Upscale Calif. chocolate makers’ sweet success

“I can’t afford a mink and a diamond, but I can afford a piece of really good chocolate,” she said.

As with wine and coffee, the origin of premium chocolate has increasingly become a selling point. And consumers have also responded to manufacturers’ efforts to tout their relationships with growers in the developing countries where cacao typically comes from, she said.

The quality and quantity of cacao in a bar or bonbon is what distinguishes fine chocolate from the coating on a Snicker’s, according to Scharffenberger, who personally oversees the blending of 30 varieties of beans that go into the company’s products and visits the ranches in Guatemala, Madagascar and other countries where it secures supplies.

“We aren’t creating flavors that are earth-shattering, just delicious,” he said.

The Food and Drug Administration requires milk chocolate to contain at least 10 percent cacao, but Scharffen Berger’s milk chocolate contains a whopping 41 percent. Its darkest dark chocolate, 82 percent.

Before Scharffenberger and Steinberg set up shop, California already was home to plenty of chocolate makers — both high-end and pedestrian. Besides Ghirardelli, they include Glendale-based Nestle USA, Guittard Chocolate Co. in Burlingame, Joseph Schmidt Confections, which also was bought out by Hershey’s last year, and See’s Candies in South San Francisco.

The growth has been steady enough that by 2000 California had edged out Pennsylvania, home of Hershey’s, to become the nation’s chocolate capital. In 2004, the last year for which figures were available, California had 136 companies churning out chocolate and cocoa products compared to Pennsylvania’s 122, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Besides its reputation as a food snob’s paradise, there is a practical reason the San Francisco Bay area, in particular, has emerged as the heart of chocolate activity: the consistent, moist climate, according to Scharffenberger.

“It’s a pain to make chocolate when it’s hot,” he said.

Like a winery, the company offers tours of its Berkeley factory where participants — about 40,000 of them a year — receive morsels of chocolate trivia along with free samples. On a recent morning, a tour group learned, for example, that cacao beans are technically a fruit, that dark chocolate tastes better melted on the tongue instead of chewed, and that the actual cacao content of white chocolate is zero.

Adrienne Newman, an aspiring chocolatier from Austin, Texas, was taking the tour for the third time after making chocolate “a full-time hobby.” Over the holidays, she took her boyfriend to Switzerland so she could taste the local wares, and she mail orders chocolate from new companies whose products she wants to try.

For a long time, she could still enjoy a Hershey’s bar, Newman said, but no more.

“I’m beyond that,” she said. “After three years of tasting exquisite stuff, there is no going back."

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