I Left My (Chocolate) Heart in San Francisco

At Pier 17 on San Francisco’s waterfront, set among the palm trees and blue skies, sits a squat cement building stamped with the words “New American Chocolate.” Inside, a high-tech scientific development center is leading the revolution in chocolate science, studying things like wild fermentation and plant genetics… all for the sake of better tasting chocolate. TCHO is a chocolate company with high-tech roots: Co-owner Louis Rossetto was the founder and former publisher of Wired Magazine, and founding partner Timothy Childs was a NASA scientist designing machine vision systems for space shuttles before he turned to chocolate making. Through the photos below, join us for a tour of the facility, and get a glimpse at how chocolate goes from bean to bar.

Chief Chocolate Maker and tropical botanist Brad Kintzer describes cacao plants, with their enormous pods, as “Dr. Seussy.” Cacao beans, from inside the pods, are what will eventually become chocolate, but not before they get removed, fermented, checked for brix levels (sugar), roasted, blended with sugar, vanilla, and sometimes milk.

Cacao beans, from the interior of cacao pods, were almost designed by nature to not be eaten. They’re extremely bitter on their own, but the plus side is that animals would spit them out—basically sowing the cacao tree’s seeds. But the first step to making them into delicious chocolate is fermenting them, which breaks down their flavor components and gives them complexity. TCHO controls the fermentation process by aging beans and splitting them in half to monitor their ripeness.

TCHO meticulously monitors the brix, or sugar level, of their chocolate, as a winemaker watches the same levels in his wines. Kintzer explained that chocolate research is at least 50 years behind knowledge about grapes.

TCHO works with communities throughout South America to harvest their local cacao varieties. The effects of different climates, elevation, geography, genetics, and wild fermentation are just beginning to be understood, since each indigenous population works with their beans according to their own traditions, often with no documentation of technique. But TCHO’s “bean team” finds that the same plant grown on just opposite sides of the Andes produces dramatically different chocolate.

Ever the technology nerds enthusiasts, the TCHO team keeps this vintage command station from an old European castle by their super high-tech gear. It’s kind of a machine mascot.

Here’s how TCHO’s bite-sized TCHO-a-Day chocolate palettes get made:

Step 1: Tempered chocolate goes into molds.

Step 2: Molds get cleaned off and the chocolate dries, nearly instantly.

Step 3: The chocolates get flipped out of the molds.

Step 4: Voila. They even look like computer chips.

TCHO’s flavor wheels make the point that chocolate doesn’t have one flavor, it has many. They point out that one chocolate’s fruity aromas predominate, while others are nutty or earthy, etc. They don’t add flavorings, except sugar for sweetness, vanilla, and in some cases, milk, which tastes almost caramelly because they first cook the milk.

TCHO has won numerous design awards fro their packaging, including the gold medal from the European Design Awards and the Academy of Chocolate. I went gaga for the most recent release of TCHO’s chocolates, alphabet-emblazoned boxes designed by Morla Design, whose work has appeared in collections at the MOMA, SFMoMA and the Library of Congress.

On learning about TCHO's ethical production methods and community development practices, Ruth spoke for all of us when she said, "I want to feel good about the things I love." Here she is with “The Bean Team”: Chief Chocolate Maker Brad Kintzer, VP of Sourcing and Development John Kehoe, and Director of Sales Robert Kopf.