Not too long ago, we dove into the project of designing paper to wrap our bars. We all pulled together our favorite inspiration images, and then Elaine and I set off to work designing patterns with the help of two incredibly talented graphic designers. I trekked to Austin to meet with one of our graphic designers and spent a number of days sketching repeated organic shapes at my desk. Elaine also excitedly poured hours into the project. About a month later, we have more fantastic patterns than we know what to do with.

Todd, Cam, Elaine, and I held the “pattern games” and let the patterns go head-to-head. We chose our favorites and are ready to place an order, hopefully before monsoon season strikes our printer in India. All told, I think we’re well on our way to having our own Dandelion-designed paper!

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!

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!

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!

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.

A little bit ago, we wrapped our 10,000th bar with a golden ticket inside. We did it right, too. We mixed it in with all our other bars and purposefully lost track of it. That weekend, we packed up for the farmer’s market and for our event at Love and Luxe. A few weeks went by and we didn’t hear anything. We figured the bar came back with the leftovers from the market, went to a wholesaler, and likely made its way across the country. Then, we found it!

Betsy, the owner of Love and Luxe, wrote us a very happy email saying that she’d opened the bar and found the golden ticket! We put together a box of treats for her and dropped it off a week ago. The box was a celebration of 10,000 bars, so it had to be awesome. We included lots of bars, whole roasted beans, nibs, pocky, ground chocolate for drinking and baking, and chocolate gems made with Betsy in mind.

I was lucky enough to bring it to her shop. Betsy was thrilled. After our Valentine’s event, she was so excited about chocolate that she bought 5 or 6 bars. She gave most of them away as gifts, but kept one for herself, buried in her purse. When she finally opened it, there was the ticket! Lesson learned, keeping chocolate all to yourself really pays off.

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

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

Despite Cam’s best efforts to keep us tempering and wrapping, we took a short break today to celebrate his and Chiann’s birthdays and gather inspiration for our packaging.

As we scale up, we need more paper and different patterns to wrap our bars. This gives us an awesome opportunity to design our own prints that really reflect us. We started the process today by gathering images and patterns on our wall. We talked about the things each of us likes and we’ll come back in a week to really get things moving. We have to work quickly to produce our paper before monsoon season hits our printer in India. For now, the wall above our hand-washing sink has never looked better!