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Archive | wholesale

Chocolate on Two Coasts!

April 9, 2012 by

I’m taking a trip to Boston this weekend and so is our chocolate. We met one of our retailers, Formaggio Kitchen, at the Good Food Awards in January. They won for their in-house charcuterie and had a chance to taste our chocolate while visiting SF. Awesomely, they were one of the first shops to bring our chocolate to the east coast, introducing it to a whole new set of customers. They snapped this photo at one of their first tasting sessions, saying that our bars are a perfect after-dinner treat.

While I’m visiting this weekend, I’ll host a tasting on Saturday from 11 AM – 2 PM at their shop in Cambridge. If you live nearby, come visit! I’ll have our three bars to taste and I’ll be ready to answer any questions about making chocolate from the bean. Hope to see you there!

If you’d like to learn more about chocolate making, take a look at Chocolate 101 in our online store.

Hello, Four Barrel!

February 22, 2012 by

Don’t forget, we’ll be teaching Chocolate 101 next Wednesday night in our space. There are 15 spots and we’d love to see you there. Tickets are available in our store.

The next time you’re walking down Valencia Street craving our chocolate and eagerly awaiting our factory, you can make a stop at Four Barrel. As of last week, all of their chocolate drinks are made with our Madagascar.

We stopped by the cafe late last month to make a few test drinks. Our tasting wasn’t nearly as intense as the last time we made hot chocolate, but we did taste drinks made with our Colombia, Costa Rica, and Madagascar. Initially, we thought the Colombia would be best as a simple, sweet drinking chocolate, but the fruitiness of our Madagascar tasted incredible with Four Barrel’s coffee. The complexity of the chocolate played really well with the rich milk and espresso.

Our working with Four Barrel is an awesome partnership. We admired their space long before we met Jeremy and the rest of the crew. We’d be lucky to have a place as welcoming and good looking. And as two roasters on the same street, there’s a pretty unique opportunity for collaboration. When we open on Valencia, we’ll serve their coffee along with all of our hot chocolates.

Market Update

December 8, 2011 by

It’s been a long week… and it’s only wednesday. For the last few months, we’ve been scrambling to keep up with demand (great problem to have!) but this week one of our machines (our temperer) started acting up. This has put  a pretty big dent in our production capacity and, while we’d love to come to the market, we have some outstanding orders from our wholesale clients and we can’t let them down.

So, that means we’re going to have to skip tomorrow’s Mission Community Market in order to make more bars. We’ll miss you all but you can still grab our Madagascar bars as part of the market gift boxes.

While it’s not a market, we will be doing a small tasting outside Bi-Rite from 3-6 on Saturday. Stop by, say hello, and try our new Colombian bar! It has a lot of the same super-chocolatey flavor that we loved in the Venezuelan, but it definitely has its own soul. Hope to see you there!

 

See you tomorrow!

September 19, 2011 by

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!

 

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.

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.

Where to find us

August 2, 2011 by

We’re keeping busy making lots of chocolate these days. We’ve increased production to fulfill a few new wholesale orders for shops in San Francisco. You can now find our bars at Chocolate Covered in Noe Valley and soon at Fog City News downtown. Both of these shops carry really well-curated collections of chocolate makers. We’ve gotten to know the owners of each shop, and both Jack and Adam are incredibly knowledgable and encouraging of new makers. If you go to check out our chocolate, be sure to ask for other favorites and recommendations.

Outside the city, you can also find us at Serendipity in San Carlos. It’s another wonderful shop dedicated to great chocolate. Fatima has a collection of local chocolatiers and makers. She also serves delicious coffee and chocolate drinks. I hope you can check it out!