Chocolatiers = Re-melters?
Posted in:
Opinion
It was certainly never our intention at TCHO to cause anyone offense, especially since, with the imminent introduction of our TCHOPro line of technical chocolates, people who buy couverture are also our customers. Our point was simply to differentiate ourselves by pointing out that we are so utterly obsessed by chocolate that we made the fundamental (and perhaps fundamentally insane) decision to integrate backwards to source, and then control every step of the process to making finished chocolate -- bean to bar.Obviously, that there are but a handful of companies in America that do what we do doesn't make us better or worse than most of the other good people who work with chocolate, just different. Apple makes computers; Intel makes their chips. Both companies understand the value they contribute to computing. If Intel was describing themselves, they would rightly say they don't use chips, they make chips. And if Apple was describing itself, it would rightly say it doesn't make chips, it uses them to make great computers. Is one "better" than the other?On "arrogance" -- again, please don't confuse our pride in what we've accomplished with any sense of "superiority." We are a small, young company, and we have spent the past three years engaged in the very difficult endeavor of building a business with a supply chain that spans the developing world, a pier full mammoth machinery, and the daunting task of creating from scratch original formulations for extremely demanding consumers. We are a little start up competing in a very brutal arena with some of the biggest, most established transnationals in the world, and we realize every day that our success is anything but assured -- the last thing we feel is arrogant. On the contrary, I feel incredibly humble and insecure in the face of our manifold challenges.To Hallot: we roast on location while we finish our own roasting facility here in SF. That means we buy the beans directly from producers, take possession of them, develop roasting profiles in our lab for that particular batch of beans, contract for transport to a roasting facility -- three of the four we use were designed and built by our co-founder Karl Bittong -- and then either Karl or Timothy or both are physically on location. for however long it takes, to direct the roast using the roasting profiles we created. We don't think of this as "buying" liquor, as if we were selecting some finished product off the shelf from a producer. Actually, we think of this as manufacturing liquor under very trying circumstances -- out there in the world, rather than in our nice, safe factory. Believe me, we wish our facility was finished here in San Francisco, if for no other reason than it would vastly simplify the logistical, travel, and manufacturing obstacles.But this raises an interesting, larger question. Where should we draw the line over what constitutes bean-to-bar? Say thirty percent of dark chocolate is sugar, and sugar directly contributes not just to the sweetness but the flavor of the bar. Does anyone believe that a bean-to-bar manufacturer isn't because they buy refined sugar, instead of refining it themselves? Is Scharffen Berger not a bean-to-bar manufacturer because they contract out the manufacture of their milk chocolates? What if you contract molding and wrapping? Virtually nobody ferments, so is anyone really a "bean-to-bar" manufacture? What about growing -- if you were making wine, growing your own grapes would be another measure of the care and control you take in making your product. By that measure, there would be very few "bean-to-bar" manufacturers, indeed.
