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Two Chocolate Garages

August 8, 2011 by

On Saturday we spent a really inspiring day in another chocolate garage in Palo Alto. We have our own garage, our lab, in East Palo Alto. But, The Chocolate Garage is just a few blocks away, founded by Sunita de Tourreil. We met Sunita a few months ago, and she’s been a wonderful neighbor. Her mission at The Chocolate Garage is to educate. She supports new makers, connecting them to other experts in the industry and introducing her customers to their bars. Her mission is to bring attention to “Happy Chocolate“- chocolate that tastes delicious, but also has integrity in its cacao sourcing and connection to the farmer. We really appreciate her approach. When our space is open in San Francisco, we also hope to have a large educational component of our factory operation. It’s rewarding and exciting to teach chocolate lovers about all the care and effort involved in making chocolate.

Because she’s our neighbor, it’s been very easy to drop by and visit Sunita. A few weeks ago, she came to our garage to try bars Todd brought back from the FCIA event in D.C. and to see our process for roasting test batches. Then on Saturday, Sunita hosted us during the Palo Alto Farmers’ Market. She holds open hours during the farmers’ market, and has many regulars that stop by after shopping for produce. It’s a nice space with comfortable chairs and couches, and it draws in people eager to taste new chocolate and learn about the process of making bars from the bean. Each Saturday she puts together a tasting, and I encourage you to drop by at some point. During the hours we were there, we met lots of her regulars and shared our bars. We chatted about our factory, but also got to talk about the delicious mulberries at the market and the way the market came about in the early 80’s. The Chocolate Garage has a great community.

After our morning with new customers, Alex Rast of Seventypercent.com dropped by to taste our bars as well. He was in town from England, and graciously offered to give us feedback and a lot of incredibly valuable information about process improvements and formal tastings. Alex works with Martin Christy and others at Seventypercent.com to give comprehensive reviews of chocolate bars. His palette is exceptional, but more impressive is his scientific knowledge of bringing out flavor from the bean. He had all kinds of insights, and we will undoubtedly use his feedback to improve our bars. Though, he did offer one piece of advice that we may ignore. He told us that the best way to cleanse your palette is with watery polenta, which he described as having the consistency of gruel. No doubt he’s right- maybe we should go ahead and give it a try! We look forward to keeping in touch with him. He’s a great resource, and we really appreciate the introduction from Sunita.

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!