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.

We’re working hard this Friday, getting things together for the Noe Valley Farmers Market tomorrow and for our event at Love & Luxe.

We’ve had Venezuelan bars at the Noe market for the past few weeks, but tomorrow we’ll bring the last 9 bars we’ve made. We’re making progress toward getting more Venezuelan beans. We have a few bags from Ocumare on their way shortly, and hopefully part of a container coming in a few months. For now, come and get the last bars we have on hand!

I’m also busy making chocolate gems for our event tomorrow night at Love & Luxe. This is the closest I think we’ll come to making heart-shaped chocolates for Valentine’s. I needed a way to transport the gems to the event without them scuffing, so I’m using the foil liners that came free with our new molds. I think the gems look pretty festive this way. If you’re strolling through the Mission tomorrow night, stop by and say hello.

We’re teaming up with Love & Luxe, a beautiful jewelry store by the site of our Valencia Street space, to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Join us next Saturday night, February 11, for A Love Supreme from 5 – 10 PM at Love & Luxe, 1169 Valencia Street. Admission to the event is free and you’ll find unique Valentine’s Day gift ideas all around. We’ll be there with our chocolate and Blue Angel Vodka will offer samples of their own.  Even better, 5% of Love & Luxe jewelry sales and proceeds from the sale of work from the Visual Aid Pillow Project will go towards Visual Aid. It should be a blast and I hope you can come by.

We’re back in the factory, some of us still in our party clothes from the Good Food Awards. Cam’s back to work at the temperer, but couldn’t wait to change out of his tie and fancy shoes. It was a fantastic night, full of people who love what they do, and I’m pretty happy to be among them.

Todd accepted our award for our Costa Rica 70%, Batch 2, and we got our first medal. It’s pretty awesome, in the shape of a chocolate bar with a big bite out of it. Tonight it’s hanging on one of our shelves, keeping us company while we winnow a big batch of Madagascar and make a few more bars for the morning. Now that our temperer’s working again, we’re working really hard to get ahead and it feels great to be making bars.

Tomorrow you have two chances to catch us. Todd and I will be at the Good Food Awards Marketplace from 9 AM – 2 PM at the Ferry Building. Our regular Saturday customers can find Cam and Chiann at the Noe Valley Farmer’s Market. I think the excitement of tonight should carry us through to tomorrow’s early start.

It’s been a long week… and it’s only wednesday. For the last few months, we’ve been scrambling to keep up with demand (great problem to have!) but this week one of our machines (our temperer) started acting up. This has put  a pretty big dent in our production capacity and, while we’d love to come to the market, we have some outstanding orders from our wholesale clients and we can’t let them down.

So, that means we’re going to have to skip tomorrow’s Mission Community Market in order to make more bars. We’ll miss you all but you can still grab our Madagascar bars as part of the market gift boxes.

While it’s not a market, we will be doing a small tasting outside Bi-Rite from 3-6 on Saturday. Stop by, say hello, and try our new Colombian bar! It has a lot of the same super-chocolatey flavor that we loved in the Venezuelan, but it definitely has its own soul. Hope to see you there!

Just wanted to wish everyone (in the US, at least) a Happy Thanksgiving! Todd, Alice, and I are currently spread throughout the continent for the holidays: Alice is in Boston, I’m in LA, and Todd’s in Mexico. Unfortunately, we won’t be back in time for this weekend’s Noe Valley Farmer’s Market on 11/26. We will be at next week’s Mission Community Market on 12/1 and the Noe market on 12/3. Hope to see you there.

I guess good news comes in pairs — we just found out that we picked up a few awards at last weekend’s Fall Chocolate Salon. We won gold medals for best organic / fair-trade chocolate and the new product awards, as well as silvers for best overall dark chocolate and dark chocolate bars. You can see the full list of winners here.

This salon is a smaller version of the giant Chocolate Salon that happens every year in the spring. It’s a bit more intimate and it was great place for us to catch up with some friends we hadn’t seen in a while and meet some new ones. Here’s a shot of Alice and me with our friend Zeina, a few hours before Alice hopped on a plane to Madagascar.

Special thanks to Corinne for the photos — Corinne has embarked un a multi-year bet to eat a different chocolate everyday. She is currently up to 1,800 chocolates eaten so far. You can check out her blog here: www.chocolatebanquet.com.

Cam and I are back from our weekend in Seattle at the Northwest Chocolate Festival! Thanks so much to the organizers- the event drew thousands of excited chocolate fans.

We started the weekend by setting up our booth at the Seattle Center and taking a walk up to Chocolopolis, a clean and beautiful shop on Queen Anne that sells our chocolate. We met the owner, Lauren Adler, a few months ago in D.C. and we’re lucky to be featured in her store. She has our bars on display and in her craft-makers tasting kit!

From there, we went to the “Meet the Makers” reception on Friday night. We got to chat with other makers and friends. We sampled a bunch of bars, which got us excited for the weekend ahead. Then, at 10 AM on Saturday, there was a line of hundreds of chocolate lovers waiting at the door, all clamoring to come taste bars and confections. While each of our bars has its adamant supporters, the Madagascar was our biggest seller this weekend. In a room full of people who know and eat great chocolate, it’s easy to see why so many people are drawn to a bar with bright, bold flavor. Also, apparently Kristy Leissle, the Doc of Choc, has been talking us up! A number of people came up to our booth saying, “I’ve heard I have to try your bars.” It was a great feeling. Thanks, Kristy.

We came home at the end of the night pretty tired. It was all I could do to stay up later than Cam’s 3-year-old nephew. Fortunately, we were able to enlist his help with our accounting, and get our work done quickly for the night!

We’re home now, with lots more work to do. We’re looking ahead to November, getting ready for the holidays and the Fall Chocolate Salon. It’s time to get back to making chocolate!