Sweet! High-end chocolate business booming

updated 7:01 a.m. ET Aug. 27, 2008

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 that 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, antique 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 idyllic 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 like 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 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 whose 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 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 turn-of-the-century era 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 in the future.

Though a soft economy has forced Americans to cut back on some luxuries, U.S. sales of dark chocolate keep booming, lifted even higher 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 annually by 2011, up from $16 billion in 2006, with organic and dark chocolate representing the fastest-growing segment.

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