Ann Cleaveland
TCHOSource Program Manager

Ann brings many years' operations and business development experience in the travel industry to TCHO. Her professional life has taken her from alpaca farms in Ecuador to the Arctic tundra and many places in between. As often as possible, she prefers to be accompanied by her bike! Ann received her MBA from the Presidio Graduate School and is passionate about deploying innovative public-private investment to address poverty and climate change.

Recent Blog Entries:
Unglazed
Tour de France
Field Trip

Brad Kintzer
Senior Product Developer

Brad's passion for chocolate began when he encountered his first cacao tree on a field trip to the Montreal Botanical Garden while studying botany at the University of Vermont. Immediately determined to learn all aspects of the chocolate making process, Kintzer spent months working on cacao plantations throughout Latin America, learning firsthand the crucial agricultural and post-harvest processes that influence chocolate flavor.

Continuing his quest for chocolate knowledge, Kintzer began product development work with pioneer artisan chocolate producer Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker, in 2003.

Following the 2005 acquisition of Scharffen Berger by Hershey’s, Kintzer’s product development responsibilities expanded to include Joseph Schmidt Confections and Dagoba Organic Chocolate. In addition, Kintzer has worked with other fine chocolate industry leaders including Lake Champlain Chocolates, Michael Recchuiti Confections and others.

As part of the dynamic team at TCHO, Brad continues to focus on making world-class, delicious chocolates that showcase the diversity and complexity of cacao.

Recent Blog Entries:
Unglazed
Tour de France
Field Trip

Cash Shurley
IT Director / Direct-to-Consumer Sales

Cash brings over 15 years of Information Technology experience to TCHO. Though most recently coming out of IT consulting, his experience runs the gamut from Internet startups and smaller financial firms to large enterprises and production datacenters. Cash likes to bring creativity into the technology mix, and his other passion is making music in his personal project studio. He also fronts a band.

Recent Blog Entries:
SMART!!
Blogo!
A Trip to Texas

Christa Martin
Creative Services Director

Christa is a creative team builder and art director with experience working for national retailers (Restoration Hardware, Papyrus, Whole Foods Market). She's been busy creating packaging, marketing materials and doing some visual merchandising. She lives in Oakland with her husband, Geoff Katz, K-flüf the hip-hop kitty, and an aging, misanthropic chihuahua named Tippi.

Christa spends her non-TCHO time painting, sculpting, organic gardening and cooking. In the past she has traveled to 26 countries, been a back-up singer in a Michael Jackson tribute show, owned show horses, and played the oboe.

Emi Takahara
Office Manager

Emi Takahara is the center of TCHO’s Universe. She is the go to person for anything from hardware supplies, q-tips, to permits. Emi has her hand on the pulse of everyone at TCHO. She is as comfortable in a boardroom meeting as she is with a drill in the factory or hardwiring lights in warm, bright, conference rooms. She is a master of environmental control, emphasis on “mental”.

Emi has a highly evolved sense of smell and can smell a dead rodent encased in three feet of concrete immersed in 30 feet of brackish seawater under a pier.

Recent Blog Entries:
Person, Place or Thing (Chicago)
My First Dirt Track Car Race
Person, Place or Thing (SF Fun!)

Grace Erickson
Production Manager
Read an interview with Grace

Grace brings experience in production planning, cost accounting, and industrial engineering from her time at Ghirardelli Chocolate Company, where her responsibilities included manufacturing qualification for new products, production process and efficiency improvements, and analyses on throughput, scrap, and overfill. She also brings to TCHO passion on the sustainability front, having strived in the past to lower the impact of the business of manufacturing on the environment.

Jane Metcalfe
President

Jane is perhaps best known as the co-founder, with Louis Rossetto, of Wired magazine (US, UK and Japanese editions), Wired TV, Wired Books, and the Wired Digital suite of websites. They created an enduring brand and a pioneering and innovative company.

Jane now serves on the boards of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the UC Berkeley Foundation, and she is a founding board member of the One Economy Corporation, an international non-profit whose mission is to use media and technology to help low income people accumulate assets and join the economic mainstream. She loves organizations and industries on the verge of transformation, and the leading edge of anything.

And she is the proud parent, with Louis Rossetto, of two 21st century citizens, with whom she loves cooking, jumping thoroughbreds, skiing and sailing.

Recent Blog Entries:
21C Museum Hotel offers TCHO some downright legendary Southern Hospitality
21C: Voted #1 Hotel in U.S.

Jeremy Wanamaker
Logistics Coordinator

Jeremy has spent the majority of the last few years working in the home winemaking/ homebrew industry. His hobbies include outdoor activities such as: cycling, basketball, football, and disc-golf. He is an avid sports fan; especially bay-area sports teams, such as the 49ers and Warriors.

His plan is to someday start his own franchise of brewpubs all over the world, and has been working feverishly at creating the perfect chocolate beer. Meanwhile he is attempting to expand the knowledge of brewing beer to the masses.

Recent Blog Entries:
MMMM Beeeer.
The Great Outdoors
More Beer...

John Kehoe
Sourcing Director

John began his career in international trade in Caracas, Venezuela in 1987. Since the cocoa market in Venezuela was liberalized in 1991, John’s work has been dedicated to the procurement and marketing of specialty cocoa, working closely with farmers, exporters, importers and chocolate manufactures. In 1999, client and colleagues, ED&F Man Cocoa, hired John to restructure a cocoa exporting operation in the Dominican Republic. In 2002, John returned to the United States, and founded “EcoTrade” a Specialty Cocoa brokerage and consultancy based in Miami. Through friendships and contacts developed over the years, John expand his experiences to initiate new relationships and diversifying supply to include Ecuador, Jamaica, Trinidad, Madagascar, as well as fair trade cocoa from Ghana and the Ivory Coast. This work was considered by many as pioneering a market in the United States for Specialty Cocoa.

Recent Blog Entries:
Blog From the Field
New Horizons
It's like your Birthday!

Karl Bittong
Co-Founder

During his 42 years of experience in chocolate manufacturing and supply relationships, Karl has designed and built chocolate manufacturing plants and developed formulations for many of the leading producers throughout the world—including van Houten, Bensdorp, Unilever, Transmar, and a veritable who’s who of premium manufacturers in the US. Karl’s long-standing relationships throughout the cacao supply chain — with growers, exporters, brokers, equipment manufacturers, and large industrial end-users—is helping TCHO source high quality cacao at attractive prices, build a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, and will help create partnerships in our B2B market segment.

Larry Del Santo
Marketing Associate

Larry loves chocolate. He has been working in the chocolate industry for over 3 years. Scharffen Berger was his home and first exposure to chocolate, where he worked in retail and gave factory tours for the public. Studying marketing and communication at USC, along with his chocolate experience, brought Larry to TCHO. Larry likes traveling and spending time exploring all that San Francisco and Los Angeles have to offer. He loves movies, especially the ones critics hate (i.e. 300, Old School, Wanted). Social networking is one of his favorite things - he’s an avid “Twitterer” (follow him: LarryDelSanto), Facebooker and networker. You can most likely find him rooting for the Trojans or running around San Francisco getting people to come to TCHO on a tour!

Laurel Collier
Vice President, Operations

Laurel has spent the majority of her career in the field of Industrial Automation, most recently as the COO for Automation Controls, a South Bay leader in high tech factory automation. She comes to TCHO with a full management toolkit, ready to turn some wrenches in the new and fascinating world of chocolate. Laurel has immersed herself, quite literally, in the social, economic, gastronomic, and technical aspects of her new industry. The startup world of chocolate offers Laurel the ideal platform exercise her passion for developing infrastructure, managing and coaching talent, and helping to bring a common vision to reality.

A self-indulgent interior, furniture, and garden designer, Laurel loves to create beautiful, functional and funky spaces inside and out. When not burning the startup midnight oil she is visiting the natural wonders of the world and exploring countries and cultures that are either illegal or inadvisable to travel to. She keeps sane by continuing her long soccer career with the Olympic Club of San Francisco, and occasionally shows up to work with injuries unbecoming of a woman her age.

Recent Blog Entries:
Blog Clog

Louis Rossetto
Chief Executive Officer and Chief Creative Officer

Louis is the co-founder with Jane Metcalfe of Wired magazine, Wired TV, Wired Books, and the Wired Digital suite of websites, including the first website with original content and Fortune 500 advertising HotWired, as well as the award-winning search engine HotBot. In short, he not only foresaw the major social and economic trend of our time, the digital revolution, he was an active participant and leader in its development.

Louis is obsessed with building a great business from the ground up, creating products and experiences that delight, and changing the world without politics — and with being the best dad he can be to Zoe and Orson, and partner to Jane. Not necessarily in that order.

Recent Blog Entries:
Faces
Sequencing cacao
Out of many, one

Matt Heckert
Senior Engineer

Matt has been working as an engineer, as well as a performance and sound artist, since 1978. He runs his own design-build shop where he does design, fabrication and machining. One of the founding directors of Survival Research Laboratories, he has built robots and designed soundtracks for performances and films. In 1989 he conceived and developed a group of sound producing machines know as the Mechanical Sound Orchestra and toured it in the United States and Europe. He has won numerous art grants and awards for his work and has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. Matt is obsessed with making sound-noise-music with the mechanical devices he builds.

Recent Blog Entries:
Who likes vinyl? Licorice pizza anyone?
Fishing on the SF Bay
Salsa Time!

Nina Luttinger
New Products

Nina arrived into the realm of TCHO (employee #1, actually) from the specialty coffee and fair trade worlds. After launching a fair trade importing company in the mid-1990s, she later worked as an account manager with TransFair USA, the Fair Trade certification organization, collaborating with leading specialty coffee and tea companies to launch fair trade products. Nina is the author of “The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry” and has been a strategic marketing consultant for numerous sustainable businesses. She grew up baking all the chocolate birthday cakes (nicknamed “ninacakes”) in her family. She loves chocolate and coffee together.

Recent Blog Entries:
store concept...
wrapping your head around bar wrappers...
connection....

Rick DeCost
Production Supervisor

Rick writes: “Born in Niagara Falls, N.Y., right down the street from Love Canal. My connection with chocolate goes back to My Grandmother who used to work the counter at Fanny Farmer’s Chocolate. Of course we would go visit for the samples. I spent most of my life running a printing press. After that dried up, I decided to become a baker, to keep working with my hands. One day I stopped by to visit [head engineer] Matt at TCHO. I was drawn in by some unforeseeable force — and now can't seem to find my way out.”

Robert Kopf
Director of Sales

Rob has more than 20 years experience in sales and operations — primarily in the confectionery and food & beverage industries. He is passionate about building brands and growing new businesses. Prior to joining TCHO, Rob helped successfully launch award-winning products and grow sales for companies such as Impromptu Gourmet, FoodService.com and the San Francisco Chocolate Factory. Rob is obsessed with cooking the perfect meal.

Timothy Childs
Co-Founder and Chief Chocolate Officer Emeritus

As co-founder and our first (and so far only) Chief Chocolate Officer, Timothy was responsible for the company's original vision and strategy, including TCHO's Flavor-driven approach to chocolate making as well as TCHOSource, the company's project which he developed with Sourcing Director John Keogh to improve livelihoods and generate prosperity throughout the cacao value chain. After four years of insane effort, he took a much deserved break in January 2010, preparatory to his next entrepreneurial adventure.

Prior to founding TCHO, Timothy launched the successful retail brand Cabaret Chocolates, where he co-pioneered single-origin marketing with distribution through national outlets. He is also the founder of early stage companies in the Internet and computer graphics industries and also co-founded VeRGe and the Web3D RoundUP. Before becoming hooked on chocolate, he developed machine vision systems for NASA's Space Shuttle program.

Timothy is a sought-after speaker whose other obsessions include community building, artistic and cultural movements, paragliding and multi-camera video time-lapse projects.

Recent Blog Entries:
Roxie, the wonder dog
5.7 and 9 gram mold dies, Sexy! (SFW)
Spore - the ultimate of digital generative systems

Zohara Mapes
Chocolate Maker

Zohara’s deep passion for chocolate began early starting out as a young girl making French style truffles. The passion for cacao took hold and led her on journeys through the Mayan jungles and into labs with chocolate technologists. She created a confection company selling seasonal flavors at farmers markets and special events and has led classes in Hawaii on cacao from tree to chocolates.

She also has a background in multimedia and has traveled the world on projects for the UN doing documentary video and web work through Europe, the Middle East, Brazil and Hong Kong. She has a deep love for music and toured with Jazz great Ornette Coleman on his European Tone Dialing tour doing live video Jazz at 16.

Zohara feels at home with TCHO blending the worlds she loves of Chocolate & Tech.

Recent Blog Entries:
Strange...