Let’s talk about chocolate. EarthKosher is proud to provide kosher certification and to be a part of companies that are thinking big. Thinking beyond a product. Beyond themselves. TCHO is one of those companies. TCHO creates high quality American chocolate, with big intention. Intention to equality of trade and care of people and farmers, respect to the environment while producing an exceptional product for everyone to enjoy.
EarthKosher provides kosher certification to so many TCHO products; and can be found clearly on the TCHO website product page.
TCHO is New American Chocolate.
What does it take to make New American Chocolate? Obsession. Obsession with flavor. Obsession with innovation. Obsession over fusing the two to craft the very best chocolate, from bean to bar.
The obsession begins at origin. We don’t just buy good beans, we help make the best beans. TCHOSource is our unique sourcing program, designed to obtain the best beans in the world while enabling the producers of those beans to earn a better living.
We go beyond fair trade (which we also support) to partner directly with growers. We help them improve the genetics of their plants, improve their cacao fermentation by redesigning their fermentaria, and improve cacao drying by designing new drying racks. We also provide them flavor labs where they can actually make chocolate — for many, this is the first time they taste chocolate made from their own beans. Then we provide sensory training so we can speak a common language about the results of their efforts. And finally, we link it all together in a common, cloud-based database — called Cropster — where we can share the results of all our efforts in real time. All to enable our partners to produce the exceptional, flavor-driven cacao that we pay premium prices for, so we can make seriously superior chocolate — New American Chocolate.
Integral to New American Chocolate are our recipes, and that brings us to Beta. Beta is TCHO’s obsession with co-creating our chocolates with our customers. How? After our own intensive development process, we invite you to taste our efforts, give us online feedback, then incorporate that feedback to iterate new versions — which we invite you to taste and react to again. Rise and repeat. This program has resulted in our creating with your feedback thousands of recipe iterations over the years, resulting in the extraordinary chocolates we proudly craft every day. Beta isn’t the way making chocolate is normally done, but normal never leads to extraordinary. And New American Chocolate is definitely extraordinary.
Extraordinary is re-imagining what it means to taste chocolate, as represented by our dark and milk Flavor Wheels. Because chocolate isn’t just one flavor, savoring chocolate is a journey for your intellect and emotions, as well as your senses. At TCHO, we believe that journey should go beyond percentages and origins — which can be incomplete, even deceptive descriptors — which is why we created PureNotes dark chocolate. PureNotes explore the pure flavors inherent in cacao beans themselves, nothing added. For example, the hints of red berry in our PureNotes “Fruity” (single origin sourced from Peru), or bright acids like in mandarin oranges in our “Citrus” (from Madagascar), or the deep, hearty richness in our “Chocolatey” (Ghana), or subtlety of roasted nuts in our “Nutty” (Ecuador). Likewise, milk chocolate isn’t one flavor either, which is why we created SeriousMilk. Our first two SeriousMilks explore the caramel notes that come from heating milk and sugar in our Classic, as well as the underlying chocolate in our Cacao.
So yes, we are obsessed. We’re obsessed with making a better world. We obsess over where our cacao comes from and how our growers are involved. We’re obsessed with finding the perfect recipe for our chocolate. We’re obsessed with creating an experience that delights. But, most of all, we’re obsessed with you. We want you to rediscover chocolate like never before. You—our partners, our growers, our co-creators, our friends. You are our inspiration, our motivation, our true obsession.
PUBLISHED ON APRIL 14, 2016
WRITTEN BY LAURA ANN SWEITZER
Did you know that many cocoa farmers have never tasted chocolate? And that next to none have tasted chocolate made from their own beans? This fact is indicative of some of the very serious inequalities found in most cocoa supply chains.
Although TCHO is a small chocolate company, we are working hard to change this. TCHO installs mini chocolate-making laboratories – TCHO Flavor Labs – in farmer organizations and national cocoa research organizations around the world. Farmers, cooperative leaders, and cocoa scientists use TCHO Flavor Labs to enjoy delicious chocolate and to rigorously analyze the quality of their beans.
How does this help TCHO make great-tasting chocolate? Well, it’s next to impossible to ask someone to sell you a good-tasting, high quality cocoa bean if they’ve never tasted a roasted bean or chocolate. Providing chocolate-making equipment to co-ops in our supply chain helps TCHO source the best beans. Providing the same equipment to cocoa research institutes helps these organizations ensure that farmers in these countries are planting cacao trees that produce tasty cocoa beans!
Last week, as part of this ongoing work, TCHO had the chance to host a team of eight from the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG) and Cacao Abrabopa Association – a Ghanaian farmers association.
This visit was part of the Ghana Quality Improvement (GQI) Project- a project TCHO manages in Ghana in collaboration with the World Cocoa Foundation, Guittard, and CRIG. The initiative is partially funded by the United States Agency for International Development. Through the GQI project, TCHO has been working with these partners to install a flavor lab at CRIG to ensure they can consider flavor, alongside productivity and pest resistance, when they research what seedlings to breed and distribute to farmers throughout Ghana.
The CRIG flavor lab was installed in 2014 and a selected team of tasters has been training hard ever since to consistently identify various attributes in cacao beans and rank the overall flavor. Last week’s visit was a continuation of that training. We spent lots of time tasting and identifying the flavor of cocoa beans! The visit also included training on cocoa bean analysis, roasting, chocolate making and some fun!
Feel good inside and out, with EarthKosher 
