Just wanted to wish everyone (in the US, at least) a Happy Thanksgiving! Todd, Alice, and I are currently spread throughout the continent for the holidays: Alice is in Boston, I’m in LA, and Todd’s in Mexico. Unfortunately, we won’t be back in time for this weekend’s Noe Valley Farmer’s Market on 11/26. We will be at next week’s Mission Community Market on 12/1 and the Noe market on 12/3. Hope to see you there.
Archive | event
I guess good news comes in pairs — we just found out that we picked up a few awards at last weekend’s Fall Chocolate Salon. We won gold medals for best organic / fair-trade chocolate and the new product awards, as well as silvers for best overall dark chocolate and dark chocolate bars. You can see the full list of winners here.
This salon is a smaller version of the giant Chocolate Salon that happens every year in the spring. It’s a bit more intimate and it was great place for us to catch up with some friends we hadn’t seen in a while and meet some new ones. Here’s a shot of Alice and me with our friend Zeina, a few hours before Alice hopped on a plane to Madagascar.
Special thanks to Corinne for the photos — Corinne has embarked un a multi-year bet to eat a different chocolate everyday. She is currently up to 1,800 chocolates eaten so far. You can check out her blog here: www.chocolatebanquet.com.
Cam and I are back from our weekend in Seattle at the Northwest Chocolate Festival! Thanks so much to the organizers- the event drew thousands of excited chocolate fans.
We started the weekend by setting up our booth at the Seattle Center and taking a walk up to Chocolopolis, a clean and beautiful shop on Queen Anne that sells our chocolate. We met the owner, Lauren Adler, a few months ago in D.C. and we’re lucky to be featured in her store. She has our bars on display and in her craft-makers tasting kit!
From there, we went to the “Meet the Makers” reception on Friday night. We got to chat with other makers and friends. We sampled a bunch of bars, which got us excited for the weekend ahead. Then, at 10 AM on Saturday, there was a line of hundreds of chocolate lovers waiting at the door, all clamoring to come taste bars and confections. While each of our bars has its adamant supporters, the Madagascar was our biggest seller this weekend. In a room full of people who know and eat great chocolate, it’s easy to see why so many people are drawn to a bar with bright, bold flavor. Also, apparently Kristy Leissle, the Doc of Choc, has been talking us up! A number of people came up to our booth saying, “I’ve heard I have to try your bars.” It was a great feeling. Thanks, Kristy.
We came home at the end of the night pretty tired. It was all I could do to stay up later than Cam’s 3-year-old nephew. Fortunately, we were able to enlist his help with our accounting, and get our work done quickly for the night!
We’re home now, with lots more work to do. We’re looking ahead to November, getting ready for the holidays and the Fall Chocolate Salon. It’s time to get back to making chocolate!
We started selling our chocolate at the Noe Valley Farmer’s Market a few weeks ago, and it’s been an awesome opportunity for us. It seems like there are lots of chocolate lovers in the neighborhood. This Saturday, we’ll be at the Noe Valley Harvest Festival from 10 AM – 5 PM, on 24th Street between Church and Sanchez. We won’t be at the farmer’s market that morning, so if you have an early morning chocolate craving, you’ll have to wait until the festival opens at 10. But, we’ll be there!
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.
It’s a late night of chocolate making, getting ready for the Noe Valley Farmer’s Market tomorrow morning. Todd made some snacks to keep us going! Ahh, yes, the perks of working at a chocolate factory.
Come visit tomorrow morning at 3861 24th Street, between Sanchez and Vicksburg Streets from 8 AM – 1 PM.
We’re headed to Fog City News tomorrow for a lunchtime chocolate tasting. We’ll be at the shop, at 455 Market Street, from 12-2 PM. We’re excited to share a few details about our process and samples from our new batches from Costa Rica and Madagascar. One of the toys we’re bringing is our magra. We’ll demonstrate a bean cut-test, and let everyone see what our beans look like on the inside. This is the easiest and most effective ways for us to examine our beans’ fermentation and ripeness. Come take a look!
We also made a limited edition of our Tanzanian chocolate for Adam at Fog City News a little bit ago, and we’re bringing the last few bars from this batch to him tomorrow. Hope to see you then!
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.
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.
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!