Recchiuti & Astreas: Chocolate Bonbons in Outer Space

Scott Prazynski, Shahreen Reza, Michael Recchiuti and Tiffany Vora

Michael Recchiuti's eponymous chocolate company Recchiuti that he founded and runs with his wife Jacky has just turned 25 and his focus is clearly on the future. “I am not a person of complacency,” he says – and it shows. Over its first quarter century, the company has built a solid rep as one of America’s top confectioners, a status confirmed when the New York Times announced in January that its little black box of sixteen truffles was yet again, in the opinion of its editors, the best in the nation.

But rather than rest on these laurels, the husband-and-wife combo has undertaken two big new ventures. One is moderately risky, a radical rebrand, while the other is something of a moonshot, literally – working to make chocolates fit for that final frontier, space.

A Cosmic Meeting

Last fall, I sat in on a meeting between him and two representatives of his partners, the start-ups Astreas and Mission Space Food. The first to arrive is the NASA astronaut and Stanford-trained doctor Scott Parazynski, whose off-work adventures include going down into the basin of an active volcano and taking a submersible to see Titanic’s dread remains. His medical and space experience are useful to the next to join, the polyglot CEO of both companies, Shahreen Reza, a Cambridge graduate with expertise in cybersecurity, who formerly worked as an executive at the Peter Thiel-founded Palantir Technologies.

It's fair to say, a meeting of three such individuals is only likely to happen in the food- and tech-obsessed Bay Area. The meeting moves between big, high-ceilinged rooms all buzzing with activity, Recchiuti, a chill Willy Wonka walking us around his chocolate factory, showing off the machines, letting us taste their products. “These German machines are great, when they work. But I’ve had to learn how to fix them.”

From the way they speak of their joint efforts, Reza has put Recchiuti through his paces, through umpteen iterations of these ready-for-Mars bars. But bars it turned out were not what she wanted; she set her mind on snacks shaped like planets, with differing layers of foodstuffs in each of what would be the core, crust, and mantle of these miniature orbs.

Creating Chocolates for Space

“Round is hard to do,” Recchiuti says, “so we had to find the right molds. That’s taken some time.” They abandoned a plan to put a hard fortune-cookie type shell around each, as too cumbersome to produce – anyway, the crisp casings might draw water in and get soggy. An attempt to use macadamia nuts fizzled – “it’s too perishable a product,” Reza says.

The chocolate they chose needed to be less sensitive to temperature changes. At the core of some of these little planet shaped bonbons, Reza and her team are planning to put a mix of the vitamins astronauts seldom get on missions as well as energy-boosting aids to attentiveness, maybe some finely ground coffee, and some extracts from memory-promoting lion’s mane mushrooms. Nutraceuticals is the industry shorthand for what they’re putting in there. Other bonbons might encase things to aid in, or at least not interfere with, sleeping – they talk about sourcing mint leaves for some.

A Forward Focused Venture

Recchiuti chocolates coming off the line

“With Virgin Galactic, Space X, independent space stations … the industry is going exponential,” she says. She also thinks surgeons and pilots might benefit from the little pick-me-ups. With the products nearing readiness, Recchiuti says Reza is working with another graphic design firm, Portland-based Ziba, to sort out its branding, and casting about for another round of investment. “We might have to shift manufacturing of this to elsewhere,” Recchiuti says, “San Francisco expenses being what they are. Maybe to Houston, near where some of the space industry is.”

Parazynski has been on five Shuttle flights and seven spacewalks so his input is invaluable. “Mealtime is really an important time of the day," he shares, adding "On the international space port, you had astronauts from all over, Canadians, Japanese, Spaniards, French – we had some great French meals up there. For other, more ordinary meals, you don’t want to just be popping pills, supplements.”

Reza jumps in: “To have a fine chocolate to eat, with these other benefits – that’s what the mission is.” On March 4th, 2024, Astreas successfully delivered its brain-boosting chocolate truffles to the International Space Station, for the ISS Expedition 71 crew. At year 25 for Recchiuti, the endeavor has been the very definition of a lofty goal.

Reza expects the product to launch for earth-bound consumers, in the fall of 2024.