[kictanet] Chocolate.com -- this is fun and yummy]

[alice]

Technology start-ups


  Chocolate.com

Apr 17th 2008 | SAN FRANCISCO
 From /The Economist/ print edition


    A start-up innovates in an unexpected field


TCHO, a small company based in a warehouse in San Francisco, sounds like 
a typical high-tech start-up. The brainchild of an engineer who 
previously worked on computer-vision systems for the space shuttle, the 
firm is developing "beta" versions of its new product. Volunteer testers 
are invited to submit feedback via the web. Louis Rossetto, the 
co-founder of /Wired/, a technology magazine, is on board as chief 
executive. All the employees have stock options. But Tcho is not about 
to launch a new website or mobile device; it is a technology firm that 
makes chocolate.

Its founders believe there is vast scope for innovation in the way 
chocolate is made and sold. Most cocoa farmers have never tasted 
chocolate, and produce cocoa beans without any idea of how they will be 
used, says Timothy Childs, Tcho's founder. The resulting chocolate is 
classified and sold in a very unsophisticated way, labelled at best by 
country of origin and percentage cocoa solids. (It is rather like 
labelling a wine "France, 13% alcohol".) So Mr Childs wants to put 
things on a more technical footing—just as Americans formalised 
techniques for winemaking in the 1970s. He has developed ways to analyse 
and grade beans, and a six-segment "flavour wheel" to map out their 
natural aromas. Using a variety of jury-rigged spice grinders, heaters 
and temperature sensors, he has worked out how to get cocoa beans to 
reveal their complex flavours and to get chocolate to solidify evenly.

Tcho is also working with cocoa growers, in conjunction with two 
research groups it has equipped with satellite-internet connections, to 
help them improve the quality and consistency of their beans. Tcho hopes 
that the most effective techniques will then spread in an "open source" 
fashion to other growers. Beans will be turned into chocolate on Tcho's 
elaborate production line, which is being used as a test-bed for remote 
video-monitoring of industrial processes by researchers at Fuji Xerox in 
Palo Alto.

The firm will sell much of its chocolate to other food companies, for 
use in other products. Such customers, says Mr Rossetto, like the idea 
of buying chocolate based on a consistent flavour profile; Tcho's 
flavour wheel could become a de facto industry standard, he suggests, as 
IBM's PC did in the computer industry. Tcho will also sell chocolate 
using its website <http://www.tcho.com/>, and through a shop and 
visitors' centre due to open in the summer.

San Francisco, a capital of food culture as well as technology, is the 
logical place to produce a high-tech chocolate. John Kehoe, Tcho's 
sourcing director, says chocolate is going down the trail blazed by 
speciality coffee, as consumers become more discerning. Chocolate today, 
he says, is where coffee was five years ago. Having been ahead of the 
curve with /Wired/, which launched just as the web was emerging, Mr 
Rossetto seems to have spotted another trend.

-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
AfrICANN mailing list
AfrICANN at afrinic.net
https://lists.afrinic.net/mailman/listinfo.cgi/africann