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The Story of “Fruity”

TCHO is so obsessive about flavor that we would go to the ends of the earth to find the perfect cacao for our chocolates. But luckily we only had to travel to the remote savannah of Peru for our “Fruity” beans.

The Making of “Fruity”
Running Time: 6:50, 49meg Quicktime
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Timothy and John ride to the end of the supply chain on a bone-jarring pickup truck journey through the verdant backcountry, visit a local growers conference and a co-op owned liquor processing plant, check out a whole lot of beans, and make direct connections with farmers who are as obsessed with great cacao as they are.

The Story of “Fruity”

Don’t let anyone tell you making chocolate isn’t hard. It is. Making great chocolate is even harder. Because at TCHO we actually do the work from “pod to palate,” our journey to a finished bar of chocolate is filled with twists and turns. When it’s all over, we’re left with a sense of satisfaction, delicious chocolate, and some incredible stories. To get our Beta “Fruity” bar to where it is today took months of careful planning and intense work. And it wasn’t always sweet.

Timothy Childs, TCHO’s founder and Chief Chocolate Officer: “The difference between a good chocolate maker and a great chocolate maker is not in the process of making the chocolate, it’s in how you handle the unexpected challenges along the way.”

The experience of making “Fruity” had its fair share of these challenges, but Timothy and the TCHO crew rose to the occasion every time. From the germ of an idea, to acquiring and testing dozens of bean samples, to arduous travel to upcountry Peru and back, “Fruity” has been a labor of love.

To begin the search for the perfect bean for “Fruity,” John Kehoe, Director of Sourcing and Farmer Relations, considered several possible countries. Venezuela, Trinidad, and Jamaica are known for fruity cacao; however none of them truly possess three important TCHOSource™ tenets: organic cacao farming, a history of cooperative agriculture, and the opportunity to work directly with farmers.

So the duo turned their attention to Peru, a diamond in the rough — a country possessing organic and Fair Trade cacao backed by farmers with strong organizational capacity and a history of coops. John shipped bean samples back to Timothy in TCHO’s San Francisco lab. Timothy test-roasted these different beans and eventually decided on how he wanted “Fruity” to taste: “a spike of berries, deep cherry, with a medium to medium-strong fruit acid tone.”

Though many of the beans that John and Timothy found were intriguing, Timothy discovered one that really captured his attention. “Once I got this great Fair Trade, organic bean in our lab in San Francisco, I realized that was very, very tricky to work with. But the finicky characteristics of the bean were all part of its allure for me. Locked inside were these little hints of the flavors that I was looking for.”

Next, to learn more about Peruvian cacao farming, John and Timothy traveled to Peru, first visiting a regional conference for cacao growers where they met farmers and leaders from Peruvian cacao cooperatives. After the conference was over, Timothy and John headed to even more rural locations, scouting cacao farms. John says of the trip, “It was a 12-hour four-wheel drive adventure filled with beautiful views, bountiful agricultural land, and kidney-jarring potholes in unpaved road.”

But John knew the hard trip was worthwhile when he saw a cooperative manager pay extra attention to the fermentation process, meticulously checking the wet cacao, which, as he says, “sounds simple, but I rarely see this degree of crucial detail work.”

The next hurdle was getting the cacao out of Peru. “It was a real odyssey,” John relates, “as the shipment traveled through the strike-laden port of Callao and navigated the customs authorities and shipping lines. After months of delays, I flew back down to Lima and worked arm and arm with the cooperative and customs broker to get our container on the water.” Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, over many weeks, and through much trial and error, Timothy perfected the roasting and conching profiles to achieve the bright, fruity flavor he wanted from the Peruvian bean.

There’s a big difference between making chocolate in small batches in the lab and producing it on a large scale. So the next big challenge was how to scale Timothy’s very specific roasting and conching process from a 500-gram batch to 500 kilograms at a time. Timothy turned to his ace in the hole: co-founder Karl Bittong, a world-renowned bean-roasting expert. They worked together on the really challenging roasting issues, and nailed the flavor.

But a perfect roasting plan only goes so far.

Timothy had to be ready to deal with unexpected issues, and there were plenty. While our SF factory nears completion, Timothy, Karl, and Assistant Chocolate Maker Zohara Mapes traveled to Costa Rica to oversee production. As Timothy relates, “Roasting the beans for ‘Fruity’ was really a bear. From dealing with challenges in customs, to repairing equipment that was not up to TCHO specs, to working around twice daily electricity embargoes. It wasn’t easy.” Timothy, Karl, and Zohara rolled up their sleeves and got into the mix, working the roasters and equipment directly. Overseeing the roast for stretches up to 38 straight hours, at times Timothy found himself leaning against a warm pipe and nodding off on his feet while waiting for the next batch to finish.

Making chocolate is hard work, but we enjoy (almost) every minute of it, no matter how twisted the journey from pod to palate. If great chocolate makers are characterized not only by their commitment to the highest quality materials and processes, but also their ability to deal with unforeseen challenges, then Timothy Childs, John Kehoe, Karl Bittong, Zohara Mapes and the TCHO team have proven themselves to be great chocolate makers. After over a year of work, we’re proud to introduce you to the second product in the TCHO chocolate family, TCHO “Fruity.”