About TCHO Chocolate
San Francisco, CA
www.tcho.com
TCHO (pronounced “cho”) was founded by Timothy Childs and Karl Bittong in California. Timothy previously owned and ran a specialty chocolate company called Cabaret Chocolates – a confectioner who made exceptional truffles. Also a “technology geek”, Tim had worked for the NASA space shuttle program and for various Silicon Valley tech startups. His vision was to be an innovator in the chocolate industry through the use of technology. Karl has spent over 40 years in the chocolate industry and had designed factories for leading chocolate companies all over the world. The two met at a chocolate equipment trade show in Europe in 2005, and soon after purchased a vintage chocolate factory in Germany that was for sale. They had the factory disassembled and shipped to the United States in several containers. The factory was refurbished and reassembled by a team of engineers and is housed on a pier in downtown San Francisco. They are the only bean-to-bar chocolate maker in San Francisco.
Below is our interview with New Product Development Manager, Nina Luttinger who told us more about the company and their chocolate.
Chefs Collaborative: There’s been a renewed interest amongst entrepreneurs in the “bean-to-bar” business model. TCHO is one of three Chefs Collaborative members that is working with raw cacoa beans and producing high-quality chocolate. Tell us about the process and how it makes your product unique.
Nina Luttinger: Chocolate is an amazing product to work with. You can’t believe how many steps are involved in bringing it from the farm to your palate! And every step along the way affects its final flavor.
Fortunately, because we directly source our own cacao beans and form relationships with growers, we control every step of the development process – in other words, everything that impacts final flavor and functionality – from bean fermentation and drying to roasting, formulation, refining, and blending. Our scientific approach to bean fermentation and roasting makes for a rounder, more complex chocolate that is not bitter – by design.
CC: We’ve spent some time on the TCHO website. I was hoping you could tell me more about your Flavor Wheel.
NL: TCHO offers a whole new way to think about chocolate: based on the primary flavors found in cacao. Like wine, chocolate starts life as a fruit with inherent flavors – flavors that come from a combination of genetics and terroir. These flavors are enhanced and tuned as the fruits are fermented and processed, often with guidance.
We use our Flavor Wheel to precisely spec the cacao beans we source by flavor from all over the world. Then we combine technology and innovation to focus and tweak these flavors during fermentation, drying, roasting, conching, and blending, as we meticulously craft our chocolate. The result is a line of pure single-origin dark chocolates with distinctive flavor notes (like “Fruity” and “Nutty” and “Citrus”) that have no added flavorings.
The flavor focused chocolates are currently available in our consumer line but will soon be available through our TCHOPro line. At the moment TCHOPro has 3 blends available, made from a combination of our flavor-focused chocolate (a 66% organic/fair trade, and a 68% and 60.5% blends). These are available in 3 kg bags of drops, a 25 lb box of drops, and 1 kg blocks.
CC: You mentioned working directly with the cacao farm to ensure quality. What kind of things are you doing at the farm to produce the best beans?
NL: TCHOSource is our program of partnering with farmers to make good cacao beans great, and great beans exceptional. We accomplish this mainly through improving post-harvest practices, procedures and facilities where all good chocolate starts – in the field.
TCHOSource creates quality feedback loops that don’t regularly exist, thus empowering producers to better control flavor and bean quality. We fuel TCHOSource with direct investments in infrastructure, in-field remote monitoring, sensory analysis and training, and technology transfer. We also install in-country Flavor Labs where producers taste chocolate they make from their own beans – an almost unheard of practice, until now.
These investments have made dramatic improvements in cacao quality, while providing better incomes to cacao farmers.
CC: What do you see as the biggest challenges in producing and marketing your chocolate?
NL: The Flavor Wheel approach makes the job of sourcing our cacao even more challenging. It’s already pretty hard to find exceptional quality cacao. But we need to source cacao with specific flavor notes – then experiment with every step of the chocolate-making process to see how we can accentuate its natural, inherent flavor. We have to test literally hundreds (possibly thousands) of samples before finding a source that will work with us.
In fact, the flavor approach is also our biggest marketing challenge. I think a lot of people assume we add nuts to our “Nutty” and fruits to our “Fruity” because of the product names. When we explain that these are flavor notes that are inherent to the cocoa bean, most people have a sort of “aha!” moment and they get excited. Most people don’t think of chocolate as an agricultural product – that starts with a fruit with specific flavor notes. Nor do many people realize pure dark chocolate can have a spectrum of different flavors. We tell this story.
CC: Your TCHOPro line is designed specifically for professional chefs and bakers. How are they using your chocolate?
NL: Lots of chefs and confectioners are using our baking drops and our 1 kg couverture blocks. Some of the restaurants using our chocolate include Farallon, Chez Panisse, Absinthe, NOPA, Camino, and plenty more. We have testimonials from a bunch of them on our website.
They’re using our chocolate for everything from flourless chocolate cake to ganaches, sauces, and mousses. They’re also using our Organic Cacao Nibs and our Drinking Chocolate, which is made directly from our couverture (instead of using powder).
