Beta-testing Chocolate

October 2, 2008 7:43 AM

What happens when a former NASA software engineer and a co-founder of Wired magazine decide to start up a chocolate company? TCHO Ventures is trying to make single-bean varietal chocolate varieties that best express the component flavors of chocolate, which they've identified as "chocolate", "nutty", "fruity", "floral", "earthy", and "citrus". To test this concept, they've been "beta-testing" their chocolate in plain brown wrappers, and collecting feedback. The result is good chocolate, with just a hint of viral marketing.
posted by kaszeta (26 comments total)

The result is good chocolate, with just a hint of viral marketing.

Well, they don't need our help then.
posted by delmoi at 7:48 AM on October 2, 2008

All the links go to their website? Oh, that's the viral marketing part.
posted by smackfu at 7:48 AM on October 2, 2008

Oops, I was going to link in the Economist article, which is actually where I first saw these folks. We're all used to viral marketing, but I'm not used to it in chocolate, and not used to reading about it in the Economist first.
posted by kaszeta at 7:53 AM on October 2, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

BoingBoing did a good behind the scenes video tour of the factory which goes a long way to explain why the company is different/special.
posted by stbalbach at 7:57 AM on October 2, 2008

PepsiDark
posted by Mikey-San at 8:39 AM on October 2, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I bet the Belgians are laughing tehir asses off. Americans? Making chocolate? With their sugar-adled palettes ruined by years of over exposure to oversweetened food? Maybe they could make a chocolate with a hint of vomit, as an upmarket alternative to Hersheys.
posted by Artw at 8:40 AM on October 2, 2008

the Economist article, which is actually where I first saw these folks

Heh. I saw them first in Make. I guess they are having a wide appeal.
posted by DU at 8:45 AM on October 2, 2008

…of course people would have said the same about Americans ability to make wine or decent beer back in the day. That said, those are based on home grown ingredients. Where’s your background in colonial oppression on the African continent? Is the French army willing to fight wars on your behalf to keep chocolate cheap?
posted by Artw at 8:46 AM on October 2, 2008

Viral marketing involving Wired that Boing boing's done an in-depth report on. Ugh. Do we really need to do to chocolate what Starbucks did to coffee?

This will ensure that you can't actually get a good piece of chocolate. It ensures that you get chocolate in which one "component flavors" is expressed to an extreme to the exclusion of the others. And you are going to get legions of overnight chocolate experts opining on some upscale Hershey bar using adjectives fed to them through marketing.

And then they are going to argue amongst themselves over whether paper, foil or plastic packaging preserves the "nuttiness" better.

There never has been a more prescient book than "Trading Up".
posted by Pastabagel at 8:54 AM on October 2, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I bet the Belgians are laughing their asses off. Americans? Making chocolate?

Which country do you think makes the best chocolate?
posted by timelord at 8:55 AM on October 2, 2008

Heh. I see Noka gets a mention.
posted by Artw at 9:06 AM on October 2, 2008

BoingBoing did a good behind the scenes video tour of the factory which goes a long way to explain why the company is different/special.

One suspects that for the readers of BoingBoing, the things that make the company special are the words "NASA software engineer" and "co-founder of Wired", rather than anything to do with the chocolate.

Countdown to a Flickr photostream of the factory floor and arcane discussions about open sourcing the software that drives their conveyor belts ...
posted by outlier at 9:08 AM on October 2, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

"OMG It runs on Win CE. Shut it down! Shut it down!"
posted by Artw at 9:09 AM on October 2, 2008

My Warcraft guildmaster is one of their investors, they made custom chocolates with our guild logo. Yes, deep nerdy. It's good chocolate and I like their local manufacturing. It's clever to build a chocolate company like an Internet startup with the concomitant marketing, communication, etc. Tcho strikes me as being a lot like Moo, really, only chocolate instead of narrow business cards. Will it work? I hope so, but there's lots of good chocolate out there.
posted by Nelson at 9:32 AM on October 2, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

This showed up in a presentation I attended recently, including samples. I really didn't like it. I wanted to like it, of course, but not for me.
posted by stevil at 9:42 AM on October 2, 2008

I've seen their warehouse and eaten their chocolate (at a totally non-chocolate-related underground function that was taking place in the same warehouse pier). It was good chocolate but this:


"TCHO is about helping you become a knowledgeable enthusiast, since without context and meaning complete enjoyment of chocolate is impossible.

TCHO’s website connects our customers to the minds making TCHO, as well as to each other.

TCHO’s tour is a multimedia exploration of how chocolate is made, how TCHO makes chocolate, and of chocolate culture.

TCHO creates new rituals for sharing chocolate."

Is such a smug Web 2.0 appeal to geek snobbery that I want to pelt these people with M'n'Ms and Fun Size Hershey bars. Yeah, that's my new RITUAL for SHARING chocolate I JUST CREATED.
posted by oneirodynia at 9:42 AM on October 2, 2008 [6 favorites has favorites]

Just as a warning Tcho Tcho chocolate would contain human ganglia paste and give you dreams of cannibalism and SAN loss when ingested – don’t get them confused.
posted by Artw at 9:52 AM on October 2, 2008

Tcho Tchp create new rituals for sharing chocolate too. Horrible, horrible rituals.
posted by Artw at 9:53 AM on October 2, 2008

Is this a post or an ad?
posted by rocket88 at 9:55 AM on October 2, 2008

BoingBoing huh. How is a feature in a major media publication 'viral' But I digress. People associated with boingboing do a feature on their friends. Yawn.
posted by delmoi at 9:55 AM on October 2, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Just don't be bringing any raw chocolate into Canada.
Couple arrested for carrying raw chocolate. For second time, drug test falsely shows their confection to be hashish.

"Even with their certified letter from the Department of Justice, which clearly outlined the organic chocolate they were carting across the U.S. border was, in fact, chocolate, Nadine Artemis and her partner, Ron Obadia, prepared themselves for the worst."

Meanwhile, Cadbury recalls Chinese-made chocolates and Hong Kong authorities defend melamine levels in Cadbury chocolate.
Which isn't really chocolate, truly.

Loved the david lebovitz quote "Why the heck would you ask someone what they think if you don't care to hear their answer?" What is this, Fox News?" from timelord's link.

I do love Lindt, but noticed they were closing stores left and right when I was in St.Louis this spring. The sale was awesome. I bought $150.00's worth, which would have cost 3x's that at their regular prices. Oh, plus 3 books on chocolate. Yummm.
posted by alicesshoe at 10:21 AM on October 2, 2008

Why can't foodies just fucking enjoy stuff without having to turn it into rocket science? Forest for the trees...
posted by Thorzdad at 10:29 AM on October 2, 2008

Well, they don't need our help then.

Why can't foodies just fucking enjoy stuff without having to turn it into rocket science?

I am strongly interested in this stuff (chocolate, chocolate industry), and don't consider news about TCHO to be viral, but I guess that it's possible that jaded Mefites could do so. For many holiday seasons, my sweetie and I have bought high quality chocolate in bulk (11 lb/5.5 kg boxes) and tempered it ourselves in order to make various chocolate-based confections for friends and family.

Wikipedia link.

It does in fact matter how you make chocolate, including growing it, harvesting it, fermenting it, packaging it, shipping it, blending it, conching it and tempering it. It does in fact matter how much you love the process and the end-product. If you don't know about that or don't care about it, that's fine, but don't ruin it for the rest of us who do know and do care.

I have a lot of good friends who cook in various food industries or at home who can tell what brand of chocolate they're eating (I can most of the time) going only by the taste and the aroma. These folks have a professional stake in the industry and in knowing the source and quality of the chocolates they work with in order to make cost-effective, appealing, high quality confections.

I have a friend who is allergic to only certain sources for chocolate (Venezuelan cacao bothers his food allergies, but no other source of cacao does). I have plenty of friends who are dairy allergic who have to be very careful about their chocolates too. For these kinds of people, having an industry that is more "open source" and having a clear idea of the ingredients down to the sourcing country is of vital concern.

I have friends directly affected by the unfair business practices in chocolate making and chocolate growing. I have friends involved in social activism of the kind where we teach folks to help themselves, using our time and resources to identify more efficient ways to make money, stay in business and help support their families and their livelihoods.

There are plenty of things to worry about if you have cause, and making the industry and the approach more systematic or scientific actually helps a larger slice of folks to fucking enjoy the stuff without having to worry about allergies or quality or ethics or taste.

Further, this is an industry where concerted effort to educate folks in the supply chains to do things better and more efficiently is something that arguably does social good. Sort of like the microloans of the 1990's, imparting new knowledge on how to make the products of their labors higher quality with higher yield would be an economically freeing pursuit.

Folks who are now in very disadvantageous economic situations with distributors or suppliers might benefit and get out from under the yoke by knowing better, more efficient processes to get better, higher quality results. The industry is dominated by very large conglomerates who are not as interested in making high quality chocolate as they are in dominating the market and getting a large chunk of marketshare, and they put everyone else in the market to a severe disadvantage.

For the socially progressive benefits of doing this sort of thing alone, I'd endorse it, let alone the quality of the product.

Seems to me like this sort of thing could/should appeal to the old school social progressiveness of Metafilter if nothing else.
posted by kalessin at 11:09 AM on October 2, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

Thorzdad: but nasa scientists are encouraged to think outside the
box.
posted by uni verse at 12:04 PM on October 2, 2008

I'm waiting for someone to make the peanut butter connoisseur market. Make sure someone fpp's when that happens please.
posted by phylum sinter at 8:53 PM on October 2, 2008

Which country do you think makes the best chocolate?

"I'm more interested in artisan-produced chocolates and a majority of them are being made in the United States. Most of the industrial chocolates don't interest me."

That's a rather expansive exclusion.

Which country makes the best cars? Oh, Panama, no question. I know a guy there that builds them from the ground up, and the quality is impeccable. Well, best car. He hasn't gotten to his second one, yet.

I would think that "best, mass-produced" is the very way to tackle the question of "which country makes the best" if you're going to work with such a question in the first place.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 5:34 AM on October 3, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]