Blommer Chocolate, North America's largest processor of cocoa beans and ingredient chocolate products, announced recently the expansion of the company's sustainable farming initiatives with a new program in West Africa. This program (called CIFOB) will focus on cocoa farmers in Cote d'Ivoire.

According to Peter Blommer, COO of the company, "CIFOB is introducing programs to farmers focused on teaching modern farming and business techniques that will help improve the yields and quality of Cote d'Ivoire's cocoa crops. Based on our experience in Indonesia we would expect to see significant improvements in family incomes due to gains in crop yields and improved market access. The program will also advance safer labor practices."

In Indonesia, more than 15,000 farmers benefited from SAFOB in 2007, the program's second year of operation. Among the results have been increases in family incomes of 20-55% through higher crop yields and quality premiums. Seeing the tremendous impact of the Indonesian program, it was an easy decision to introduce the program in West Africa."

CIFOB has started working with 15 cooperatives throughout the cocoa growing regions of Cote d'Ivoire. Farmers are trained in techniques to revitalize their cocoa farms and to improve cocoa quality. "Simple technology can go a long way in helping farmers improve their incomes," noted Kip Walk, Director of Blommer's Cocoa Department. "For instance, we have introduced a greenhouse type structure called a solar dryer to the cooperatives. The dryers provide a weather proof, natural method of properly drying cocoa beans, which allows the farmer to create a consistent product for the marketplace." These dryers were first used [by Blommer] as part of a Blommer sponsored program in Ecuador that resulted in a 30-40% increase in farmer incomes.

Chocolate Landmarks Food Network Challenge Feb 10th at 8.00pm. Watch Fritz and Torben Bang compete amongst the best in the chocolate industry. The show also airs Feb 11th 3.00am, Feb 13th 9.00pm, Feb 14th 12.00am, Feb 16th 2.00am, Feb 17th 7.00pm.

Fritz's throwdown with Bobby Flay will also be aired on Food Network the same night at 10.30pm. The show also airs Feb 11th 1.30am, Feb 19th 9.30pm, Feb 20th 12.30am and Feb 23rd 4.30pm

When it comes to learning about the history of chocolate, most people never look past the excellent book, The True History of Chocolate by Sophie and Michael Coe. I have to say that the timing of the publishing of this book (1996) was instrumental in my quest to become a chocolate critic. While I am sure that the Coe's did a fair amount of primary research, much of what they wrote was gleaned from the writings of others, which can be confirmed by taking a look at the bibliography.

Many of the sources that are referenced are not easily accessible - even in the current age of Internet access - unless you have access to a good university research library.

For me, one of the cool things about chocolate is that it affords me an opportunity to satisfy my curiosity on a lot of subjects. While I do the tasting and criticism things, my ability to do these is informed by my knowledge of the history, cultural anthropology, economics, agronomy, genetics, and more about chocolate. Chocolate is a lens that I use to look at any subject of interest.

So, if it's not easy to get access to many of these resources, where can you go to learn more?

One great resource is Project Gutenberg, a collection of eBooks that are in the public domain. I like to use the resources at archive.org because they aggregate the Project Gutenberg eBooks with those available from other sources.

One eBook I can recommend is The Project Gutenberg EBook of Cocoa and Chocolate, by Arthur W. Knapp, originally published in 1920 and titled Cocoa and Chocolate: Their History from Plantation to Consumer.

Click here to read the eBook online in a web browser.

The text is also available for download in a few different formats from links on this page:

From time to time I will be posting other good learning resources that are available online as comments to this post. (Book recommendations will be posted in the forums in the Book Reviews category.) If you have some online resources that you'd like to recommend, you can post them here.

If you look across the navigation tabs, you'll see that I have moved the search widget from the left-hand column after the Latest Activity section to its own page. I did this to speed up page loads.. The widget searches for text, images, and videos related to chocolate and aggregates them all on one page of search results.

What makes this widget cool is that I get to train it by specifying sites that are related to chocolate and giving it keywords that define the "tag cloud" or "buzz cloud." And you can help me train the widget.

You can help make this THE best chocolate search widget on the Internet by:

• Rating the search results. When you use the widget you get to cote on the relevance of the search results. If you see a result that does not pertain to the topic of your search, give it a NO vote. If you find a page that really does a good job of answering your search request, give it a YES vote.
• Suggesting a word for the tag cloud. Not all the words I have entered are displayed, but feel free to recommend anyway. Add your suggestions as a comment to this post.
• Suggesting a "model" site. You don't get to see these, but the widget enables me to select sites that are related to chocolate and the search engine uses those to help determine the relevancy of the results. If you know of a really good site about chocolate that might not be well-known, add your suggestion as a comment to this post.

At the moment, the use of the search widget is supported by advertising that is displayed on the results pages. As with the ads that are displayed on this site, once it gets to the point that this is a really useful and well-used capability, I will take the site and the search widget "private" and get rid of the ads. Until then, I hope you will understand that this is a necessary evil during the early stages of the development of this site.

Have fun!

According to their monthly newsletter, Costco says that Theo is making a "limited" (as limited as anything that is sold in Costco can be) edition Valentine's Gift Set.

This follows a trend for well-known chocolate companies to sell their wares through Costco. While probably less destructive to the bottom line than selling through WalMart, the fact that people can purchase the chocolate at 20% normal retail prices would indicate that Theo is not making its customary margins.

The Gift Set is actually pretty extensive and would make a decent introduction to their products for an emerging chocophile: 5 origin bars, 6 flavored bars, and 6 bob bons. The article does not give a price, you'll either have to go online or into your local Costco to find that out.

If you scroll down the home page of The Chocolate Life you'll see a new calendar of events I have created. If you have (or know of) an event that can be included on this calendar, send me a message and I will add it. Better yet, please leave your recommendations as comments to this post.

Hold on to your hats everyone, rumor has it that Starbucks will be getting into the "artisan" chocolate business in a big way pretty soon. Given the number of doors (that's the technical term that people use when they talk about the number of stores) in the Starbucks franchise it stretches credulity to believe that the chocolate will actually be made using artisan production methods. When I know more I will let everyone know what I find out.

In the meantime, take a moment to post your thoughts in the Forum Discussion "What Makes an Artisan Chocolate Artisan?"

The majority of the growth in the premium chocolate business in the US over the past several years has come as a result of an increase in interest in artisan confections. This has led to dramatic growth in the number of artisan chocolatiers capable of commanding premium prices for their goods.

Less dramatic, but no less interesting, has been the growth of artisan chocolate makers in the US. In 2005 the list contained one name: Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker.

Their success, however, encouraged a number of people to start seriously looking at getting into the business of making artisan chocolate. The purchase of Scharffen Berger by Hershey Artisan Confections validated their efforts as it signaled that there were possible exit strategies beyond passing the business on to family members.

2006 and 2007 have seen the introduction of a new generation of artisan (defined as batch processed as opposed to continuous processing) chocolate makers. Interestingly, they are all in the West and Midwest: Theo in Seattle, Amano in Utah, DeVries in Colorado, and Askinosie and Patric in Missouri. While all are still learning their craft, each of them approaches the art of making chocolate with entirely different purposes and different equipment. Where they may be most alike is in the way they were started and financed: They are the product of individual visions, they have all taken two or more years from concept to production, and they are all closely-held.

The new kid on the block, TCHO in San Francisco, is about to change much of that.

The brainchild of Timothy Childs, a co-founder of Cabaret Chocolates who used to work on space shuttles before he started making chocolates. After a disagreement about the direction of the company that led to his leaving Cabaret, Timothy started looking closely at getting into making chocolate rather than confections. That interest was driven, in part, by his original desire to limit Cabaret's reliance on chocolate from a single manufacturer located in Venezuela. Although the chocolate might have been good, the political situation in Venezuela is unstable, to put it mildly. Timothy was encouraged along this path by one of the investors in Cabaret as well as a long-time friend, Louis Rossetto, who is probably best known as a co-founder of Wired magazine.

From the start, one of the more interesting aspects of TCHO's development was the mashup of traditional chocolate-making technology and Silicon Valley-inspired innovation and entrepreneurialism. It was not just enough to buy old machinery and refurbish it, TCHO hired a master mechanic and roboticist to strip away all of the old electrics and replace them with state-of-the-art process control electronics. The old equipment links them to traditional methods of artisan chocolate making that is enhanced by an awareness of what is happening at every stage of the process - and the ability to control many of the variables - normally only available to industrial processors.

This blend of art and tech inspired by the lessons of Silicon Valley permeates everything TCHO does. It's not just enough to make chocolate, they have to look at chocolate making technology and see how and where it might be improved. It's not just enough to make chocolate, they have to re-think the way chocolate is being marketed and sold. Does percentage cacao really mean anything? What about origin? What about organic and "Fair Trade?" And (while they're at it), why not think about the vocabulary of chocolate and see if there is a way to make it easier for people to understand?

This questioning of commonly-held assumptions is an integral part of many Silicon Valley startups. But it's definitely unusual for the chocolate industry.

An example of just how different TCHO is going to be was revealed late last year when their first production was made available as a public "beta test." A large chocolate company would have held focus groups and done limited distribution in test markets to figure out consumer reaction to their product - a process that can cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. Most artisan chocolate makers avoid any sort of market testing. They trust their instincts and the opinions of a few close friends.

TCHO, on the other hand, published an invitation on their web site for people who wanted to be involved in the development process. This is common in software and Internet development but highly unusual for food products.

Packaging of the TCHO beta bars.

It is an example of a brilliant marketing strategy. First, TCHO does not have to pay for expensive focus groups and market-by-market consumer testing. Second, they build buzz around a concept I call artificial scarcity. While anyone could go to the web site and order one of the beta bars, you actually had to go to the factory in San Francisco and pick the order up in person. TCHO would not ship the bars. The limited availability added cachet to the buzz, drove up interest, and led to people on the East Coast who wanted to get in on the beta test to get friends in the Bay area to place orders for them, go to the factory to pick them up, and then ship them back east. Think about it: people were paying for the privilege of tasting a product that was not ready to go to market. Then those who did get their hands (and mouths) on a bar were asked to provide their feedback about what they did and did not like - for free.

Not only did TCHO save a bundle but they were able to build an enormous amount of word of mouth at quite a low cost, leveraging their knowledge of the Internet by applying it in a food marketing context.

TCHO is also looking at ways to simplify the chocolate-buying experience by avoiding the chocolate marketing trend that is most in vogue this season, percentage, and placing lesser importance on origin. The designation of the current beta release bar is "Beta C Ghana 0.XX." The 'Beta' designation means that the bar is still being tested, the 'C' stands for the flavor profile (chocolatey - as opposed to fruity, nutty, etc.), and the '0.XX' is the 'version number' of the release. Ghana is the country of origin of the beans, and as the web site attests, "refers to the single source for our 'chocolatey' bar, a land known for deep, rich cacao." TCHO runs a small test lab and can turn around new versions of a chocolate based on feedback from beta testers in as little as 36 hours.

In talking with Timothy about their naming process - finding ways to accurately and succinctly talk about chocolate has occupied a lot of my time over the past decade - one unanticipated side-effect of the decision to simplify the naming scheme arose. That is that TCHO's choices for beans are much more tightly constrained than they would be if they were promoting origin and percentage. What Timothy (who does most of the bean sourcing) has to do is find beans that, when processed and made into chocolate, will deliver the particular flavor profile they are looking for. Usually, when making origin chocolate, the chocolate maker tries to express the varietal and terroir characteristics of the beans - whatever that happens to be.

To do that, TCHO is working very closely with the farmers from whom they purchase their beans in a program that TCHO calls "Smart Sourcing." Where I can appreciate the technical and market innovation TCHO is committed to, in the end, it is probably their approach to bean sourcing that will have the most profound and lasting impact on the chocolate industry.

The best parallel that can be made is the application of technology to the California wine industry. Prior to the development of the wine industry in California, high-end wine making was pretty much an art form based on hard-earned knowledge passed down as oral tradition through apprenticeships from previous generations. What really kick-started California's growth as a major wine producer was the use of technology to deconstruct how great French wines were made and then to develop methods for understanding - and ultimately controlling - every aspect of the wine-making process.

By comparison and in the most fundamental and important ways, cacao post-harvest processing remains in the stone age. For example, very little is actually known about what variables affect fermentation and drying, and farmers, who are mostly responsible for doing the fermentation and drying, do not have access to accurate thermometers, moisture meters, and pH meters. While $300 for a moisture meter may not seem like a lot to you or me, in many cacao-growing countries it can represent the entire value of the cacao crop for a farmer for a year and so is simply beyond reach. For a chocolate company looking to source quality beans, the investment is trivial compared with the potential return.

But can't co-ops afford technology like this? In many cases, yes, but often they lack the sophistication and the will to make these sorts of community investments, even though everyone would clearly benefit. One of the best examples of this I personally came across was in a loosely-knit community of 90 farm families in Barlovento, a region in Venezuela known for its cacao (the Hacienda Concepcion, made famous by Cluizel, is in Barlovento). Even though the community had been organized for a decade, as a group they had never been able to agree to pool their profits to build a community fermentation center and drying pad even though doing so would be an invaluable resource to the community on many different levels, not least of which would be improving the consistency and quality of the cocoa they produced. As a group they lacked the will to do this and if even one farmer declined to contribute, the rest would not go ahead without that family's involvement.

Unfortunately, this is all-too-common behavior in many cacao-growing countries. (Come to think about it, it's all too common here in the US, where entrenched self-interest often trumps community investment.)

Eventually, Timothy envisions a mesh of sensors that evaluate and record every aspect of what's going on in and around a fermentation box, correlating (for example) changes in ambient temperature and humidity with changes in chemical and thermal activity in the heap of fermenting beans. By doing so they hope to be able to develop reliable guides for optimal fermentation and drying, by varietal, by country. Better fermentation means better cocoa, which also means better chocolate. More importantly, by focusing on product quality issues, TCHO fully expects the farmers to start charging them more for beans, creating what is called a "virtuous cycle" (in TCHO-speak, a 'spiral of quality'). Investing in farmers to improve quality results in an increase in bean quality that results in the farmer being able to earn more for their labor which results in improving the quality of life for the farmer and his family which will lead to continued improvement in the quality of the beans because the farmer gets a tangible - and meaningful - return on his investment of labor.

In typical TCHO style, Timothy is committed to innovating the cocoa supply chain into a "supply loop." TCHO plans to take a percentage of revenues and reinvest them in hard tangible improvements in the cocoa processing facilities of their farmers. They also plan to invest early, before seeing finished crops, working with any person or entity that is interested to develop low-cost fermentation, drying, and other equipment and techniques and then transferring what they have learned to the farmer.

But how is the chocolate? It's still in Beta so it's really too early to tell. I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a couple of bars from two earlier beta releases, and while there was definitely room for improvement, the initial results indicate that when they finally settle on a recipe they'll have achieved something remarkable from bulk West African amelonado Forastero beans.

Here are my initial impressions that I made on the TCHO chocolate bars I beta-tested. (I can't believe I just wrote that.) In this e-mail I sent to Timothy, I am using for the first time some new language of my own to describe the flavor profile of a chocolate based on a music analogy in an attempt to reduce reliance on terminology borrowed from the wine world. (I'd like to hear your thoughts on this analogy - pleae comment.)

When I think of chocolatey when it comes to chocolate, one of the common flavor profiles that comes to mind is "baked brownie" and both the 0.18a and 0.18b batches have traces of this flavor in them.

Where the two batches differ most is in the "attack/decay/sustain/release" profile of the fruit acid flavors. In the 0.18a batch the fruit acids come to the front more quickly and are "sharper" (the attack) than in the 0.18b batch. The fruit acid notes - which don't really have a distinctive flavor although they are probably more red fruit without any "drying" flavors (astringency) in them - diminish more slowly (the decay) and stay around slightly longer (the sustain).

Both batches have lightweight but quite long "releases" (or more commonly, finishes) to them in which the baked brownie flavor predominates but is joined by some other flavors. I detect virtually no astringency in either sample, which is pretty remarkable for typical Ghanaian beans - amelonado Forastero genetics feature quite heavily here. This lack of astringency from tannins and accompanying bitterness suggests that you are getting better than average fermentation delivered by most Ghanaian farmers. Careful roasting prevents the formation of bitter and tannic compounds from the flavor precursor components that are the result of fermentation and drying.

The very long aftertaste on both is very clean which is a strong sign of good quality control all the way through the process.

The relatively complex nature of the flavor profile is interesting for a chocolate using beans of West African origin. Normally I find the flavors of West African chocolate more monotonic, so being able to balance the fruit acid with the chocolatey flavors is something of an accomplishment.

The TCHO beta has now been opened up and they are accepting orders from all over the country and shipping them. For more information and to order, visit www.TCHO.com.