Little Chocolate’s Big Moment
Craft chocolate, like beer and coffee before it, is ready to go mainstream. But that doesn't mean it's ready to sell out.
Dandelion employees hand sort the company's beans to remove defective ones.
Photographer: Justin Kaneps for Bloomberg
Dandelion Chocolate’s two-ingredient, single-origin, small-batch bars are bundled in gold foil and custom wrappers. Its café and factory in San Francisco’s Mission District is filled with freelancers on laptops, children on scooters, and well-heeled couples on first dates. At the counter, a blue-haired server blowtorches s’mores while another grinds locally roasted coffee beans. The employee-controlled Pandora playlist changes depending on who’s working.
Dandelion Chocolate is hip. The guys running it, however, are not. They’re nerds, and not the hip kind.