Posted on August 6, 2008 - by Matt

TCHO Chocolate

The future of chocolate is here and it was started by the founder of Wired Magazine, Louis Rossetto. Unlike your traditional chocolate company or food company for that matter, TCHO (pronounced CHO) is run very much like a start-up Web 2.0 company:

• They are based out of San Francisco.
• They are in “Beta”.
• They have an odd name.
• They take customer feedback.

You maybe thinking, “Sounds cool, but I bet it tastes bad”. You, my friend, would be terribly, terribly wrong. Since tasting both thier Chocolatey and Fruity chocolate, my taste buds are no longer the same. Their chocolate is better then anything you will taste from those insanely priced “chocolatiers” and you will take pleasure in knowing that the Cocao beans, from which their chocolate is made, are obtained via “fair trade“.

The TCHO movement is unlike any other. They are, first the first time, allowing the cocao growers to taste chocolate from their personal cocao. The folks at TCHO actually go to the cocao farmers and make sure that they are getting the best quality ingredients for their chocolate.

Since their chocolate is currently in “beta” and sometime changing daily, they tag each pouch of chocolate you recieve with a batch number. With this number, you go to their site and rate the chocolate you eat, so that eventually they will have a perfect chocolate.

As I stated earlier, they currently have two different blends, Chocolatey and Fruity. Chocolatey has been around since the company’s start, sometime last year, so it is very refined thanks to user eater feedback. On the other hand, Fruity was released a month or so ago and although it is not so refined it is very tasty. Judging from the name you would expect a very fruit like taste but I did not get that at all when tasting, instead I got a sweet “twang” which is something that the Chocolatey didn’t have. The Chocolatey chocolate is derived from Ghanan beans and the Fruity is made from Peruvian beans, the differences in orgin greatly contribute to the differences in taste.

If you are a dark-chocolate lover or just want to try something new, check out TCHO.

[Edit] I forgot to mention, if your a chocolate lover or just looking for an interesting blog to subscribe to definetly give the TCHO Blog a try.

[Edit (again)] It seems as though I am on the reviews page of TCHO.com.