• 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 packaging!

Susanna Dulkinys of Edenspiekermann of Berlin designed TCHO’s new packaging, as well as all aspects of TCHO’s visual identity. Susanna and Erik Spiekermann have been intimately involved in the project since February 2006, before the first equipment arrived from Dresden — in other words, from virtually the beginning. They believe so strongly in TCHO they are also investors. These are Susanna’s notes on the new designs:

The Aztecs prized the cacao bean so highly that it was their form of currency. The Aztec empire used cacao beans as trade for cloth, and in the Yucatan the beans were still used in place of coins as late as the 1840’s.

Cacao has an equally valuable place in modern society. And chocolate, while ancient, is also a modern food.

A TCHO Chocolate bar, with its algorithmic guilloche patterns, looks like a modern form of currency. “Modern” was always part of the brand brief — no faux traditionalism, but resolutely forward-looking for a new generation of chocolate enthusiasts.

So the TCHO brand language is deeper. Color, pattern, shape, the TCHO Flavor Wheel, and typography all serve to distinguish the TCHO visual brand.

The colors on TCHO’s bars and products are drawn from the TCHO Flavor Wheel and represent the company’s unique flavor-driven philosophy, based on focusing on the inherent flavors present in cacao: chocolatey, earthy, nutty, floral, fruity, and citrus. These are flavors you can taste even if you aren’t a chocolate expert. TCHO is obsessed with making chocolates which are the purest expression of those flavors.

The six Flavor Wheel colors, plus six engraved repetitive patterns, are the visual expressions of TCHO’s flavor-driven focus.

Other visual brand determinants include the square, specifically the measure of TCHO’s smallest bar. This square is the basis of measure for the grid underlying all packaging, literature, and communications.

The Logotype is derived from an iconic letterform from the industrial sector but with modified cross-strokes and corners to simulate what could be a chunky chocolate letter.

The typographic palette is clean and relatively light — reversing out of pure color to whites. This sets the logotype clearly apart creating clarity and contrast between brand and information.

The layout system is proportional and multiples of squares, defining column measures and image scale.

The rest is great chocolate.