From The Blog

Closer Every Day: Construction Update and a Peek Inside Our 16th Street Factory

March 11, 2019 by Annie Kamin

Annie, our Chief of Staff, has been working on a Herculean task for, quite literally, years. She is in charge of the buildout of our just-out-of-reach 16th Street Factory in San Francisco. From plumbing snafus to signature cards, electrical work to signage, she’s left her mark on nearly every bolt, hinge, and joist of the space (opening in about a month). This story is her recall of the trials by fire of one of the largest projects of her life, and a preview of what’s inside.

Much like an expertly crafted bar of single-origin chocolate, building a chocolate factory takes equal parts skill, patience, determination, finesse, creativity, and, in all honesty, perhaps a whisper of insanity.

It’s fun, but it definitely has not been easy.

We’ve been working on building our 16th Street Factory for over four years, and at long last we are in the final stages of construction. I’ve been working on this project for just about two years now, and it has been hard to imagine this space as anything other than a construction site filled with the familiar and comforting sounds of hammering, welding, and drilling.

Chocolate machines inside the 16th Street Factory

Say hello to the TECHNOCHOC

For the past few months, we’ve been moving past more of the work that yields invisible progress (conduit runs to junction boxes, refrigerant lines, anything plumbing related) and we’ve started working on the finishes throughout the factory. With each light illuminated and each counter installed, the space is brought to life just a bit more.

It’s slightly bewildering, but even more thrilling, to think of the day in the not-so-distant future when I’ll be able to enter a room using a door with a handle instead of walking through the giant void where a window is supposed to be. The chaotic hammering, sawing, and drilling will soon be replaced by the quiet hum of the roaster, the gentle whoosh of the winnower, and the hypnotic white noise of our stone melangers hard at work.

I never thought that a question as simple as, “When will you be open?” could be so difficult to answer. We are so close to completion, but still have the lingering uncertainty of our final inspections ahead of us. Are there enough exit signs? Are the soap dispensers in all of the right places? Will they tell us we need ANOTHER PERMIT? If we manage to pass all of these inspections with flying colors, with colors, or even with a simple checkmark, we’ll be ready to open around the end of April. If we don’t, well, we’ll fix what needs to be fixed and try again the next week. Regardless, we are in the final stages of construction, and the building will without a doubt be open to the public soon…very soon.

Banquettes in the Dandelion Chocolate 16th Street Factory

Banquettes in progress

When you work on a project all day, every day for years, it can be easy to lose sight of the scale and the beauty of exactly what it is you’re doing. We’re building something that has some elements that San Francisco hasn’t seen in decades, and others that the city has yet to experience.

Yes, but…what’s inside??

The 16th Street Factory will have a café that is reminiscent of our Valencia St. location, but it will be slightly smaller and geared more toward folks who want to stop in, grab a Mission Mocha and a cookie (yes, for breakfast), and get to work.

Melangers making chocolate in the 16th Street Factory

The melangers are spinning on our first batches of chocolate made in the space

There is also the option of following a not-so-secret path that starts at the café and leads you down a small set of stairs, past our circa 1920’s freight elevator, and onto our catwalk that provides an intimate look at the roasting, winnowing, and melanging processes. At the end of the catwalk is our bleacher seating, where anyone who wishes to visit the factory can sit, relax, and watch our chocolate makers hard at work.

Chocolate salon inside the 16th Street Factory

The chocolate salon is underway

Sound exciting? That’s only a third of the factory! Directly adjacent to our café is a gleaming, gorgeous room that is home to our chocolate salon, an elevated pastry and chocolate dining experience that will offer a decadent breakfast menu, our chocolatey take on afternoon tea, and eventually, plated desserts in the evening. We’ve applied for a beer and wine license for the space, but, shockingly, we’ve hit a few snags and we are still working on securing it.

Our Chocolate Experiences team will be offering classes, both new and classic, and more opportunities for private events and event rental in the space. We also have a small amount of workspace where our teams can plan and coordinate to help the business run.

We are so proud of what we’ve built and we cannot wait to share it with you all. Stay tuned for exciting updates on our progress, an opening date, and more via our newsletter and Instagram. I’m looking forward to hosting you in our newest factory very, very soon.

Office space inside the Dandelion Chocolate 16th Street Factory

Upstairs office space in the works

A Visit to Areté Chocolate

February 26, 2019 by Ryan O'Connell

Ryan is a chocolate maker at our 16th Street factory, as well as a frequent traveler and motorcycle enthusiast.

Before Areté Fine Chocolate moved from Milpitas, California to Spencer, Tennessee in spring of 2018, Eric, Snooky, and myself had the pleasure of seeing the glory of what was, at the time, still their semi-operational facility before they’d fully packed up for their move. Areté Chocolate is owned and operated by David and Leslie Senk. As of our visit, David and Leslie were Areté’s only employees.

After meeting the Senks and seeing their process, it was abundantly apparent they are people of high personal and professional integrity, which very much shines through in their careful processing and top-shelf chocolate. Throughout the day, as our conversations meandered through chocolate theory, some noteworthy similarities and differences between us stood out:

We both believe in the importance of data collection to understand outcomes in the chocolate making process.
We both believe that when the chocolate is tempered may make a difference in its flavor. Aging chocolate and its impact on flavor is something we look forward to testing in more depth.
Areté removes the radicle from all of their beans, which is something we’ve always wanted to do and are we are working towards.
Much of their process is a result of custom and creative adaptations to fit their evolving needs while not sacrificing quality. Similarly, improving our quality is central to – and runs parallel with – our reflexive metrics for success as we continue to grow.
Areté makes all their chocolate in mini melangers, such as the ones we use for experiments.
David believes temperature control is crucial to consistent, predictable flavor.
We both believe that testing one variable at a time through experimentation is the best practice.
We’ve developed our own process for removing broken and moldy beans prior to roasting. At Areté, all moldy beans are removed after the beans are broken, one by one, through his mechanized, creatively-engineered process, speaking to the ingenuity and passion behind the operation.
After roasting in a convection oven, David’s beans are removed and then rapidly cooled to prevent any further, unwanted roasting. In a similar fashion, our beans are cooled in our drum roaster’s cooling tray post-roast.

The refining and conching room of Areté Chocolate

Takeaways to consider for experimentations or reinforcing in our current chocolate making practices:

We should continue to consider results of experiments done by others, while holding off on drawing any conclusions until a hypothesis can be tested through our own experiments.
We should also continue to revisit the effects of aging chocolate, with future experiments to support our previous investigations.
We should investigate further experiments testing the effects of melanger chocolate temperature, which may lead to more stringent temperature control guidelines and an improved understanding of how process temperature directs flavor.
Consider moving toward 2:1 mineral oil to chocolate ratio when testing microns via micrometer.

My personal favorite part of the tour: Talking with all those present about chocolate, life, and the chocolate life; seeing the incredible passion, enthusiasm, and dedication that the Senks have for making great chocolate.

Favorite origin/product: Ben Tre, Vietnam

Fun fact: We will be working with Ben Tre cocoa beans and releasing our take on the origin in 2019!

Biggest challenges: Possibly scaling up while maintaining quality, and chocolate making as a sustainable business.

4000 Years and Counting: A History of Drinking Chocolate

February 16, 2019 by Amie Bailey

Amie Bailey is the General Manager of our soon-to-open 16th Street Factory, and she just started with us in January, 2019. She is a food blogger, a pastry chef, a hyper-organized person, and a fan of chocolate in all of its drinkable (and non-drinkable) forms.

For most of my childhood, the process of making hot chocolate started by opening a packet. I, for one, have always loved that aroma coming from the little foil envelope that can only be described as “sweet.”

These days I’m more likely to be enjoying a Mission Hot Chocolate at our Valencia cafe, or whisking up our Hot Chocolate Mix at home, and as a result I’ve been digging into the history of drinking chocolate. While bars of chocolate and confections are available around the world, historically we as humans have preferred drinking our chocolate over biting into a bar.

Let’s go back about 4000 years to 3300 BCE to prehistoric South America, in what is now known as Ecuador. In October of 2018, archeologists from UC Berkeley uncovered ceramic pots from the Mayo-Chincipe people with traces of cacao residue on them, making chocolate one of the oldest beverages known to humanity.

The Maya continued the tradition of drinking chocolate and passed it along generation after generation. It took many centuries for the Maya (and then the Aztec) people to develop the techniques for making chocolate into a beverage worthy of the devotion we pay it even today. Highly prized, chocolate was a reward, a sacrifice, a currency, and sometimes exclusive to royalty and the military (Montezuma II reportedly drank 50 golden goblets of hot chocolate per day).

It’s tempting to think that chocolate was only for the wealthy in ancient lands, but in ancient South and Central America, chocolate was truly a group activity. It’s a lot of work to grow, harvest, ferment, roast, and grind chocolate into a paste and then convert it into a drink. Our melangers refine our chocolate for four to five days after we roast and winnow the beans (depending on the origin), and they run on electricity! Imagine doing that by hand! Consequently, and up until very recently in history, chocolate has been hard to come by. While maybe not *everyone* got 50 cups per day in Mesoamerica, it’s likely that everyone got a taste of it.

Chocolate was also a decidedly different experience back then. None of these cultures grew and processed sugar, and honey was harvested in the wild and by chance. Chocolate wasn’t just “not sweet”; it was pretty bitter – more akin to coffee than what we think of hot chocolate. It was also mixed with a variety of spices, vanilla, ground corn, or almonds.

None of these cultures were traditional herding cultures either, so the chocolate was made with water rather than milk. The texture came from pouring it from cup to cup to create foam. Today, Mexican Hot Chocolate is made with a molinillo, and the foam is considered particularly desirable.

Cruising right up to 1500 AD, the Spanish invade and conquer these cultures in a brutal fashion, taking not just their gold, but their cacao (and the skills they developed to make it into chocolate) as well. Cortez presented cacao for the first time in Europe, and from there drinking chocolate found favor and fame throughout the continent. Sometime in the 17th century Europeans began to eschew adding spicy chili pepper to their drink in favor of sugar, which was expensive but available.

The pirate botanist (what a job title!) William Hughes published a book in 1672 titled The American Physitian that devoted an entire chapter to “The Cacao Nut Tree” and the ways in which it could be prepared for drinking, going so far as to call it “The American Nectar.”

In the 18th century, we see chocolate houses rising right alongside London’s famed coffee houses as places to gather, gamble, and carouse. At this time and in these places, chocolate had reached its most opulent form to date, with sugar being bountiful and using dairy instead of water to make the beverage. Many of these places still exist in London today and you can see them, or at least the outside. White’s is one of the best known. This is where Prince Charles had his bachelor party, and it does not admit any woman other than The Queen of England. You can also view The Cocoa Tree on Pall Mall in St. James’s London which is now The Royal Automobile Club.

17th century British chocolate house

From there, mass availability followed lock step with the industrial revolution. It wasn’t THE first thing to be made in a factory, but it was really close. In 1828, Dutch chemist Coenraad Johannes van Houten invented the process of extracting the cocoa butter from chocolate leaving a cake that is pulverized into powder. With this invention we enter the era of Hot Cocoa (made from cocoa powder) taking the lead over Hot Chocolate (made from the paste of cocoa nibs) and making the drink widely available (unless you were a very, very lucky child) and what we all grew up with.

With small-batch and bean-to-bar chocolate gaining a wider and wider audience, I think we live in one of the best times for enjoying Theobroma cacao, the scientific name for chocolate, meaning “food of the gods” in ancient Greek. From enjoying single-origin chocolate bars to drinking a spicy Mission Hot Chocolate at our cafés, I hope you’ll join us at our shops or online to explore.

Learn more about the history of chocolate.

Resources:

Science Magazine Online: World’s Oldest Chocolate Was Made 5300 Years Ago – In a South American Rainforest

Smithsonian Magazine Online, What We Know About the Earliest History of Chocolate

Gastro Obscura, The Rambunctious, Elitist Chocolate Houses of 18th-Century London

Cooking In the Archives

Chocolate Class, Enlightenment-Era Chocolate/Coffee Houses

Pleasant Vices Video on Making Mayan Style Hot Chocolate in the 18th Century Manner

Hot Chocolate, William Hughes’s ‘American Nectar

Chocolate Ganache Macaron Gift Box for Valentine’s Day

February 4, 2019 by Karen Solomon

Dandelion Chocolate chocolate ganache macaron for Valentine's Day

Loving people can be sweet. But the love of a good cookie can be transformative! For the third year in a row, we are delighted to be tucking our kitchen’s handmade pink macarons into pretty bowed boxes special for Valentine’s Day. Crisp and chewy almond meringue cookies sandwich a Camino Verde, Ecuador single-origin chocolate ganache — this year with the flavors of the kitchen team’s favorite cocktails.

If you’re local to San Francisco, we can’t wait for you to see these – and, of course, to taste them! Mary and the whole kitchen team have been flooded with preparations. You can only imagine what 2,000 macaron tops and bottoms in petal pink look like when spread across our tiny kitchen. We’re only able to produce 100 boxes. And because they’re too delicate to ship, you can only find them at our SF Valencia Street and Ferry Building shops.

In the 2017 blog post Mary wrote the first year we offered this seasonal gift, she points out the difficulty of getting the texture of the cookies right while trying to make so many all at once. “The reason macarons are usually only found in bakeries and restaurants, rather than the home kitchen, is probably that they are a rather intimidating project to take on. Admittedly, if you don’t have a great deal of experience making them, even if you’re a professional baker like I am, the prospect of making macarons can be a little…frightening.”

Why the fear? “The thing about macarons is that something can go wrong at nearly every single step of the process, and they are delicate: the almond flour must be ground and sifted finely enough, the egg whites must be at room temperature, the meringue must be folded into the almond-sugar mixture enough (but not too much!). This process is known as macaronage, and when done correctly, it produces a thick batter that flows like lava but still holds its shape when piped.” Like many great elements of French cooking, the ingredient list for the cookies is simple: ground almonds, egg whites, and sugar. And quite literally, the temperature or humidity of the air can make or break these cookies. It is no small feat to get that perfect crisp-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside texture every time.

The single-origin chocolate ganache filling, made with our Camino Verde, Ecuador ground chocolate and rich cream to make it silky, takes a new twist every year. For 2019, it’s cocktail time! (The rich, chocolatey center will have the flavor of the spirits, but almost none of the booze.) Each box contains 10 macarons total with two of each flavor: Fernet, Mai Tai, Manhattan, Negroni, and Paloma.

The beautiful, reusable gift box is decorated with one of the pretty patterns we design ourselves, and finished with a satin bow we tie by hand. Find the macaron gift box in both of our SF shops February 13th and 14th, 2019, for $35. We’ll also have bouquets of flowers on hand on Valencia Street to help you woo your Valentine.

My unexpected path to
Dandelion Chocolate Los Angeles

December 3, 2018 by Norah Hernandez

Norah is one of our original employees, and she has worn many hats and tied a lot of bows on our behalf. Right now she’s writing to us from LA, where she’s heading up our newest pop-up shop.

Six years ago this month, the WSJ published two tiny lines that declared: “Dandelion Chocolate makes some of the best chocolate in the world”. Dandelion Chocolate was so small back then, they could not handle the influx of online orders that came through following this little write up. With only 11 or so people in the company at the time, they needed some extra hands to help fulfill these orders for some of the best chocolate in the world – and this is where my journey with Dandelion began.

Norah and her team inside Dandelion Chocolate LA

At the time, I had no experience in chocolate, and thought, what the heck, how fun would it be to help at a chocolate factory! The one day gig included stickering bars (which we did by hand back then), sorting beans, foiling bars and tying the three packs with ribbon. Without realizing it, my first summer job at Tiffany & Co. many, many years prior, helped shaped the iconic Dandelion Chocolate bow. Maya showed me how they had been tying the bow, and without thinking, my muscle memory kicked in and I started tying the bows as I had been trained so many years ago. I owe this talent to be possibly the single reason that I was asked to come back day after day (at that time they could not afford to officially hire me until February of the following year), so I came in every day not knowing if it would be my last and this magical workplace would come to an end. My patience paid off and in February of 2013, I became an official employee and started working on the production team.

Back then, everyone wore many many hats and helped fill voids where ever it was needed, this led to me helping with gift box development and production after work and on the weekends, which turned into the start of our product department. In 2014 I became our first product manager and brand manager (I secretly feel I still hold this title because of the love I feel for our brand), and was responsible for developing new products, the production of current products, merchandising our retail shelves and making sure everything visual was always on-brand.

I eventually transitioned into the retail department when the Ferry Building manager gave notice two years ago. I took this opportunity to use my previous retail expertise and help the company where they needed me most. We were a small hot chocolate stand outside and this location had some challenges. After improving systems and sales during the first few months, the Ferry Building invited us to move inside to the old Scharffen Berger shop. We jumped at the chance to have one of the highly coveted shops inside this iconic San Francisco destination. Overseeing the construction last fall, we were able to open (by the skin of our teeth) the weekend before Christmas. Moving just a few hundred yards inside, we saw an immediate doubling of sales. The Ferry Building had become a real sustainable location for the company.

In the spring of last year, my family made a decision to move to Los Angeles. This decision came with the reality that I would have to leave a company that had made a permanent mark on me, and hopefully I too had made a small mark on it. When I first told Todd I was moving and joked that we should open in LA, he laughed, and then must have thought about it as a serious idea and came back to me and asked if I was really serious. I mean, how could I not be! Moving to a city that I love and bringing the chocolate and the company that I adore to share with this city has been an amazing opportunity for me. If there is anything I know about LA from living here years ago, it is that this city appreciates good food, beautiful design and amazing stories. I am so excited to share all those things through our pop-up at ROW DTLA for the next six months.

the outside of the Dandelion Chocolate LA shop

We have been open in LA for one week now and I have already met the some of the most amazing people (and kids). I cannot wait to share our story about chocolate and who we are as a company of now ~95 people. This a long way from the days when we all fit around the 12 person table on the mezzanine for All Hands, or the days when Maya started a rumor that if we hit a sales goal, Todd would take us all to Hawaii. At that next All Hands, his last slide just had the word “Rumors” on it, he told us, and I quote, “it would be crazy to shut down and pay for the whole company to go to Hawaii, so it’s lucky for you that we are crazy, we are all going to Hawaii!” Todd’s not crazy, he’s a brilliant visionary and I am so lucky to have stumbled upon his small dream for a chocolate factory he thought maybe 4 people would visit every day.

We will be open at ROW DTLA through April 2019 and our hours are M-F 11-7, Sat & Sun 10-6. We will start hosting Chocolate 101 classes on December 14 and 15 and you can find more details about how to sign up on our website under “Visit Us – Tours & Classes”.