The flood did depress him a little. Just a week after the new production facility at Taza churned out its first batch of Mexicano chocolate (sweet and tight, fruit and fire!), the skies opened up, flooding parts of Cambridge and Somerville and filling Taza's spiffy new bean-to-bar production facility shin-deep with rainwater. But Alex Whitmore is not a guy who gets waterlogged without a fight. Two weeks later, Taza is up and running, dry as a bone and ready to churn out delectable, crave-able, handmade Mexican chocolate bars. Taza's new retail factory shop and plant tour program are back on track for a late-August opening.
How did you become Mr. Bean-to-Bar Mexican-Chocolate Man? I was a chocolate maven and could taste things that others missed. And then I went to Oaxaca for a week and tasted the stone-ground Mexican chocolate. The process of grinding chocolate on millstones fascinated me. I went back for a second week. It looked easy, but when I first tried to grind my own beans, the room was full of smoke. Opening a chocolate-making company was "Plan C" at best. I'd studied anthropology in college, worked at Zipcar, where I got the entrepreneurial bug, and then worked at a café. Plan A was to open a café that sold Mexican food. Plan B was a café that sold Mexican chocolate . . . and Plan C, I guess, was Taza.
How did bean-to-bar chocolate get "hot"? (Pardon the pun.) Bean-to-bar (meaning that we start with fresh cocoa beans, not chocolate that is ground elsewhere) came out of the San Francisco food culture in the early '90s and spread to Berkeley when John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg began making bean-to-bar chocolate. People went crazy for the chocolate - especially pastry chefs and confiseries. And then it sort of began as one of the artisanal products that people loved. There was Steve DeVries in Colorado, who started in 2005, and Theo Chocolate in Seattle, and a site called Chocolate Alchemy that was teaching people online how to make chocolate. . . . By now, all the bean-to-bar people know each other. We bump into each other in little villages in Mexico.
Why is bean-to-bar chocolate better than the classic upscale European chocolate? Same reason that green beans from the farmers' market are so much better than frozen green beans or beans from a can. Fresh flavors make a huge difference. Chocolate is a tropical product, and doing what we do - we call it direct trade - means that when you buy Taza, it's fresh, fair-trade, and made with care. We buy our beans from a grower we know, at a premium; we grind them in Somerville on millstones we bring from Mexico. And we produce all our chocolate on premises - we use biodynamic cinnamon bark and organic vanilla beans, and we wrap the bars in the room next door. We're artisans.
And why Mexican chocolate? I fell in love with Mexican chocolate in Oaxaca. I loved the flavor profile - bright, fruity, and slightly acidic. I loved the slight grittiness in the finished product, and I was amazed that no one in the US seemed to be doing anything with Mexican chocolate.
Do people always love it? No. We have to manage expectations for the first bite. Half of the people don't like Mexican chocolate when they try it the first time. But the people who like our chocolate love our chocolate. I was petrified that people would reject "gritty" chocolate. Now we have 900 retail outlets. Not bad for a business that sold its first chocolate bar in 2007.
Louisa Kasdon can be reached at louisa@louisakasdon.com.
