• 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

Finally, 1.0!

Lots of ways to tell the story of the 1.0s.

Let’s start with dreams. Dreams of a lifetime, or, more precisely, lifetimes: co-founders Timothy Childs’s and Karl Bittong’s, the dreams that drove them to quit the Shuttle program to make chocolate, or to devote 42 years building chocolate factories around the world.

Another way to tell the story is to talk about Beta. Almost exactly a year ago, we introduced our first chocolate (“Chocolatey”, appropriately enough) at the Entertainment Gathering at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Since a lot of us have tech backgrounds, we adopted a familiar idea: we encouraged our users to help us make the chocolate they wanted, in much the same way software developers engage beta testers. We called what we were doing Beta chocolate, and put it in plain brown bags with rubber stamps to identify the contents. As we subsequently found out, this is not the way it’s done in the chocolate business. But the idea struck a chord as customers became creators, helping us formulate this release after 1,026 iterations over the past year.

It’s a story of hunting down flavor itself. Sourcing beans after jolting rides by Sourcing Director John Kehoe up-country in Peru. Or personally selected by our co-founder in Ghana. Or from the plantation of a friend in Madagascar. Then cut tested, roast-tested, and melanged in hundreds more tests before a particular lot was even accepted. Then enumerable formulation trials begin, including sugar tests, to even get the earliest 0.1 Beta to put out a bar to tasters. Moving to factory production, large-scale bean batches are roasted to lab-determined profiles, then ground, refined, and conched as they are heated and cooled at specific intervals; and finally the chocolate is tempered to perfection. Behind it all: Chief Chocolate Officer Timothy Child’s genetically-blessed mouth and its over-abundance of taste buds obsessively searching for peak flavor.

1.0 is also a story of reimagining what it means to taste chocolate. The wine conventions currently used, like varietal, origin, and percentage, can be misleading — the same varietal, for example, grown on the same farm in the same growing region can taste radically different depending on the season, how the beans were fermented, or how they were dried. We suggest there’s a better way to discover your chocolate — namely the flavors that are inherent in cacao. Our flavor wheel is our attempt to make chocolate that is the purest expression of the flavors inherent in cacao, in this case, so far, “Chocolatey”, “Fruity”, “Nutty”, and “Citrus.”

And it’s also a design story. During Beta, we focused on what was in the bag, not on what the bag looked like. Now that we have arrived at 1.0 formulations, Susanna Dulkinys of one of the world’s leading design firms, Edenspiekermann, has created packaging as delightful and innovative as the chocolate in the box. And that bar itself now looks nothing short of amazing.

And finally, this is a story of passion and dedication and insanely hard work by a remarkable team. Dozens of people at TCHO have struggled against long odds over these past three years to bring you our first final formulations. In the end, there’s only one way to truly understand this story. Just put it in your mouth.