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:

As promised, here’s our wrapping machine in action:

If you’d like to learn more about chocolate making, take a look at Chocolate 101 in our online store.

We all felt a little self-conscious watching this, but we have our first video!

Todd did an excellent job telling our story, but my favorite part should be obvious. Our videographer,  Liza, included Cam’s chocolate air toss antics, and they’re pretty good.

Todd and Caitlin are headed to New York at the end of the month for The Next Big Small Brand contest. It’s Caitlin’s first trip to the city, so it should be a great time all around.

Things move quickly around here. So quickly, that it’s been a few months since Cam and I went to Madagascar and he first posted about getting there. I made it a day or two behind Cam, after missing my first flight. Taking the trip on my own kept things interesting! I found myself texting Cam from the tiny port of Ankify, desperately hoping that he’d find me. I haven’t had many happier reunions.

Here are a few different clips from our trip. I’m starting with my favorite. It showcases my pro pod-opening skills.

Cam was not a pro.

Truthfully, neither of us was really that good.

After the pods are opened, the workers pull the beans from the pods.

At SOMIA, we watched a worker move the beans between fermentation boxes.

After fermentation, the beans are raked into an even layer and dried in the sun.

At Millot, workers hand sort the broken beans and junk from the good beans.

We also saw beans being washed. This gives them a cleaner appearance for later enrobing.

This video shows the beans emptying from the washer. It also shows how our stomachs felt at the time…

Millot’s distillery smelled amazing. They distill lemongrass, ylang ylang, and a few other essential oils. I wish we had smell-o-vision.

That’s just a taste of my stories from Madagascar. The lemur pictures are still to come.

Rather than putting the nibs straight into a melanger (the machine we use to combine the nibs and sugar into chocolate), we use a peanut grinder to turn the nibs into a paste first. We recently upgraded this first stage grinder to a new one. The old one would occasionally seize on nibs with less fat (like our Costa Rican) so we had to feed it a scoop at a time. With the new one, though, we can fill the hopper and it’ll crank through everything. It came configured with an 24 second auto-shutoff but after opening it up and changing a few dip switches, we were all set.

It’s important to inspect the beans before throwing them in the roaster as there can be lots of junk tagging along in the bag. We decided to build a bean inspection table (a glorified bin with some mesh to let the small junk fall through) to make that step better. We’ve taken some classes at the Tech Shop in the past and this seemed like the perfect time to apply those skills. We modeled the parts using AutoCAD and created the toolpaths using MasterCAM. The video shows the desktop router cutting the pieces out of HDPE. Now we just need to assemble those pieces, add the mesh, and seal everything and we’ll have a fully FDA compliant inspection table.

After doing a bunch of tests, we realized that winnowing was easier and our yield was better when we sorted the beans into different sizes (i.e. small, medium, large). We started out doing this by hand but it was really tedious and time consuming so we decided to build a sorting machine. It took a little while to build, but we’re pretty happy with how it turned out. It sorts a lot of cracked beans quickly and it kind of sounds like rain (chocolate rain?). Now we just need to have a better loading system and rebuild it out of stainless steel…