How Tcho is Taking Chocolate in Bold New Directions

The “innovation corridor” is what boosters have long called a contiguous part of Emeryville and Berkeley – and no wonder, since there are companies like Bayer, Pixar and Zymergen here. But lately, it might as well be called Vegetable-ville and declared a cow-free zone. In the last couple of years, reasonable facsimiles of burgers and milk have been manufactured here with no bovine involvement – and it's now where high-end milk chocolate is being produced, again with no actual milk in the mix.

Just before Christmas last year, the San Francisco-born, Berkeley-bred Tcho held a launch for its new line of milk-free chocolate bars – even while it was also announcing its decision, last fall, to become a B-Corporation. The launch also included a demo of the labs the company has set up in cacao-growing countries around the world – with $15 million in support from the United States Agency for International Development. And so, in short, for this small chocolate company, it was a big news day, and its CEO Takayuki Date was duly on hand to announce it.

Tcho Timeline

Tcho is an unusual company, founded in 2005 by Timothy Childs, a tech expert who worked with NASA for years, and a veteran of the chocolate industry Karl Bittong. With the usual start-up aims of disrupting this space, Tcho was operated for a time by the co-founders of Wired magazine Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe. A venture capital fund bought it in 2013 and then sold it to Ezaco Glico, the Osaka-based candy-maker, most famous for Pocky. The Japanese company has an estimated 5,000 employees to Tcho's 40.

Into the Chocolate Lab

In this ever-shifting time, continuity has been provided by Tcho's chief chocolate maker Brad Kintzer, at Tcho for the last decade after learning his craft at another Bay Area chocolatier Scharffen Berger. Kintzer was on hand at the opening to give tours of the nearly 50,000-square-foot factory – and, a few days later, in a phone interview, provided chapter and verse on Tcho's new efforts to shift the market.

A botany and environmental studies grad of the University of Vermont, Kintzer began the tour with a paean to cacao. “They are these absolutely peculiar plants,” he says – ones he saw for the first time in a greenhouse of a botanical garden in Montreal. “The flowers grow off the trunks, and one in 400 of them will be lucky enough to fruit and grow into a full pod. They're harvested by hand usually with a machete – there's this sweet fruit mold surrounding these astringent and bitter seeds.”

He cuts open a red-orange pod, exposing these beige, gooey-looking seeds, and then speaks of all the different processes needed to make the result palatable, the roasting, fermenting, cracking, winnowing, grinding, and tempering. Next to him is a small workstation that can do some of these things at a micro-scale, with hairdryers positioned over some bowls providing the last of these processes, tempering the chocolate with heat.

“This is essentially the type of lab we've set up because many of the cacao growers have never tasted the chocolate that comes from plants they've grown,” Kintzer says. And so ten of these MacGyvered labs have been set up in Ecuador, Peru, and Ghana, these places as much as 20 degrees north or south of the Equator where cacao trees can grow. “The hair-dryers, you can replace those if they break. So better probably than a $5,000 heating element from Switzerland.”

The head of quality control at one of Tcho's growers, the ACOPAGRO cooperative in Peru's San Martin province, Hernan Garcia Meza, says he's used the lab set up there, and found it helpful to notice the different flavor profiles coming from their beans.

Another manager at the coop, Pamela Esquivel, notes that the beans they gather, ferment and dry, come from four different regions – so they can compare and contrast the tastes coming from the different plantations.

Which is the aim, according to Kintzer. “We're trying to get the growers to have some sense of how what they do affects the taste,” he says at the launch. (This type of process has long been done informally by certain chocolate companies – another Bay Area player, Guittard, for instance, has often set up such demonstrations of chocolate-making with suppliers, connecting beans to the taste of bars.)

In the hubbub of the launch, Kintzer speaks briefly about how, in the wine and coffee worlds, there's already been work of this nature done. “There's a whole vocabulary out there, the genetics have been researched, that book ln wine and coffee has been written many times over. But not with chocolate.”

On a side-table near the mini-lab is a paper done by one Lambert A. Motilat, a scientist at the University of the West Indies, with the title, “Review of Cacao Exploration and Germplasm Movements.” Kintzer says it's a work on the genetic diversity of these plants, how they moved originally from the Amazon basin to Pre-Columbian Mexico, and then to West Africa, some islands in the Pacific and Hawaii. “No one's studied this stuff at a very deep level. Maybe genetics is a bigger piece of it all than we know at this point.”

The Production Facility

Before we enter the factory proper, Kintzer makes a joke he admits he's often made before, as he asks us to don hair-nets and step in a shallow water bath. “It's time to cleanse your soles.” Inside, the factory he shows off the machines that do all these processes he's spoken of earlier at a larger scale – the company has tended to do about $10-million in annual sales, this in an American market that's selling about $20 billion each year. “A David in a Goliathian market,” Kintzer has said before, adding now, “People think we're bigger than we are.”

As influencers take photos of each other in various attractive poses in the thick of the heavy machinery, Kintzer brags about a trusty grinder that can smooth the product to where the grit is smaller than humans can perceive. “The human palate can detect particles of 30 microns and this takes it down to less than 25.”

The Secrets to Dairy Free Milk Chocolate

The machines are whirring, the grinders grinding, inside, and I wait until our call, to ask him about how he tries to make milk-free bars taste good. “In milk chocolate, you want some softness, some creaminess, some caramel – the trifecta.” After numerous experiments, he arrived at a set of products that deploy oat milk, organic cashew butter and some coconut sugar. Of the six new bars, all proudly advertising, “100 percent plant-based”, two were stand-outs – the Holy Fudge, derived mainly from West African cacao, and the Born Fruity, sourced in Peru. The other four, to my mind, had some distance to go before I'd forgive them for supplanting Tcho's milky Mokaccino bar.

Looking Towards the Future

As for the decision to become a B-Corp, he says it has put in place a formal process for the company to improve on various headings. (B-Corps undertake to report not just on a financial bottom line, but environmental and social bottom lines, and include the likes of Patagonia, All Birds, and The Body Shop.) “It's a model that fits with what Tcho has been doing all along,” Kintzer says, “Using the organic product, trying to pay our suppliers fairly.”

At Scharffen Berger, Kintzer was around to see chocolate's last big revolution – that other Bay Area chocolate start-up's effort not to go after a singular taste, but to offer what chocolate expert Alice Medrich calls varietal or single-origin chocolate. “It made a big difference,” she says. In the 2013 edition of her chocolate bible, Seriously Bitter Sweet, Medrich writes: “New and more interesting chocolates – purer, more flavorful, less sweet, different, even exotic – …. started to appear, next to familiar brands.”

Where Scharffen Berger led many other larger companies soon followed. Tcho is, as Kintzer says, a small company, a slingshot-bearing David surrounded by many cudgel-wielding Goliaths, but it is an influential one. Working in this vegan-friendly corridor, it may not have a feel for what the larger market wants. But maybe it does: It's betting big on these plant-derived chocolates, sourced from farmers with a heightened awareness of how their beans get used.