Dan’s Chocolate Adventure

Selim Bassoul is not a household name today. He is a relatively unknown CEO, but one who I would consider a rising star. Bassoul runs a company calls Middleby, which makes oven and commercial kitchen appliances, and has grown it from about a $100 million to a $1 Billion or so market cap company (full disclosure: I own shares, but I’m not recommending anyone else buy them). I was talking to my neighbor about Bassoul, as one of Middleby’s divisions, Blodgett, actually manufacturers in Burlington, Vermont, and he was extremely impressed with him as well. I was surprised thet he knew him, but he said he was in his business school class at Northwestern.

Three things that really impress me about Selim Bassoul:

1. He knows his products cold, and understands the details about every single product Middleby sells. I have heard analysts ask him specific questions about a stove or oven and he will respond with specific BTU numbers on burners.

2. He tries to spend at least two days a week working with his customers. If you try to run a modern corporation from behind a desk, best of luck to you.

3. He refuses to offer future guidance, which I view as a sign of having backbone against the analysts. Predicting the future for the benefit of stock analysts is ridiculous (isn’t that their job?) and any time spent on it is a waste of the corporation’s money.

Ok, this post is a plug.

I have literally had suppliers in the wedding industry tell me that I can charge much more for our wedding chocolates than we do, saying “it’s the wedding industry, of course you can mark it up!” This truly annoys me, as if it is only rich people who get married.

I think we’re the only supplier that gets a ribboned two-piece box below $2.00 (with the 20% discount). But brides find it, and they talk to each other, and they are tired of being ripped off by vendors for their special day.

Between the time that truffles come out of the cooling tunnel and when they go in the enrober, they have to cool down and “set up” for an extended period of time, generally overnight. The chocolate shells, filled with their interior ganache or other filling are placed in racks like these:

It’s extremely tempting not to pick off a few every time you walk by, as fresh chocolate is sitting right in front of you, at eye level, practically asking to be eaten.

This is the nicest speed test I’ve seen. One recommendation - mess around with this using your wireless vs a cabled connection. When you see how much faster your ethernet cable is, you’ll be much less inclined to use wireless.

Dan’s Chocolates is in agreement with Guittard 100% on this. The proposed FDA rule change, would, in fact, as the NY Times says, “widen the gap between good and awful.” Hey, it’s a pretty big chasm today, as our customers know. No need for the FDA to put the Grand Canyon in place here.

See the NY Times story here.

On the Caramel River and the PB Ecstasy bars, we started using a technique in the past few weeks called “tongue depositing.” We use the one-shot machine to lay down both the inside bar filling and the outside chocolate in the same pass. This is a top view. On one side goes the chocolate, on the other side the filling:

And here is a side view (the whole apparatus moves up and down when the nozzles are injecting):

With tongue depositing, the nozels drop down, and as they are releasing chocolate and caramel, or chocolate and peanut butter, the mold is being pulled along underneath them. Then, just before the edge of the mold hits the nozzle, it pulls up. Here is a depositor nozzle (not a one-shot technically, but you get the idea), filling a ball mold:

And:

The advantage to tongue depositing is that there is no center bar of chocolate in the middle - the entire center is filling.

I’m working from the home office today as our driveway is being widened and I’m trying to keep an eye on it.

Note, for example, how the cement mixer here is about to drench our bush in concrete. This is why it pays to be around.

Note to self: a “near miss” with wet concrete is not recommended.

There are plenty of well-known benefits to the Internet, blogging, and the frictionless, democratic exchange of issues. One of the disadvantages is that, as the cost of publishing approaches zero, the supply goes essentially to infinity. With no costs attached to publishing, the incentive to produce well-researched, good content drops, as you can always just publish again tomorrow, and there is no penalty to a bad piece, except some loss of reputation.

When Gutenberg first invented the press, it was very difficult indeed to get press time when there were only two in all of Europe. Prior to that you had to find a monk to transcribe something for you, an even more difficult process.

This is one of the reasons I think the traditional publishing industries will survive for a long time. They may decline, but I expect it to be a slow decline if it happens.

It’s better for chocolate to be frozen than refrigerated. If you need to keep your chocolate safe in the summer, and you don’t have air conditioning, the best place is a cool, dry basement. You can freeze it, though it should be shrinkwrapped and air tight if you do so. The critical thing to remember is that when you are warming it up, you need to bring it back up to room temperature slowly. This can be accomplished by putting it in a foam container, and letting the foam slow down the warm-up rate.

If it warms up too fast the fat will bloom out of the chocolate. This means that the fat particles will lose their tight binding within the chocolate and migrate to the surface, where they create a whitish appearance. This makes the chocolate appear old.

It’s the hot time of the year again, the time when chocolate likes to turn into syrup on its way to its destination. One of the things that you do when making chocolate is you use the cocoa and fats in the product to adjust the heat sensitivity. You can take a recipe and adjust it to melt at 75 degrees fahrenheit, or have it melt at 85 degrees fahrenheit. There will be a difference in taste, though the difference is sublte.

Does Dan’s adjust its recipes based on the time of year, then? No. It creates too many production difficulties and complexities. Instead, we tailor the recipe to an average temperature and then use plenty of ice and foam in the summer to make sure it arrives ok.

The vast majority of chocolate truffles are either made with shells that are spun and then filled, or with a machine called a one-shot. In spinning, the truffle shell is created in a mold which spins quickly while the chocolate is drying. The centrifugal force creates a shell with a hollow center, and these shells are then filled in a separate step. Here is a picture of the spinning machine, which spins the molds around in the air like a flailing octopus:

And a closer version:

Then, if the shells are not meant to be filled (for example if a chef is going to use them in a dessert in a restaurant) the trays are cooled and prepared for shipment:

And stacked in their molds for final shipment:

One-shot technology was introduced reliably about ten years ago. With these machines, which is what Dan’s Chocolates uses, the exterior of the shell and the interior are created in the same step. Not only is this much faster production-wise, it creates a truffle with a much tighter seal against air, and hence stays fresher.

I’ll try to post a photo of a one shot injector nozzle soon. Essentially there is one tube inside the other, and as the inner tube is blowing in the truffle filling, the outer tube is creating the shell. It’s almost magical how perfectly it all works.

One of the fundamental problems in starting a small business, whether it be a chocolate company or anything else, is that all of your time and money is needed to build and distribute product. Generally what is remaining goes to sales ane marketing. Problem is, to take market share, you actually need more sales and marketing energy than larger firms, because you are actually trying to grow.

This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult for small businesses to become midsized businesses, and why, once a business hits a certain point, it can use its tremendous momentum to roll along for years. I mean, look at how many years Polaroid has been in existence, long after a reasonable human would have predicted they would be gone due to lack of market demand.

Hallelujah! All of our chocolate bars are now officially all-natural. This was an amazing effort over the past six months to convert them all. Peppy-R-Mint:

and

PB Ecstasy:

were the hardest. With Peppy-R-Mint we had to find all-natural candy-cane, which did not have Red 5 in it. This involved finding candy cane that was dyed with beet juice, which is neither common nor cheap. With PB Ecstasy, we could not have artificial stabilizers in the peanut butter. We looked at many all natural peanut butters on the market but in the end we decided just to use the Stefan to make our own. Here is a photo of the Stefan:

The Stefan is basically a super-large Cuisinart with negative pressure (vacuum ability). We are making our own natural peanut butter in it for the PB Ecstasy ball.

For people in the boxed chocolates industry, chocolate wedding favors are one of the few bright spots in the summer. Sales from mid-June (post Father’s Day) through Labor Day just die off. Except wedding chocolate favors. They surge, as the majority of weddings still happen in the summer. (Though more and more weddings are being pushed back into the fall, some professional wedding planners tell me).

It’s one point of relief in an otherwise slow period.

I recently switched several of us here from a desktops or laptop wtih Pentium IV’s to one with Core Duo 2 processors. I believe the power savings on the Core Duo 2 are substantial, enough to be noticeable on the utility bill. The NY Times recently did a story in this area which is interesting.

Photo time! We recently did a run of our chocolate bar shelf packs, and I took a few photos for you for a behind-the-scenes look at how packaging works.

Here is the size of the press. It’s about 50 feet long:

This press is brand new and cost the printer about $5 million dollars, so don’t try this at home.

The press has its own control station, where computers monitor its every operation, including the clean cycle:

And here is the view of the control board:

When the sheets are printed, they are outputted here:

Then this tray lowers down automatically and drops them on a pallet, as such:

Then, after the ink dries overnight, they will go to the gluer and folder, which is this machine:

And then they’ll be done!