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.

One of the fun things about being at farmers’ markets is entering into serendipitous conversations with curious passers-by.  A couple weeks ago at the Noe Valley Farmer’s Market, Cam and I met a very nice man named Carlos who, intrigued by our signboard, came over for a closer look.  He tasted some of our chocolate, and then proceeded to recite (from memory!) a poem by Arnold Adoff.  The poem is included in a book of poetry dedicated to chocolate.  Called Chocolate Dreams, the collection is ostensibly meant for children, but I think it can (and should) be appreciated by anyone who enjoys chocolate, poetry, humor, or any combination of these things.

Mr. Arnold Adoff was kind enough to grant us permission to share the poem with you in its entirety.  A big thank-you to Carlos for bringing it to our attention, and an even bigger thank-you to Mr. Adoff for writing such lovely poems in the first place!

Her
She
Bar
 

Far
Star
I
See
You
Shining
Brown
In
My
Dark
And
Hungry
Sky

I
Wink
Back
Once
And
Fly
To
Meet
Your
Melt

Reproduced with permission from Arnold Adoff’s Chocolate Dreams.  New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books, 1989.  Please visit Arnold Adoff’s website for more information about the poet.

Come by and impress us with your artistic, musical or literary love for chocolate!  Alternatively, just come by to say hello.  You can find us at the Mission Community Market every Thursday from 4-8pm, and at the Noe Valley Farmers’ Market every Saturday from 8am-1pm.

We’ve had an awesome morning working with Liza Mosquito de Guia. She’s shooting a video for The Next Big Small Brand- we found out this weekend that we’re finalists. It’s a bi-coastal competition for small food businesses. Whether or not we win, we’ve had a lot of fun filming. We all struggled to work slowly for the camera and there were a few antics. Cam tried to toss a piece of chocolate into the air and catch it in his mouth, but failed miserably. Other than that, I’d say it was a pretty successful morning!

I don’t want to interrupt the Madagascar posts too much, but we were just approved by Apple to join their developer program! As I mentioned earlier, our legal company name contains the word cocoa which Apple saw as a conflict with their API named Cocoa. Fortunately, after a few phone calls from Apple’s very nice and professional support team (and a few weeks waiting), they approved our application. It was a little more hassle than I was expecting, but it was nice to have a big company decide in favor of the little guy.

In order to spend more time making chocolate, we’ve been creating some technology to make the non-chocolate work easier and faster. For example, we built systems for tracking revenue, inventory, and demand. We realized, though, that there are a bunch of things we’d like to do while we’re mobile (e.g. tracking sales at markets). We applied to join the Apple Developer Program so we could starting trying things out with our actual phones. Unfortunately, I just found out we were rejected:

Thank you for your interest in the Apple Developer Program.

Please know that as the legal entity name (Cocoa Co, LLC ) provided in your enrollment contains an Apple trademark, we are unable to process your request and your enrollment has been withdrawn.

For a list of Apple trademarks, please visit:
<http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html>

Before we’d picked Dandelion Chocolate as our name, we created a placeholder name, Cocoa Co, LLC, to use while we figured out what to call ourselves. It rolled off the tongue and it was a nice play on cocoa vs company but we didn’t really plan on it being public. Once we picked our name, we filed a fictitious business name (aka a “doing business as” or DBA) statement and published it in a newspaper (thanks El Observador!), as required. And then we promptly forgot our first name… until we submitted our application to Apple. They make it clear it has to be your legal entity name (they don’t allow DBA names), so we used ours. Unfortunately, since Apple has a trademark on the word cocoa, they won’t allow us to join since our name contains cocoa.. even though we actually use the stuff?

I responded to Apple saying that it seems silly that a chocolate company isn’t allowed to use the word cocoa in their name, but I’m not holding my breath on getting a positive response back…

It’s a late night of chocolate making, getting ready for the Noe Valley Farmer’s Market tomorrow morning. Todd made some snacks to keep us going! Ahh, yes, the perks of working at a chocolate factory.

Come visit tomorrow morning at 3861 24th Street, between Sanchez and Vicksburg Streets from 8 AM – 1 PM.

I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for fortune cookies. There’s something about the bonus cookie at the end of a meal that I can’t resist. So, when fortune cookies were being passed out after dinner with my girlfriend and her family one night, I grabbed one, cracked it open, and saw the fortune above. I’m not superstitious and I’m not gonna play my “lucky numbers” in the lottery, but I wouldn’t mind if this one comes true :)