• Flavor Wheel
• How to Pair Chocolate
• How Chocolate is Made
• How To Taste Chocolate
• Press and Reviews
• The Story of 1.0
• The Story of 1.0 design
• What happens to Beta?
• A Year in Beta Slideshow
• Glossary

Our new packaging

We love our Beta packages. Lots of you do too. From the outset, however, Beta was never intended to be TCHO’s final packaging.

The reasons are twofold: one is practical, the other esthetic.

When one of our chocolates graduates from Beta, it means we’ve integrated your feedback, finished our tweaking, and believe it’s ready for general release — which means much bigger batches. The more chocolate we produce, the more we need to package efficiently, and the handmade way we package the Beta products simply doesn’t scale.

Here’s why: You might have guessed that the Beta packages are as simple as they look — industrial brown kraft paper, sealed with our chocolate inside. What you might not know is that up to now, loyal interns and employees have been manually breaking bars, then hand-stuffing and hand-sealing each package of TCHO chocolate you’ve ordered, seen, and eaten.

With increased production, we would need squads of workers to do this amount of packaging, a blatant waste of human talent. The SIG packaging machines we purchased are capable of handling up to 200 bars a minute — we’d need about a hundred workers to do the same job.

The other reason our Beta chocolates graduate to new packaging is that one of TCHO’s guiding heuristics is to provide experience that delights — and we think our new packaging does exactly that. Chocolate may have ancient roots, but it is also a thoroughly modern food. Which is why we eschew faux traditionalism and embrace Susanna’s future-forward design.

Our Beta packaging was delightfully surprising in its straightforward simplicity. Our new packaging delights in a completely different way — it is bright, colorful, tactile, sophisticated.

But if you still love our Beta packaging, don’t despair. It is not going away. We will continue to wrap it around all our many future generations of Beta products.