After many months, our online store is open! We shut our store down in December in order to keep up with our growing wholesale demand. At the time, we were struggling with our temperer and working hard to grow our production while our demand continues to increase. It feels pretty momentous to open the store again. We’ve made great strides with our production pipeline in the past few months. Cam’s taken on the role of production manager and has been busy whipping us into shape. He makes an epically long to-do list for us every morning and puts it on our chalkboard. After a few long days in February, we threatened to get him a smaller chalkboard with less room to pile on tasks. But, instead, we rose to the challenge of cranking out bars.

We’ve made a few other process improvements as well. Caitlin’s now an expert temperer, meaning there are extra hands to help make bars. Cam created a timer for our roaster. We now hear the Oompa Loompa song from Willy Wonka every time another round of beans is done. Todd and Greg have been working overtime on our cracker. And, the rest of us are pitching in as well. All these things together mean that we have bars on hand and are ready to sell them in our online store.

If you click over to our store, you’ll find our bars from Madagascar, Colombia, and Ocumare along with gift sets and tickets to our Chocolate 101 classes. We’ve also included a note about shipping in the warm summer weather. We have to be careful with our bars in the heat, so we’ll only ship out orders on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. We’ll take every precaution we can, but if you receive bars that have suffered in the heat, please let us know and we’ll happily replace them.

In the past few months, we received a few emails from chocolate lovers eager to buy our bars and we’re happy that you all now have ready access. Thanks for waiting!

Our container is finally in the country! It’s on board the MSC Francesca, which is currently in LA, so it has one more short journey before it arrives in Oakland. We just heard from our customs agent that the beans have been cleared by the FDA, but they still need to be inspected by customs because we’re a new importer (gotta make sure we didn’t slip any guns in with our beans). Assuming smooth sailing (har har), we could have access to the beans in just a week or two.

Things are moving along quickly. Dirt’s flying and our plumber’s laid pipes with incredible attention to detail.

And, we found our own buried treasure- rubble from the 1906 earthquake!

We’re teaching Chocolate 101 again on May 31 at our production kitchen in the Dogpatch. There are still a few tickets available in our online store. I hope you can join us!

There’s movement! We got our first update from our project manager, George, and our foreman, Ed, on Friday. The construction of our factory on Valencia Street is underway. We’ve been waiting a long time and it’s incredibly exciting to see the space start to come to life. We’ll keep you updated, but you can also check out all the photos on our flickr page.

We’re teaching Chocolate 101 again on May 31 at our production kitchen in the Dogpatch. There are still a few tickets available in our online store. I hope you can join us!

We got a bit of great news — we finally have our building permit! It’s been a long, hard road getting permits from the city, so we were thrilled when we got the okay to pick it up. This was the last step before we could start building the interior of our space.

George, our construction project manager, and I headed down to the building department to grab it in person. Of course, when we got there, it was missing a stamp and had been taken back into the system. We spent a good chunk of time scurrying between floors searching for the lost signatures. Finally they decided we were all good and let us stamp the plans! (That’s George above stamping each page).

As we’ve been waiting for this to happen, the construction crew was all ready to go, measuring and planning all of the plumbing:

And no groundbreaking would be complete without a photo of me holding a shovel looking like I just dug up a giant pile of rocks!

Sometimes blog posts just write themselves. This one was super easy. I walked in to the factory today and found a disk of beautiful pictures taken by Laurie Frankel. Enjoy and have a great weekend!

All set for the Next Big Small Brand Event

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to accompany Todd to New York for the Next Big Small Brand Contest.  Picture this.

A room full of people excitedly salivating at the prospects of trying six different companies’ delicious attempts to win over the judges in their favor, a panel of celebrity judges (celebrities in the food world at least!), and two humble chocolate makers fresh off the plane from sunny California…fine let’s be honest, from not-as-sunny but still really awesome San Francisco.  The room is buzzing with foodies intent on exercising their honed taste buds to suss out who is going to be the next hottest food entrepreneur.  Questions fly.  Todd and I explain the nuances of our chocolate and how we can tease out the amazingly different flavors from just cocoa beans and sugar.  We refill the sample bowls, smile with delight as people’s expressions turn to shock and joy while taste traveling around the globe from Colombia to Venezuela and last, to Madagascar.

Many characters and a few familiar faces later, it is time to announce the winners…Todd and I make our way onto the stage.  After thank you’s all around, without a drum roll they announce people’s choice, a fellow SF company, Black Jet.  And the Next Big Small Brand Winner is…New York SuperFoods.  WAIT WHAT?  NOT DANDELION?  Hold up.

So we didn’t win.  But we met some amazing people, now have a beautifully done video about what we do, and NY SuperFoods is an awesome up-and-coming company who could really use the branding help to go big.  We were so lucky to be a part of the event and had a blast spreading the word about our chocolate to the other coast.

While we were in New York, we took the opportunity to stop by and see friends at the Meadow and Formaggio Essex (both carry our chocolate).  The Meadow’s display was beautiful and the shop was an oasis of calm in the craziness of New York.  Formaggio is located in food mecca with different vendors around the periphery reminiscent of markets in Europe.  We are so excited they are selling our chocolate.

The Meadow

We also took a field trip to the Bronx (I made it to 4 out of 5 boroughs while I was there!) to see Jim Greenberg at Union Confectionary who has a 1950′s Otto Hansel wrapping machine for us to check out.  He showed us around his wonderland of vintage temperers, panners (used to make chocolate covered nuts, etc), and other candy-making equipment.  The crowning glory (besides our excitement at seeing the wrapping machine) was a mini model chocolate factory built for the 1896 Chicago World’s Fair that purportedly inspired Hershey to move from confections to making chocolate.  It is crazy to me that factories used to be run from one engine attached to a series of giant leather belts…feeling pretty good about working in a “modern” chocolate factory.

The mini model chocolate factory that inspired Hershey to start making chocolate!

I even managed to squeeze in some touristy fun.  Todd was a great sport about being a “tourist” for the day (he is from Connecticut, which for you West coasters with hazy East coast geography is right next to New York).  Between calls back to the shop to make sure everything was going okay in SF, I managed to get him to pose for a picture at Grand Central Station and we may or may not have taken a whirl on the Staten Island ferry just to get a closer look at Lady Liberty.  We also did some “research” about what makes the best hot chocolate by sampling what NY had to offer.   We will be unveiling our results when our Valencia Street space opens.

Look at those goofy tourists at Grand Central Station

All in all, a great first trip to New York and being part of the Next Big Small Brand Contest was an amazing experience.

We have 3 more pairs of hands around the chocolate factory these days, and they’re all pretty fantastic. Caitlin joined us in January and Natalie and Cynthia have been helping out for the past few weeks. All together, we make a great chocolate-making team.

You’ll have a chance to meet Cynthia this Thursday at the first Mission Community Market of the season. She’ll be there every Thursday evening, with help from the rest of us, from 4-8 PM on Bartlett Street between 21st and 22nd. The Mission Community Market is one of our favorite events. Last year we got to know a great group of customers and fellow vendors. For us, the market’s a lot like our office hours. It’s only a few blocks from the site of our factory space on Valencia, so it’s a great time to meet people in our neighborhood and share our chocolate. Come say hello!

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

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.