By now you’ve heard of bean-to-bar chocolate, but have you heard of bar-to-bean? Our friend Ryan at Cat Trick Films made us an awesome and quirky video for our opening. Check out how chocolate bars are (un-)made:

Happy holidays from all of us at Dandelion Chocolate! Thanks for making this an awesome year. We’re humbled to be a part of this amazing community; the support we’ve gotten from our new friends, neighbors, volunteers, fellow chocolate makers, chocolatiers, and chocolate tasters has been overwhelming. We can’t wait to see what 2013 has in store!

We’ll be closed for some much needed rest and will see you all next year. As we’ve sold out of our very last bars, we will reopen the factory the second week in January once we’ve had time to replenish our stock. And look for the cafe soon!

Tomorrow is a big day for us — we are finally opening our doors to the public! It’s been a long time coming since we first saw Ron, our landlord, two years ago in the auto repair garage. We’re busy getting the final touches on our retail shelves and putting more batches in the melangers.

This is a limited opening, meaning we will have short hours for the near future. The factory will be running and we will have some new additions to our retail shelves including collaborations with local chocolatiers and limited-edition batches like one made with beans from the La Red Co-op.

The cafe will not be opening for at least a few more weeks — we are nailing down how to make the best hot chocolates, brownies, and cookies. But, if you stop by, you may be pressed into service as a taste tester for some of our experiments!

Come visit us:

Wed – Fri: 12pm – 4pm
Saturday: 11am – 6pm

Look what showed up today — our new sign! It’s really big, so you won’t be able to miss us when passing by on Valencia Street.

Those of you walking by Valencia street last week may have gotten a sneak peek into our space. We took down the window coverings for a few days while the storefront was being installed. If you popped your head in, you may have noticed — the construction is done!

We’ve gotten the final hand off and our construction team is moving on to new projects. We still have a few odds and ends (putting up our sign, small touchups, sound system, etc) and a few more inspections that need the final sign off. After that, we still have a lot to do — some of our machines are not quite ready for the new space and we are still figuring out our new roaster:

We’re also purchasing our furniture, setting up the cafe, and hiring a few more team members. We hope to get the chocolate production running in the new space in the next few weeks and open the cafe sometime (hopefully) shortly after.

I should also mention that we had the most amazing construction crew — George, Ed, and team at Pacific Construction were awesome. We’ve heard that with most construction projects, you know you are halfway done when you’ve run out of money. These guys were on time, under budget, and got all of the details right. They worked extra hours to fix problems that they weren’t responsible for and when curveballs came up that caused delays (e.g. health department) they split the difference or incurred the cost themselves. If you are building something in the bay area, I would highly recommend that you give them a call. Here are George and Ed posing with our new roaster:

We’ve got a few fun events coming up pretty soon:

First, we will be at the Eat Real Festival this Friday – Sunday at Jack London Square in Oakland. Our booth will be at the Craft Marketplace and we’ll be doing a chocolate-making overview on Saturday. Lots of our food vendor friends will be there too. Check it out here.

And the weekend after (September 29th and 30th), Cam, Alice, and Lisa will be up in Seattle for Northwest Chocolate Festival. They’ll also be visiting our friends at Chocolopolis for a Meet the Maker tasting on Friday 9/28 from 2:30 – 4:30.

Here’s a video from last year’s festival, see if you can catch a quick glimpse of Cam:

There’s been a lot of good progress with the construction over the last few weeks. First, we hit a snag with the health department. Although they had approved our plans months ago, after reviewing our the other spaces in our building, they decided we needed a closed ceiling. After much back-and-forth, they approved an industrial plastic coating. So the scaffolds are up and we are adding that in now:

Next, the bean storage room is starting to take shape…

… and we have tile in the factory area.

The cafe is starting to appear…

… and we have the beginnings of display shelves:

We’re getting closer!

It’s been busy around here at the chocolate factory! We’ve been a bit behind on posting updates to the blog, so here’s a quick catch up on everything that’s happened in the last few weeks.

First, we got a giant order for a conference. This is what 2,000 bars of chocolate (and a tiny box of extras) looks like stacked next to Cynthia.

It took us about 2 years of experimenting to make our first 10,000 bars, so it was a pretty big accomplishment for us to make 2,000 bars in about 10 days of long nights and weekends. This also forced us to streamline our process and now we are solidly making 1,000 bars a week. Even at this rate, though, we are still behind on our backlog but have some more ideas on how to scale up.

Next, we have two new machines in our chocolate-making line-up. First, a much larger Selmi tempering machine:

Unfortunately, because our chocolate has no added cocoa butter or emulsifiers, the machine does not work well with our chocolate and continually seizes up. Right now we are using it as a chocolate melter, but we’ve ordered an oversized motor which should be here in a few weeks. We’re hoping this will fix our tempering woes — right now this is the longest and hardest part of our process and we are looking forward to fixing it.

We also got a wrapping machine. I won’t say much here as this deserves a blog post (or series of blog posts) of it’s own. We had a lot of drama since it would not fit through our door. Here’s a photo of it all wrapped up while we figured out how to get it into the space:

Also, our container of beans from Madagascar arrived. These were the beans from Bertil’s farm that Cam and Alice visited last fall. The full container was 198 bags — half of which we shared with our friends Charley and Nicole. Most of the beans are in cold storage, but we have a small bean mountain in our space as we work through our bags:

And finally, our space on Valencia is starting to look more like a chocolate factory:

PS — you can find some new locations on our locations page: http://www.dandelionchocolate.com/locations/

Lots of progress these last few weeks — not only do we now have a floor, we have stairs, part of a mezzanine and walls!