Disneyland is different then it was (25 years ago) .. sort of.

Autotopia—same

Dumbo ride—same

Buzz Lightyear—new!  Mark and JakeEddie went on it 3 times—each time Mark upping his marksmanship status.

Jedi Training—New!! and Scary!!!  My sweet boy was chosen out of many to receive his training by the most amazing Jedi knights… all good until Darth Maul came and scared the bejesus out of him!!!

But—the force is strong with my youngling.

We recently conducted a tasting at UX Week and, as always, had a blast. My favorite part of tastings is to watch a face take a free-wheeling, hands in the air ride up and down a 5g piece of TCHO. Rarely are there words to describe the experience.

Enter Laura Seargeant Richardson, Director Design Strategy and Research, M3 Design.

Transcribed notes from her feedback cards:

_______________

A (Chocolatey)
Color: yellow
Sound: harmony & discord
Taste: orange
Texture:
Shape: too square
Bite Material Hardness
Bite Material Thickness - fit oral cavity well
Visual:
Temperature:
Emotion over time: in this area she drew a line that had one large dip at the beginning and two smaller dips at the end.

As an expert on art and science of measuring emotion (I spoke last year) and also sensorial design, I closed my eyes to provide the continuum of my expression over time. This is an incredibly time based product. Interestingly, after I drew my line, the speaker said the founder described it as a roller coaster. Indeed.

B (Fruity)
Color: pink
Sound:
Taste: rose
Texture:
Shape: round & full
Hardness:
Thickness: same
Visual:
Temperature:
Emotion over time: in this area she drew a steady and straight line all the way until the end where it dips and then returns straight.

This rose steadily and kept plateauing, but almost always more positively.

_______________

Thank you, Laura, for your thoughtful description; and thank you to all Beta tasters for your “Oooh, wait, oh now it tastes different, whoa, yum!” I’m inspired to take photos of tasting faces at the next event. Video to follow shortly.

I have to say that working for a chocolate company is really fun.  Certainly a lot more fun to talk about at gatherings than, say, working for a software company that makes some arcane or otherwise hard-to-describe-to-people-outside-a-particular-niche-industry, or doing IT consulting, for that matter.  Not only do peoples’ eyes no longer glaze over after the inevitable “what do you do?”, but they absolutely light up. 

“Oh!  I love chocolate!  Tell me more!!”

I have to say my neighbors and friends certainly are appreciative—and I get to supply my wife with a seemingly endless supply of chocolate for her desk, as head of an all-girls private high school.  Never hurts, right?

I get to show up to parties and do tastings, and talk endlessly about how the chocolate is made, and how we are bringing technology into every part of the business, from the farmer to the consumer.  And they hang on my every word...especially when they have the wonderful taste of our chocolate on their tongues…

Ah yes, working for a chocolate company has its benefits.

Laurel is our VP Ops. She’s responsible for, among other things, finishing our factory buildout, now scheduled for 1 October. This is her whiteboard on the factory floor.

“Yeah Hi, I’m calling from TCHO Ventures in San Francisco…. TCHO Ventures…. it’s a chocolate company, we have an account with you……how do you spell it? Uh, yea, it’s T-C-H-O….. no, T as in Tom, C as in, well, chocolate, H as in hat, O as in - ….right, TCHO….no it starts with a T, not a C….”

It feels phonetic enough to me, but then again, I work here. And I don’t spend much time on the phone, but I sit next to folks who do, so I get to hear them desperately trying to explain our name.

Jeremy, Zohara, Simone, and Matt have gotten “tee-cho” and “techo” from people who can’t swallow the T, “T-C-H-O” as if our name were an acronym, and the UPS guy who visits us every day—even after numerous attempts to correct him—still mis-pronounces it as “tekko.”

This difficulty of pronouncing TCHO is somewhat ironic considering that the word was initially used as a phonetic way to communicate ‘chocolate’ to visiting German technicians, and written on a sign on our door. The word on the sign on our door ultimately became our name.

More on that story forthcoming…

Wow! 

Robert, from our mold making partners Micelli Chocolate Mold Company, just sent me these sweet pictures of the die for making our chocolate molds they just milled.  So sexy! 

Here is the positive for the 5.7 gram:

And the 9 gram positives are absolutely positively beautiful. 

I revel in imagining how these positives will become the masters for which all the other respective molds will be made.  And those molds will become the little crucibles that will shape the chocolate that will make so many people happy.

Back when we were starting Wired in 1991, the morphing section (by Carl Rosendahl and his Pacific Data Images) of this video directed by John Landis was state of the art:

Here’s where we are today:

P.S. Although morphing hasn’t lost its power:

TCHO Nutty debuted at SES (Search Engine Strategy) with Google Analytics in San Jose.

What great company for our little chocolate company to keep.  We were a featured case study for Google Analytics and we look forward to continuing to use their great tools as we further develop our website.

Rob made a fabulous TCHO booth dude.

And of course we showered the floor with TCHObundance.

Thanks Google!  We look forward to more fun in the future.