It took a little longer than we’d original planned… ok, a lot longer, but we’ve finally moved in to our permanent home at 740 Valencia St! After doing a bunch of planning, we started packing and moving things on Thursday of last week. We took a bunch of the our semi-portable equipment (melangers, temperers) in the first load:

All loaded up

After that, we packed up a bunch of boxes with all of the stuff we needed and loaded them into the truck:

Caitlin wrangling the pallet jack. Where were they in college?

Tyler and Joey unloading

 Me about to drive the truck back to Dogpatch after dropping off a load at Valencia

The real challenge was moving our 2000lb wrapping machine from 1955 as it doesn’t really fit out of the door at the Dogpatch and we weren’t sure if it’d fit past our counters at Valencia. Fortunately, we had amazing help from Snooky and his team (Vic, Mark, and Sean). Snooky and Vic managed to wrangle the machine into the Dogpatch so they were the perfect set of people to help us get it to Valencia:

Snooky, grinning and planning his attack

Just squeaking out the door

We certainly weren’t gonna lift it by hand…

But that didn’t stop us from pretending we were :)

We had about a 1/4 inch to spare on each side!

Wrapping machine in its new home 

After moving everything over, we still needed clean things up at the Dogpatch space and set everything up at Valencia.

Todd and Maya setting up tables 

Tyler, Chiann, and Maya on the roof ladder 

Tod and Lisa did an amazing job giving the Dogpatch space a much needed scrub down and Erica and Lisa (what a champ!) were hugely helpful in getting things set up at Valencia over the weekend. By Sunday, our new space was ready:

(Photo credit:  Molly DeCoudreaux)

It’s hard to imagine the move having gone any smoother than it did; thank you so much to everyone who made it happen!

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:

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/

Now that construction is in full swing and the dust is (literally) flying everywhere, the new factory space is attracting a lot more attention from pedestrians. We didn’t have any signs up for a while, meaning that people have had to content themselves with speculating wildly on all of the commotion.

Well, now they don’t have to wonder any more—thanks to the creative energy and hard work of Sarah Henry! Sarah is a recently graduated high school senior from the Highland School in Warrenton, Virginia. She was out in San Francisco doing a senior internship project with Creativity Explored, a local organization in the Mission that provides artists with developmental disabilities the means and assistance necessary to express and support themselves through their art.

We took advantage of Sarah’s artistic sensibilities while she was in SF to help us with our new storefront windows. Sarah created four beautiful window designs based around our current and future packaging patterns. She did an absolutely amazing job, and we’re thrilled that she was able to find time in her schedule to work with us!

Preliminary sketches

Playing around with color

Works-in-Progress

Seeing Sarah (Thanks, Sarah!)

Looking good enough to eat

Caitlin approves!

Sarah will be starting university in the fall at the College of William & Mary, and we wish her the best in all of her future endeavors. You can see more of her artwork here. To learn more about Creativity Explored, please visit their website.

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

The construction has been moving along steadily. For the last few weeks the focus has been on getting the plumbing and electrical under-floor work done. It’s the kind of thing that has to be done right, because once we pour the slab, it’s literally set in stone. We’ve passed our initial plumbing and electrical inspections, so the goal is to have a floor after the long weekend (so it has more time to set).

While the electrical and plumbing were getting installed, it was a big mess as lots of dirt had to be moved around:

The grease traps and rough-ins went in:

Lots of conduit for all of our machines and the cafe:

Once the inspections were done, the holes were filled back in, leaving a nice level ground:

And finally, we are starting to take a look at the roof and install the HVAC and vents!

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!