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/

Ken from Media59.com posted a quick video of Cam explaining Cacao at the SF Chocolate salon. Take a look:

Our container is finally in the country! It’s on board the MSC Francesca, which is currently in LA, so it has one more short journey before it arrives in Oakland. We just heard from our customs agent that the beans have been cleared by the FDA, but they still need to be inspected by customs because we’re a new importer (gotta make sure we didn’t slip any guns in with our beans). Assuming smooth sailing (har har), we could have access to the beans in just a week or two.

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!

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!

We’ve really been struggling to keep up with demand these last few months. After making sure we had enough great beans on hand and getting some more help at the factory (thanks Chiann, Caitlin, Cynthia, and Natalie!), we started running into capacity limits with some of our machines. Fortunately, we just got three more big melangers from Cocoatown:

Having multiple melangers is really helpful since a single batch occupies one machine for anywhere from 2 to 5 days. It’ll take us a bit to get them set up but once they’re all working, we should be able to crank out some more chocolate!

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

The other night David and John from Supermechanical stopped by to talk about their latest project- Twine. They recently raised one of the highest totals ever on kickstarter and are now working to keep up with an overwhelming demand. We met because we’d love to have Twines all over our factory. For example, we imagine using them to help us log data from our roaster and the ambient conditions. Months after a roast, we’d be able check the humidity and internal and external temperatures to help us understand any batch variation. We sometimes notice subtle differences in taste or viscosity between batches from the same beans and more data would help us get a better handle on the cause.

David and John came by during a whirlwind trip to the bay area- you can read about their take on our factory on their blog. We were really happy to spend a few hours talking about the joys of building machines. It seems like they have a lot of momentum behind their idea and are incredibly excited to move forward. They promised to stop by with prototypes for us to play with in April and we hope to have a factory decked out with Twines someday soon.

We’re offering our first class! We’re really excited about chocolate education. As we get closer to opening our space on Valencia, we’re starting to think about the different classes and tours we’ll host there. We’re teaching Chocolate 101 in our production kitchen in the Dogpatch, but this is just the start of a big part of our mission for our factory and cafe space.

This is a class for 15 people from 7-9 PM on February 29th. It’ll be an all around introduction to chocolate. We’ll cover the different types of chocolate, their ingredients, our chocolate making process, and a little about single origin bars. You’ll leave well-versed in the chocolate basics.

We’ll start the night out with a little chocolate treat, have a discussion about chocolate making, then a tour of our space, and plenty of time for your questions. We’ll taste chocolate in all of its unfinished and finished forms and provide samples of all we try for you to take home and share your knowledge.

We just added tickets to our online store, available to the first 15 interested people. We’d love to have you there.

As many of you know, we had a bit of a rough December. First we moved (yay!) but then our tempering machine broke, Alice’s apartment caught on fire, and Cam had to leave for a family medical emergency. All of this of course happened during the holiday chocolate rush, leaving us with many late nights at the chocolate factory. I’m happy to report that Alice found a new place to live, Cam’s family is all ok, and our temperer is fixed — so we are back to making chocolate!

Since everyone’s been asking about the problems with the machine, here’s the quick synopsis:

The fat in chocolate, cocoa butter, is polymorphic — meaning that it can set in a few different forms based on the way the crystals in the chocolate are arranged. Only one of those forms is the one we want because the chocolate will have a nice shine, snap when broken, and won’t turn whitish and gritty while on the shelf. Tempering is the process of heating, cooling, and agitating the chocolate in a very specific way to get this proper crystal structure. You can do this with a marble slab and thermometer, but luckily we have a machine that greatly speeds up the process:

Before the move, we had noticed a slight noise coming from the temperer while the pump motor was on, but it didn’t seem to affect our ability to get good bars. After the move, the motor noise was so loud you could hear the temperer down the hall, and sadly, the temperer would often seize up and we’d wait a few hours to get the chocolate melted and flowing again before starting over. This meant that we might be able to temper a few bars at at time, but then inevitably the machine would seize and then we would try again a few hours later.

We called the US distributor, Tomric, and Sean was incredibly responsive and sent us a new motor within a few days. We promptly took apart the machine and went to install the new motor. Unfortunately, we discovered that the replacement motor was for three phase power whereas our machine is configured for single phase. We called again and found out that the correct motor needed to be shipped from Italy.

Amazingly, a few days later, a new motor and gearbox arrived at our door, straight from Italy:

I can’t express how happy we were to see this new motor. I was ready with a new blog post; I had already thought up a good title (“Hallelujah! Christmas came early”). Again, we took apart the machine, put in the motor, and this time we were able to wire it up:

And… the noise was fixed, it tempered better, but sadly — it was not enough: the machine still seized up and left us without chocolate. At this point, we decided we needed to fulfill our orders, with machine or not. We spent the next few weeks working super early mornings, crazy late nights, and a few all-nighters to eek out just enough to fulfill what we could. Cam got so good at predicting when the machine would seize that we nicknamed him the “temperer whisperer.”

Post-holidays, we took a step back and tried to debug the machine. Given what we knew about the motors, it felt like the machine was fine but there must be something wrong with our power. We called our favorite electrician, Arnold, who brought along his brilliant son, Anthony, to look at our machine. After a few hours of measuring voltages component-by-component, they confirmed our suspicion.

The issue was that the machine has an operating range of 220-240v and our outlet was only supplying 204v. Worse, under load, the volts dropped down to around 200v. As our chocolate has no emulsifiers and is thicker than most, we needed the full power, closer to 240v, which is what we had at our previous location. So the machine was getting a full 40v less than ideal. We thought that maybe it was a faulty wire, but it turns out our space itself had bad power. Luckily Arnold installed a small step-up transformer and now we are back in business! Many thanks to everyone, especially our wholesale customers, for their patience and support.