Rain forest matters to small chocolate maker
It's Wednesday at Taza Chocolate's warehouse in Somerville, and gallons of glorious melted chocolate pour from tank to tank in a rich, dark waterfall, until the texture is just right and the chocolate is ready to be molded, wrapped, and shipped.
But this is just the finale. Taza's chocolate-making process begins more than 2,000 miles away in rain forests close to the equator, the only place on the planet cacao trees will grow.
"What most people don't know is that chocolate is a fruit," says Larry Slotnick, Taza's co-owner. "If you were to slice a cantaloupe in half, you'd see seeds and pulp. It's the same with cacao."
Every month, 10 sacks, weighing 150 pounds each, of this fruit - fermented and dried - arrive at Taza's warehouse outside Union Square to feed the roasters, grinders, and refiners that turn bitter, almond-size cocoa beans into Taza's organic dark chocolates.
Few American companies make chocolate from scratch and in such small batches - maybe half a dozen, guesses Van Billington, executive director of Retail Confectioners International. Among the better known are Scharffen Berger of Berkeley, Calif., and Theo Chocolate of Seattle. Taza is one of the newest of the "artisanal" chocolate makers.
Somerville residents Slotnick, 49, and Alex Whitmore, 30, who were colleagues at Zipcar, launched Taza in September 2006.
"I wanted to start my own business and thought I knew something about chocolate," says Whitmore. "Then I did a lot of research to find out more."
Traveling in Oaxaca, Mexico, Whitmore stumbled on to the stone-ground chocolate tradition. "They drink a lot of chocolate in Mexico. Each family has a recipe, a specific ratio of sugar or cinnamon, sometimes almonds, to cacao," he says.
"The whole reason we're called Taza ("cup" in Spanish) is a callout to the roots of chocolate, which are in Mexico, and where it's a drink."
Slotnick admits he was never a chocolate aficionado. It's the sustainability of Taza's operations that hooked him.
"We're trying to enable [farmers] to have a viable existence, not to sell their land," he said. Since cacao is one of the very few cash crops that can be grown near the equator, buying cacao helps farmers stay put and keep tending their plots of rain forest.
Whitmore or Slotnick visit the rain forests twice a year, stopping by cooperative processing plants that serve hundreds of cacao farmers. They will scoop a random sample of 100 beans and slice them in half, checking for color, quality, and taste. If the beans aren't right, they move on.
The earth in which the beans are grown - its terroir - plays an important role in character of chocolate, says Whitmore. "It's a French term," he says, "usually applied to wine, that has to do with where the grape is grown and how you can taste the herbs that are growing nearby. It's the same thing with cacao. We buy beans from special places: the northeast coast of the Dominican Republic, in the southeast of Costa Rica."
According to Slotnick, Taza and other artisanal chocolate makers produce chocolate from beans, while most others buy their chocolate in large commercial blocks and melt it down to form bars and other confections.
Taza's staff of five each week crafts 2,000 to 2,500 3-ounce bars of dark chocolate, selling online for $6 each. The company offers a few other products, including chocolate for drinking. Total revenue is expected to exceed $25,000 this month, Slotnick said.
Taza offers public tours four times a year; the next is Feb. 9. See tazachocolate.com. 