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Timothy and the

Chocolate Factory

How a space shuttle technologist and the founder of Wired magazine hacked together a homebrew chocolate lab.

By David Pescovitz Photography by Doug Adesko

VISITING TCHO IS THE MAKER’S EQUIVALEN T

of winning one of Willy Wonka’s Golden Tickets. The new chocolate company, headquartered in a vast warehouse on San Francisco’s Pier 17, is a sweet blend of DIY ingenuity, self-taught science, and online community. From hacking together a homebrew chocolate lab for $5,000 instead of buying a $100,000 “pro” system, to tricking out a 30-year-old chocolate factory line shipped over from Germany, TCHO ( tcho.com) embodies a maker mindset that its founder calls “scrappy not crappy.”

“I was a technologist working on things like the space shuttle when I got seduced by this weird, crystalline, alien goo that’s called chocolate,” says TCHO co-founder Timothy Childs.

TCHO, pronounced “cho,” bills itself as a company “where technology meets chocolate, where Silicon Valley meets San Francisco food culture.” Appropriately enough, then, the chocolate is still in beta. Fifty-gram bars in plain brown wrappers are available for $5 with formulations subject to change as often as every few days, incorporating direct feedback from, er, users. In the next year or so, though, the company plans to transform part of its warehouse into a retail store and European-style tasting room.

Childs’ eventual goal is to see TCHO chocolate become an in-demand ingredient in other companies’ products. His business plan is based on using the web to transform the supply chain into a supply loop. TCHO will use digital video and other media to tell the chocolate’s life story, opening the lines of communication between, say, the Peruvian farmer who grew a particular bean and the customer on

28 Make: Volume 14

another continent. The entire manufacturing process will be transparent, he explains, from cacao pod to palette, and TCHO will be the hub of communication between supplier and sweet tooth.

The first step, though, is getting the factory line up and running. Matthew Heckert, a kinetic artist and alum of machine performance group Survival Research Laboratories, is leading the restoration of vats, tanks, mixers, and refiners that have been dry for years. The story of how the 1972-vintage factory line made its way to San Francisco is part of the whole TCHO creation myth.

In 2003, Childs, a veteran technologist, was working on a NASA contract to develop machine vision technology for the space shuttle. Around the same time, a friend at a previous tech startup had prophesied to Childs that premium, single-origin dark chocolate was the next big thing for foodies. Through a bit of kitchen chemistry, the friend had engineered dark chocolate to melt in your mouth. Childs was intrigued by the business possibilities.

Then, with the explosion of the shuttle Columbia on February 1, he suddenly had a lot more free time. Based on the new technique, Childs and his friend co-founded a confection company called Cabaret Chocolates. For production, they secured an old Oakland chocolate factory filled with obsolete, broken machines. During the day Childs repaired the machines, and at night he evangelized Cabaret at dot-com parties.

“I learned about how chocolate was made by fixing those machines,” he says. “We had very limited investment, so we had to invent our own centrifuges