This post originally appeared on my site Chocolate Noise! Subscribe to the series here, and preorder my book, Bean-to-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution, coming out in September 2017!
TCHO isn’t your average bean-to-bar company. I mean, it was founded by Timothy Childs, who worked on space shuttles for NASA; chocolate industry veteran Carl Bittong; and Louis Rosetto and Jane Metcalfe of Wired magazine. It makes fantastic chocolate that’s widely available, and its bars are distinguished not by the beans’ origin but by their primary flavor. But the real reason TCHO isn’t your average bean-to-bar company is that it’s developed a unique partnership with cacao producers around the world to help it source and make its chocolate partly at origin and partly in Berkeley, where it’s based.
Back in the early 2000s, TCHO sourced beans the way everyone else does now: “Farmers would send sample beans to us in San Francisco, and we would roast, grind, turn them into liquor, and do an analysis to provide feedback,” recalled Brad Kintzer, the chief chocolate maker and part owner in the company (who has also worked for Scharffen Berger, Lake Champlain, and Michael Recchiuti). “That took three weeks to a month,” he said, noting that he would evaluate 25 to 30 samples per week. “And we would reject nine out of ten of them.”
The company wanted to find a more effective sourcing model, one that would help its own efficiency as well as farmers’. So in 2009, with the help of a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development, TCHO and its grant partner Equal Exchange started building chocolate labs and working with farming communities. “We realized we had to put scientific tools down at origin,” Brad said, if they wanted to see improvements and continuity. “We wanted to be able to figure out all of these questions we had, like what would happen if we collect all the red pods on one side of the river and ferment them separately from yellow pods across the river? Are there flavor differences to be leveraged?” That may sound nerdy and incredibly detailed, but bean-to-bar chocolate making is the Kingdom of the Nerdy and Incredibly Detailed. Because all of those little details affect flavor, and good flavor is the holy grail.
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