It's not a job, it's chocolate

New class of chocolatiers taking advantage of consumers' love of dark varieties

Eric Risberg
AP

Timothy Childs, founder and chief chocolate officer of TCHO, inspects the confection's progress at his chocolate factory in San Francisco.

Eric Risberg
AP

Zohara Mapes, assistant chocolate maker at TCHO, grades cacao beans after doing a cut test to check fermentation levels at the new chocolate factory.

NEW YORK — As a software developer who worked with NASA, Timothy Childs built vision-tracking systems for the space shuttle. Now the former techie has a new venture he says is out of this world: chocolate.

As demand for premium chocolate soars, a new crop of high-tech confectioners are changing the industry with Silicon Valley-style innovation, imported German equipment and an obsession with the simple cocoa bean.

"The bean totally seduced me," said Childs, co-founder and "chief chocolate officer" of TCHO, a San Francisco-based startup seeking to improve the quality of chocolate through scientific experimentation with flavors. "On a molecular level, making chocolate is enrapturing."

TCHO, pronounced "choh," isn't your ordinary chocolate factory. Based on San Francisco's waterfront, the company currently sells its chocolate only online in brown packets labeled "beta," solicits feedback and reaches out to customers through social media outlets such as YouTube. Eventually, it plans to sell its chocolate to food companies and through high-end retail outlets.

TCHO shuns the usual practice of classifying bars by cacao content or origin, relying instead on a "flavor wheel" that emphasizes taste above all: "Chocolatey," "Fruity" and "Nutty" are out now, with "Earthy," "Floral" and "Citrus" on the way.

"Saying a bar is 70 percent cacao doesn't equate," said Childs, referring to the industry standard for premium chocolate. "People should pick chocolate the same way they buy wine and food, by flavor."

A similar philosophy drives Amano Chocolate, a recently launched company based in Utah's Wasatch Mountain range. Its goal is to offer in the U.S. the premium artisan chocolate once found mainly in Europe.

Founder Art Pollard, another software developer who studied physics, fell in love with chocolate-making during a honeymoon trip to Hawaii and he whipped up his first batch using science lab equipment intended to grind chemicals.

"Eventually, I started fashioning my own equipment and began churning out some fine-quality chocolate," said Pollard, who studied confectionery in Europe and buys his beans in far-flung villages in Venezuela and Ecuador.

"It is extremely hard work and takes a lot of time; but, boy, is it beautiful when you get right," said Pollard, who now uses equipment imported from Germany to roast, grind, melt and mold his chocolate into bars.

Neither TCHO nor Amano would provide sales figures, but both say they have aggressive growth plans.

Though a soft economy has forced Americans to cut back on some luxuries, U.S. sales of dark chocolate keep booming, lifted recently by studies touting the confection's purported health benefits and growing consumer interest in organic and fair-trade products.

Total U.S. chocolate sales are expected to soar to $18 billion a year by 2011 from $16 billion in 2006, with organic and dark chocolate representing the fastest-growing segment.

"Chocolate is an affordable indulgence. No matter how difficult economic times get, we'll always want to treat ourselves," said Joan Steuer, president of Chocolate Marketing LLC, which studies trends and new products in the industry.

But while sales are growing, so is the competition, crowding shelves of grocery stores with brands such as Ghirardelli, Godiva, Dagoba, Lindt and Scharffen Berger.

While there are only around a dozen U.S. "bean-to-bar" manufacturers that make their own chocolate from scratch, smaller players who buy their chocolate wholesale and melt it into bars are entering the market at a rate of about one a month, Steuer said.

"It's exploding," she said. "The market isn't saturated yet, but it's close."

That doesn't mean people are getting rich cranking out bars and bonbons, however.

Bulging costs and paper-thin profit margins have squeezed traditional chocolate manufacturers and make it extremely difficult for new players to break in.

A commodities boom has pushed the price of cocoa, the chief ingredient in chocolate, above $3,000 per metric ton, the highest in 22 years and double the price a year ago.

Some niche chocolate makers have dreams of being bought out by a major candy manufacturer for a sweet payday.

But Childs, co-founder of TCHO, said his priority is building up the company, not cashing out.

"For right now, I'm very happy just making chocolate that fills my factory, " he said.