Blogging Chocolate

Buy some chocolate?

2008-04-25T19:11:41Z

Seth Ellis Chocolatier is mostly a wholesale business. We sell our chocolates to hotels and restaurants, and to companies wanting gifts for their clients. We also provide chocolate to retail stores, who sell to the public. If you’d like to try our chocolates, here are some of the places you can find them. (And if you aren’t near any of these locations, you can buy our chocolates on line at the incomparable It’s Only Natural Gifts, as well as lots of other great gifting stuff.)

Whole Foods Markets

Look in the bakery case at the east side of the Pearl Street store in Boulder (map) for our chocolates by-the-piece. We’re also in the Tamarac, Cherry Creek, Highlands Ranch and Belmar stores in the Denver area, and in the Colorado Springs, Colorado, Santa Fe, New Mexico and Overland Park, Kansas stores. (Not in your favorite Whole Foods Market? Have a chat with the bakery or chocolate specialty folks at your local store. We’re in their national vendor database.)

Ozo Coffee

Located right across the street from our shop, Ozo (map) is a wonderful coffee spot. Great ambience, busy but not too noisy, wireless, and they serve Seth Ellis chocolates. Thanks to Justin and his team for providing us life support during our long construction process, and for being our office-away-from-the-office.

Brewing Market

The Brewing Market (map) is one of Boulder’s coffee landmarks. Their Arapahoe store, right next to McGuckin’s, also has one of the best-stocked chocolate cases in Boulder, and an amazing assortment of chocolate bars and other other goodies. There’s always great classical music wafting out of the shop, the outside seating area is heated, and they have Seth Ellis chocolates.

Glacier Ice Cream - Longmont

If you’re out east in Longmont, Glacier Ice Cream on Main Street, right next to Starbuck’s (map) sells some of the best ice cream and gelato on the Front Range and has a connoisseur’s chocolate case, featuring, of course, Seth Ellis chocolates.

Wholesale and Corporate Sales

We do customized corporate gifts, chocolate for parties and catered events and wholesale chocolate in bulk for hotels, casinos and restaurants.We can ship chocolate, in boxes or in bulk, almost anywhere in the world in specially made protective containers and can customize packaging and branding to meet your needs. Please drop us a note at sales@sethellischocolatier.com or call David at (720) 470-3257 to discuss your project, food service or retail needs.

First Chocolate

2007-07-02T18:08:43Z

Ever wonder what a ton and half of chocolate looks like? Wonder no more! We received 3000 pounds of organic chocolate from Schokinag this morning, a ton of 66% and 500 pounds each of milk and 78% dark. Ecuadoran chocolate, processed in Schokinag’s Manage, Belgium plant, shipped to Schokinag HQ in Mannheim, Germany for distribution, then to Hall’s Warehouse in South Plainfield, New Jersey, and then on to us in Boulder. (There’s a debate waiting to be had on shipping costs vs. organic benefits, but that’s a topic for another day. :-)

And no comments on the knees, please. It’s been over 100 degrees here. Don’t tell anyone, but our chocolate cooler is probably one of the best places in Boulder to hang out. It’s at 55 degrees, and now has a little bit of chocolate in it.

Fear and Loathing in Chocolateland

2008-02-23T01:58:01Z

There’s a fairly vigorous, if rather one-sided, conversation¹ happening on the net about whether chocolate manufacturers should be able to substitute fats other than cocoa butter in chocolate products and still call the result "chocolate." (Say "vegetable oil" in a shocked, hoarse, sotto voce whisper.) Prompted by a big-brother-chocolate petition purportedly suggesting nefarious revisions to the FDA’s chocolate composition guidelines, Burlingame, CA-based Guittard Chocolate Company was upset enough over the perceived threat to stand up a web site urging chocolate consumers to register comments wtih the FDA to fight the proposed regulation changes.

I’m all for truth-in-labeling, and I’m not particularly fond of vegetable oil in chocolate, mostly.² However, the Guittard site seems a bit strident, and the comments I’ve seen so far have a slight odor of blogmob about them. I was curious about the fuss, so I went down to the FDA document store, did some digging here and there, and found interesting things.

Surprise. It’s all about money.

This debate is an economic one at its heart. Commodity consumer chocolate manufacturers are in a saturated, slowly-growing market, and are trying to increase profitability, both by cost containment and by moving up-market into the higher-margin gourmet chocolate business. Smaller chocolate producers are making inroads educating commodity chocolate consumers about better-tasting (and more expensive) chocolate, and are starting to co-opt commodity consumers by pitching healthier chocolate made with interesting ingredients by interesting people. (Disclosure: we’re one of them there.)

The FDA has guidelines³ requiring cocoa butter to be present in a food product to call it "chocolate." Cocoa butter is the most expensive ingredient in chocolate. An economic holy grail for high-volume chocolate producers is finding a way to minimize the amount of cocoa butter in products, without perceptibly altering the taste and mouth-feel expected by people buying their product. If a manufacturer could substitute a cheaper fat or combination of fats that taste right and have the same melting and manufacturing characteristics as cocoa butter, the difference in cost could go right to their bottom line. There are a lot of possibilities for substitutes, and some come close to those goals.⁴

From the small-chocolate-producer perspective, big chocolate already has a pretty mean economic scale advantage. If the conglomerates could shave sheckels off the production budget while creating products marketable as fancy chocolate, that might be scary. And, even worse, if they could create a fat mix that tastes as good as the real thing while being dirt cheap to produce, there might be challenges ahead for both small manufacturers and cacao farmers.⁵

Don’t believe everything you read.

The current tsuris⁶ over adulterated chocolate points back to a citizen’s petition⁷ to the FDA by the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association of America. The Chocolate Manufacturer’s Association was one signatory to the petition, along with the GMA and ten other industry lobbying groups.⁸ The petition is couched as an overall proposal to "modernize food standards" to allow industry to innovate food products faster, and to allow more flexibility in product composition in light of more rapid ingredient and technology development. It’s a request to add a general or "horizontal" regulation allowing modifications to standardized, FDA-defined foods (like chocolate) for "legitimate" reasons. It explicitly states the proposal would not "replace or undermine existing policies or requirements." The writers of the proposal even seem to tiptoe a bit around exactly the type of landmines planted in the chocolate adulteration issue:

…the petitioners appreciate that the agencies may wish to exclude certain ingredients or technologies that, due to sharply opposing views from stakeholder groups, have been controversial.

The word "chocolate" doesn’t appear in the document, except in the name of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association. "Vegetable oil" makes one brief cameo appearance as "ingredients cannot be replaced with ingredients from another source (e.g., vegetable oil cannot replace milkfat in sour cream)" when discussing the need for mandatory ingredients to remain present in "enhanced foods." There is an interesting request to back away from "*Ingredients not in regular ________." labeling with this justification:

Consumers have grown accustomed to innovation in the food industry and reasonably expect that the most useful ingredients will be used in any food product, standardized or not.

And, lest we be too quick to blame this document exclusively on the treachery of big business⁹ it appears this petition is a response to an earlier FDA proposal¹⁰ to streamline the process of writing food standards, in which the FDA writers conclude the only way to stay within their regulatory budget is to invite consumers and food manufacturers to propose food standards.

The fifth option the [FDA/FSIS] Work Group considered was to rely on external groups-consumer, industry, commodity, or other groups-to draft recommended revisions to existing Federal food standards but retain the agencies’ authority to establish the final food standards. … One major advantage of this option is that it would require the use of fewer of our agencies’ resources than would be required if we were to review and propose amendments to the food standards without the benefit of petitions. … The disadvantage to this fifth option is that, if a consumer, industry, or commodity group does not feel strongly about revising a particular group of food standards, we might not receive a petition and would then need to commit resources to reviewing the food standards without the benefit of a petition. … we have tentatively determined that the fifth option is the most appropriate course of action. The Work Group preliminarily determined that we could rely on external groups to suggest new food standards, revisions to existing food standards, or elimination of certain food standards that are consistent with the proposed general principles.

The nasty chocolate manufacturers, co-signers of the ultimate missive, didn’t even have to connive at forcing the opportunity for their perfidy.

Door open. Cow gone.

This is a fun debate to watch, if only for the realization that it’s about perception more than reality.

Chocolate in America is a big business. We buy lots of chocolate from Hershey, Nestle Cadbury and Masterfoods because we like it. We’ve grown up on their tastes and products. Good chocolate or bad, it’s comfort food to a staggering number of consumers. If we didn’t buy it, they wouldn’t make it. If you dig down into the development and manufacturing of chocolate products, you’ll find many examples of recipe and process manipulation and innovation for economic ends, both by big businesses and small.

One of our equipment suppliers, probably the premier manufacturer of equipment for the chocolate industry, told me recently they derate the capacity of their machines for one of the big chocolate manufacturers by something like 20%. The chocolate that’s pushed through the machines is so starved for cocoa butter that it dramatically slows the processing, and makes the machines wear out faster. American manufacturers are already exercising fat content in chocolate, either by reducing cocoa butter and pumping up cocoa powder, or by including butter oil and milk fat, allowed under the milk and other adulterant limits already set by the FDA. Even with the current FDA guidelines, the gap between what we consider premium and commodity chocolates is widening.
The naming of chocolate items is already fuzzier than we realize. For instance, in a guidance note to the chocolate industry in 1988¹¹ the FDA suggests that if consumers expect something to be called chocolate, you can call it chocolate, despite its composition:

We believe that any other nonstandardized food product that contains cocoa as the chocolate flavoring ingredient may bear the term "chocolate" so long as it can be demonstrated that consumers have long recognized that the food product may be made from cocoa and do not expect it to contain some other chocolate ingredient.
The EC already allows vegetable fat in European chocolate, clearly labeled. The rules¹² allow up to 5% of Illipe, Palm-oil, Sal, Shea, Kokum gurgi or Mango kernel oil to be included in chocolate.

In short, your chocolate has already been messed with, and your perceptions of what’s the "right" way to do chocolate are already the result of years of messin’ with it.

Standards games.

I’ve spent a chunk of my adult life sitting on standards committees for various high-tech pursuits. The politics are very similar to those played in the food standards arena, except the food folks have a lot more history behind them, and should, I suspect, be able to hide their politics better. From a corporate perspective, the aim of standards is a tactical one. The cynical (but often all too accurate) goal of a standardization chess match is to change a standard to reflect the fruits of your product development efforts, while manipulating the adopted rules to invalidate your competitors’ R&D investment, forcing them to play catch-up. Failing that, you play a waiting game, placing loopholes and hooks into the language you might be able to exercise later. And, throughout the game play, if you’re good at it, you co-opt others to help with the heavy lifting, so you’re perceived as building consensus rather than throwing self-serving rocks.

Now, remember the language I quoted above about "controversial" areas the FDA might want to avoid because of “sharply opposing views from stakeholder groups?” Guittard is one of only nine member companies of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association.¹³ To see one of this short list of corporate members stirring up consumers against their own association in this fashion might seem peculiar. The comments they’re encouraging people to post don’t seem speak to the substantive content of the rule changes. If I were in a cynical mood, I’d suspect them of trying to co-opt bloggers into helping make sure the FDA bookmarks the chocolate rules as one of those "controversial" places. And maybe they’ll succeed?

Samples here, here and here. [up]
Our family does have a peculiar fondness for Reese’s peanut butter cups when they’re on sale at three for a buck, but those don’t have any vegetable oil in them. Sugar, cocoa butter, chocolate, nonfat milk, milk fat lactose, soy lecithin, PGPR, peanuts, sugar, dextrose, salt and TBHQ. The milk in the FDA milk chocolate requirement is introduced as nonfat milk (dried?) milk fat and lactose, both to help control fat and sugar content more precisely, and to allow skewing the fat and sugar ratios as needed. 31% fat, including the peanuts. [up]
CFR Title 21, section 163 spells out sweet, white, milk, buttermilk and skim milk chocolate, none containing any fat other than cocoa butter. As soon as you add vegetable oil to chocolate, the product nominally must be called “sweet (or milk) chocolate and vegetable fat coating.” [up]
Here’s the technical bible on confectionery fats, from none other than The Oily Press. Dense reading, good for bedtime, and unless you have a decent budget for your lipid fetish, get it from inter-library loan. [up]
Think natural rubber plantations, synthetic rubber tires, Goodyear, 1937. [up]
TSOOR-iss - Troubles, problems, woes. What constitutes tsuris depends on a person’s tolerance level. The range can encompass everything from a leaky faucet in your kitchen to a malfunction in your space capsule. "Houston, we have tsuris."
—from Yiddish With Dick and Jane, by Ellis Weiner and Brabar Davilman; Little, Brown & Company, 2004, p103.
Or perhaps tsimmes is more appropriate? :-) [up]
FDA Docket 2007P-0085, October 27, 2006, Adopt Regulations of General Applicability to all Food Standards that would Permit, within Stated Boundaries, Deviations from the Requirements of the Individual Food Standards of Identity [up]
The complete list: The American Frozen Food Institute, The American Meat Institute, The Food Products Association, Grocery Manufacturers Association, International Dairy Foods Association, Juice Products Association, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, National Fisheries Institue, National Meat Canners Association, North American Millers’ Association and the Snack Food Association. All these folks trying to change your chocolate? Not. [up]
Big corporations need to be collared! [up]
70 FR 29214-29235 Food Standards; General Principles and Food Standards Modernization [up]
FDA Compliance Policy Guide CPG 7105.15, May 13, 1988 [up]
Directive 2000/36/EC, see the last page. [up]
ADM Cocoa, Barry Callebaut USA, LLC, Blommer Chocolate Company, Cargill Cocoa and Chocolate, Guittard Chocolate Company, Hershey Company, Masterfoods USA, a Mars, Incorporated Company, Nestlé Chocolate & Confections, and World’s Finest Chocolate, Inc., as listed in the association’s letter to its stakeholders about this issue. [up]

Building a chocolate shop: progress, electrics, mold

2007-07-05T04:40:09Z

Construction projects seem to go in spurts. We spend lots of time planning, waiting for ordered supplies, waiting for subs to show up, waiting for approvals, and generally worrying about how slowly things are going. Then it seems like everything is happening at once. This is a happening-at-once week.

Electricians, plumbers and tinners.

Our electricians have been busy running conduit for the various pieces of gear we’re going to install. We laid out exact locations for each machine or system, tracked down voltages and loads, and generally did whatever we could to make sure we won’t have to redo wires later. In this shot, you can see our electricians, Gary and Mark in the background, running conduit for the depositor and enrober, and the guys from Air Mechanical hanging our furnace/AC unit. The furnace will be suspended over our chocolate cooler.

One fun project for the week was hanging a transformer for our vacuum mixer. The mixer is a 440 volt monster, up until now hidden away in storage in a Cadbury R&D lab. to run it, we’ve gotten a step-up transformer to convert from the 208 volt 3-phase service in the shop to the 440 volts it needs. The question we’ve had is where to put the transformer. We don’t want to give up floor space for it, and it needs to be near the rear electrical box, as the supply to the transformer uses much heavier (read “expensive”) wire than the 440-volt output side, and we want to keep those wires short.

We discussed bolting the transformer to the wall above the breaker box or building a shelf for it, but the easy solution our team hit upon was hanging the transformer from threaded rod bolted to the flanges of the bar joists that support the roof. The transformer already had a base made from steel angle iron, and some holes in the corner of the steel frame made for a convenient way to hang it. In this sequence, Len, Gary and Mark lift the transformer on a small hand-cranked lift, line it up on the all-thread rods, and fasten it in place.

Garagedoorectomy

We’re tight on floor space. The plan we put together allows us to reconfigure the working space for multiple production tasks, and shoehorns bulky pieces of machinery into a mostly workable arrangement. The real estate we started with has an overhead 10′x10′ garage door in the rear, which is a good thing for deliveries and access. The bad news is that the rails for an overhead door make it almost impossible to seal the space under the door when it’s in the rolled-up position. The health department would insist we seal off the space under the door from the rest of the shop, and would not let us use that space for food storage. The solution is to replace the overhead door with an exterior roll-up door. Putting a plastic strip curtain across the door opening, behind the roll-up door, lets us use the entire area for food storage. In this snapshot, the new roll-up door is in place, but the old overhead door hasn’t been removed yet.

Leaky drain problems, and a nasty surprise

Our roof is flat, sloping to the north for drainage, and has a gutter running along the north side, drained by multiple down pipes embedded in the north wall of the building. We had a strong rain this week, and discovered that the down pipe at the rear of our space wasn’t well connected to the gutter and the underground drains at the bottom of the pipe were clogged.

The result was water, lots of water, running down the outside of the drain pipe and flooding the rear of our space. We fixed the upper connection, and our landlord is cleaning out the piping at the bottom of the drain so it won’t back up any more. The bad news is that this has been happening for a while. We pulled apart the wall around the pipe, and discovered lovely black mold under all the drywall. The solution is pulling down all the affected drywall and insulation and replacing it.

Here’s a snapshot of the entire drain pipe, after we got done cleaning it up. The good news is that our landlord will pay for the new drywall.

Building a chocolate shop: concrete

2007-05-22T21:04:11Z

When we started looking for a work space to lease, having adequate drainage for cleaning was on our feature shopping list. Almost none of the spaces we looked at had floor drains, and those that did had them in inconvenient places, usually under a water heater or next to a toilet. To make our current space usable, we would need to put in floor sinks¹ for our three-compartment wash sink and produce sinks, drains for condensate water from our coolers, drains for two hand sinks and a mop sink. We also need convenient access to drains so we could wash down larger equipment without flooding ourselves or our neighbors. As we started laying out where the drains would have to go, it became obvious that we would have to chop up a lot of floor to put in the drains.

After a bit of head-scratching, we figured out we could connect the drain dots, and put in a single continuous drain instead of multiple smaller ones, with pretty much the same cost of excavation and new concrete. (The minimum amount of concrete we had to order was much larger than we would need to fill in new floor around any drains.) We found a segmented² polyethylene drain made by NDS that would work.

We ordered some parts, our contractor chopped up a 45-by-5-foot area of floor, set up the drain in the right place, leveled it, used short segments of rebar to anchor it, and we were ready to pour concrete. For those of you with an interest in way too much construction detail³ , here’s the quickie how-to video for adding concrete to trench drains.

Floor sinks are small basins, usually white porcelain in this part of the world, mounted in the floor under wash sinks to isolate their outlets from the main drains. [up]
Each piece has a different graduated slope, so when they’re all connected together, there’s a smooth, continuous flow of water from the high end to the low end. [up]
Much rolling of eyes from the women in the family. [up]

Building a chocolate shop: blank slate

2007-05-21T22:31:05Z

In order to start over with our shop space, we needed to give the city a plan to remove the bits we didn’t need. Here’s our demo plan.

We removed two full-height insulated demising walls that divided the space into thirds, two bathrooms, a break room/kitchen, the shower (which wasn’t on the original demo plan, but our new water heater wouldn’t fit otherwise), the old residential water heater, lots of plumbing and vents, too much blue carpet and grungy linoleum tile and the office box right inside the entry. And we spent many painful hours scraping up carpet glue. (Full disclosure: David did the lion’s share of that work.)

And here’s a view of the space after demolition. (No, it isn’t curved. The curved look is what you get when you stitch together a whole bunch of small pictures into a panorama.)

You can also see the excavation for the trench drain that will run the length of our prep and cooking area. We had some fun finding the drains to connect to, as they weren’t where we were told to expect them. Here’s another view of the drain area, after we cut up the concrete and went fishing for pipes.

We’re planning to create a working chocolate manufacturing shop, with a small retail space. Local zoning limits our retail use of the space to 15% of our total square footage. This block diagram is the one we used to help visualize our destination. We’re planning glass walls between the shop floor the retail and lobby areas, so customers can watch us work. Or make funny faces and heckle. :-)

Building a chocolate shop: location

2007-05-21T22:37:13Z

We’ve been busy. From a standing start, we’re creating a chocolate shop. In this series of postings, we’re going to try and give you a peek into some of the interesting steps along the way.¹

Location, location, location

We’ve tracked through a lot of possible places looking for a good place to set up our shop, and we think we’ve found a winner. Our shopping list for features looks like this:

2,000-3,000 feet of space
A Boulder location with enough street presence and visibility to help generate some local buzz, but not necessarily one that has a lot of retail foot traffic, as we’re going to be primarily a wholesale business
A space that’s been used as a food manufacturing facility, or can be made into one without too much pain
Electricity, at least 200 amps, 3-phase for our gear
Floor drains for clean-up and refrigeration
A land-lord who will let us build a chocolate factory
A rental rate that won’t hurt us too much, or at least won’t kill us outright!

The catch has been that there are almost no available food manufacturing spaces in Boulder. We’ve looked at some that would require fumigation and extensive clean-up before use, including a tea manufacturing facility that had chai spices sifting out from behind the baseboards whe you leaned against a wall. Some places didn’t have enough power or didn’t have 3-phase, or wanted to charge us five figures to upgrade the electrical for their entire property. We even considered a spot next to a tatoo parlor and head shop, but the added sales value of catering to Boulderites with the munchies didn’t seem to outweigh the negative cachet we might aquire. After traipsing through more possibilities that I care to remember, and going through two sets of tentative lease negotations, we think we found a spot that’s pretty much perfect for the shop.

5345 Arapahoe Avenue #5, Boulder Colorado

On Arapahoe Avenue in the southeast part of town, we found a small industrial condo we think can be twisted into becoming a chocolate factory. Half the space was an analytical lab with lots of IT infrastructure, and half was used by a printing business. The owner wants to rejoin the two halves and is making the building into condos. It’s close to the bus, has convenient access for people coming into town, and has other up-scale businesses nearby. It also has a reasonable amount of foot traffic for nearby eateries and from the adjacent Ball Aerospace campus. It doesn’t have 3-phase power, but the building does, just 20 feet away. In total, it’s around 2300 square feet, is fairly clean, and best of all, one of our investors is willing to buy it and lease it to us, so we’ll have some leeway to modify the space as we need to.

The disadvantages are that we’ll need to do some demolition, add our floor drains, and probably replace the current overhead garage door with an external roll-up to give us enough space.

Here are some stiched-together panaorama shots of the front and back. (Click the images for a more complete view, as some of the thumbnails are trimmed.)

One more downside: the blue carpet has to go. As does the 12-year-old carpet glue underneath it!

We’ve been saving up pictures and notes as we go, but we’re just beginning to post these a few weeks away from our start-up date. To make the series more understandable when we look back at it, we’ll be putting dates on the posts based on when we did the work pictured, rather than when we posted them. Hopefully that won’t be too confusing to those of you reading along as these are published! [up]