Tcho gets people involved in the chocolate making

In addition to being a big geek when it comes to food, I'm also pretty geeky when it comes to new technologies. Obviously, the Bay Area is the perfect place for someone with those interests to live, because it's a hotbed for both great food and high tech industries.

On Monday, Boing Boing posted a link to an article about a new chocolate company in San Francisco called Tcho, so they got my full attention. It seems that despite all of the local chocolate companies around here like Joseph Schmidt, Scharffen Berger and Charles Chocolates, my fair city has no actual chocolate factories, only chocolatiers, aka people who melt down and repackage other chocolate. Until now. 

Tcho was founded by Louis Rossetto and Timothy Childs, high-tech industry veterans looking for a new startup venture. This is where the techie and the foodie collide, because their attitudes toward product development and market strategy are straight out of the internet technology world. They've released a beta version of their chocolate, and they'll be testing these betas with the public and gathering user feedback before finalizing the product's characteristics and producing a full release. 

I left work Monday evening and scrambled out of my office down to Pier 17, just north on the Embarcadero from the Ferry Building. It was a bit late, after 7pm, so I figured my chances of getting my brown paper wrapped chocolate nugget were probably shot for the night. But happily, there were the happy little chocolate makers, some wearing aprons and some tapping at the row of flatscreen computers in the front office. It's a sparse space, with the requisite technology to operate a new company, but little else. A whiteboard in the back of the room gave evidence of some flavor-profile brainstorming session. Just like a startup, except with chocolate!

After dinner we had a little chocolate tasting, and I posted my opinions on the Tcho website. If only other food manufacturers had such a level of interest in their consumers' opinions. Crowdsourcing the product development process has done a world of good for improving online experiences, so it's about time such a level of accountability made its way into the culinary world. I feel like a chocolate maker myself as I try to decide whether that taste was bitter enough, or too sweet, or whether I like that earthy flavor...

I like this insistence that chocolate is a modern product, not just a nostalgic, albeit luxurious, staple. It's something that could stand a little bit of innovation. Cacao is a complicated little plant, and for those willing to take extra effort to tweak the process of its transformation into chocolate, there could be some great new products coming out of the little factory on the Embarcadero.