to keep up! You can catch us each week at the Mission Community Market, and this weekend we’ll be at the New Taste Marketplace from 12-5 PM at 500 De Haro Street. For each, we’ll have single origin bars from Costa Rica, Madagascar, and Venezuela.

We’ll also have posts up in a few days with new updates. Todd traveled to the FCIA event in D.C. and we have a few new machines and process improvements to share. Look out for more soon.

You can also check us out here, we’re the Ourtisan of the week!

 

Mission Community Market

June 28, 2011 by

Starting this Thursday, you’ll be able to find us each week at the Mission Community Market! We’ll be out on Bartlett Street, between 21st and 22nd, from 4-8 PM. The Mission Community Market started last year, aiming to create a new community gathering space. There are a lot of great vendors, with produce, prepared foods, and delicious things for dinner. We’re really excited to meet some of our future neighbors; we hope you’ll come check it out. We’ll have single-origin dark chocolate bars from Madagascar, Venezuela, and Costa Rica, with lots of samples to share. See you Thursday!

Market this weekend

June 22, 2011 by

Come visit us this weekend in Berkeley! We’ll be at the Firehouse East Bazaar, which coincides with the Juneteenth Festival. Both promise great food and lots of arts and crafts vendors. We’ll be at 3192 Adeline at MLK Boulevard, across from the Berkeley Flea Market and we’d love to see you there. We’ll have single origin bars from Venezuela, Madagascar, and Costa Rica.

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!