July 2007
By Kelly Rehan
Chocolate Worth
Viewing
Hoping to “demystify premium chocolate,” Charles Chocolates president Chuck
Siegel offers each customer an unabridged initiation into the chocolate-making
experience.
Chuck Siegel is on a mission.
While many confectioners consider their candymaking methods, tricks and ideas classified information, this San Francisco Bay Area chocolatier allows, and even encourages his patrons to view his company’s every sweet move by means of a 60-ft-long café viewing area.
Literally everything except the cleaning area is open to the public’s eyesight—from the enrobing of Caramel Almond Sticks to the piping of dark chocolate butterfly shells filled with a creamy praline.
“We’ve created an environment where everyone who comes into our store has the opportunity to watch us make everything,” Siegel says. “There are four of five confectioners I know who are doing baby step versions of this where you can see bits of the process. But at Charles Chocolates you can see everything being made—bars, marzipans, pate de fruit, caramels—our full line of confections.”
Siegel, who founded Emeryville, Calif.-based Charles Chocolates in late 2004, is a devoted premium chocolate aficionado. But this self-taught gourmet confectioner understands that the rest of the public has yet to truly appreciate what goes on behind the scenes, despite the phenomenal disparity in growth rates between premium and regular chocolate (the latter lagging behind).
“One of the things that characterize our part of the industry is that there’s not a very good understanding on the consumers’ part of what it is we do and how we do it and why it’s so much more expensive,” Siegel explains. “What I wanted to do in creating this facility was to allow everyone to understand all of that. I want to demystify premium chocolate.”
Unveiled in June 2007, the café viewing area offers an educational, yet comfortable environment—plentiful seating, theater lighting and definition sheets to explain the purpose of each production area in the kitchen. Siegel and his staff even plan to hold a 30-minute, question-and-answer session each day with customers.
Part of Siegel’s plan to disclose the candymaking process to his customers from the café viewing area is to compensate for the lack of production tours.
“I don’t believe in tours,” Siegel says. “My personal feeling is that we’re making food that other people are going to eat and that there’s a heady responsibility that goes along with that. Introducing two, three or four tours a day into that environment is something I feel we shouldn’t do.”
Though the viewing area prevents onlookers from getting as close to the process as they could on a plant tour, the feature does have its perks.
“This is our opportunity to basically provide an even better view of the process,” Siegel explains. “If you’re on a tour, you’re just walking through. You can’t sit and watch it; you don’t have time to ask questions. So by making the entire operation viewable from the café, people can actually sit, enjoy a few pieces of chocolate, a cup of hot cocoa and actually spend some time learning it simply through observation.
“Plus, there’s something really fun about the process being brought full circle. While people are watching, they’re eating confections that have just been made. The reality is that with how quickly we turn around the products, it was probably made the day before.”
Ironically enough, Siegel seems to be coming full circle in his own confectionery career. As an inexperienced 25 year old, Siegel opened his first super premium chocolate company called Attivo Confections (Italian slang for “addiction”) in 1987 in Emeryville.
Siegel had no formal confectionery training—his only
experience stemmed from making homemade chocolate while at the Rochester
Institute of Technology in
“I really was clueless,” Siegel recalls. “I got on the phone and called Alice Medrich and Joseph Schmidt, introduced myself, told them what I wanted to do, and asked if they would help. And, thankfully, they agreed.”
Bay Area confectioners like Medrich
and Schmidt, whom Siegel attributes to pioneering premium chocolate making in
“All of a sudden you had consumers realizing that for not that much more money, they could get chocolate that was worlds better than what they were used to,” Siegel notes.
In 1995 Siegel sold his company to pursue an Internet business and consult other candymakers. But while advising others in the industry, he realized how much he wanted to rejoin it.
After spending six months developing the launch line, Siegel
founded Charles Chocolates in November 2004. The initial facility was a rental
kitchen located in
But after a grocery store went out of business back in Emeryville, Siegel jumped at the chance at relocating in his former community, doing so in late 2005.
The new Emeryville facility has 9,000 sq. ft. of usable space, though the company currently uses only 6,700 sq. ft. for production. So in less than three years, Charles Chocolates went from a meager rental kitchen to an airy, open space that has the capacity to generate $18-20 million in annual revenue.
The updated facility has enabled the company to greatly expand its wholesale, Web and retail businesses. To date, Charles Chocolates products can be purchased at 450 stores.
Wholesaling
controls the great majority of business. But Siegel adamantly opposes the use
of preservatives or additives in his products, which prevents some of his line
from appearing on retail shelves.
“Our
ganache-based products only have a one-month shelf
life, so that does create some challenges in wholesaling,” Siegel notes. ““We
don’t want chocolate to sit on the shelf. Ganaches,
as they age, are not good for four weeks and then fall off a cliff. Practically
after the second day they are on a steady decline to going bad. So it’s one of
those products where ‘fresh truly is best.’”
While wholesaling pulls in the largest sales cut, the company Web site and retail sales generate 10-15% of the business.
And the retail store, though still in its infancy, is set for success as Charles Chocolates establishes itself in its fairly new Emeryville home. Opened on Valentine’s Day 2007, the shop’s chic, polka dot stainless steel display counter, funky lighting and floating glass shelves add a modern spin—deliberately offset by the exposed brick walls.
Besides featuring the viewable café, the retail shop is the only place that features the company’s entire line of confections.
Beyond the café viewing area, Siegel plans to open a canopied outdoor seating area and organic herb garden of mostly mint and lavender.
Though not certified organic, Siegel’s products contain ample organic ingredients. And living in the Bay Area, there’s no shortage of organic and all-natural farmers or dairies.
“It’s hard for us to say we don’t use preservatives or additives if we’re using mint that’s been sprayed with pesticides,” Siegel adds. “It would make it impossible for us to represent our products that way. So if we want our products to have that level of integrity, we need to make sure that the ingredients we use also have it.”
With the wholesale business booming, Web site growth and new retail focus, it’s easy to forget that the company has yet to mark its third birthday.
A key player behind Charles Chocolates’ rapid expansion is Glen Ishikata, who joined the company in August 2006 as v.p. of operations.
When Ishikata joined the company, his first task was to boost staffing. Originally, Charles Chocolates only had three candymakers, but within his first three months, Ishikata hired 12 employees. And today, the company has a staff of 25 in production and packing.
With a resume boasting top positions at confectioneries like Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker and Chocolates à la Carte, Ishikata’s main focus now is establishing a production system that will serve a national distribution plan, while also staying true to the company’s artisanal foundation.
“My biggest challenge [at Charles Chocolates] is how to ramp up production without changing quality,” Ishikata says. “There are certain things you can do without affecting quality that can be automated. But there are other things that you have to be more careful, such as decorating or certain kinds of mixing.”
Every product is produced in small batches and done by hand, so machinery is at a minimal. But with a new set of cooling tables and a Savage Brothers fire mixer on the way, more efficient production methods are becoming commonplace in the kitchen.
“There is room for automation—we’re actually making steps right now,” Ishikata says. “We’re purchasing cooling tables as part of our expansion. Before we just let the caramels cool by room temperature, so the cooling tables speed up the process greatly.”
And as Charles Chocolates grows, it’s hard not to think about other artisan companies that have been bought out by confectionery giants like the Hershey Co. While the idea sounds attractive, Ishikata envisions a finer ending.
“I’m hoping that with an investor down the road that we’ll be able to make the product more affordable, but maybe we’ll grow so much that we’ll be the one’s looking for companies to join our family,” Ishikata says.
The family now consists of a staff of trained pastry chefs, led by production manager Marika Doob.
Like Ishikata, Doob also boasts an
impressive list of former stints. A graduate of the
“As
a pastry chef, you’re constantly creating—you never have a break,” Doob says. “Customers expect something new, cutting-edge
and exciting. I loved it, but I’m happy to be concentrating on a specific area
now. However, you can never be lazy when you work with chocolate—you always
have to be on your toes, but that’s really what I love about it.”
No doubt the sole focus on chocolate has hardly made things simple for Doob. With Charles Chocolates’ constantly evolving product line, every day brings some new challenges but also some exciting moments along the way.
“It’s been fun because it’s non-stop change,” Doob says. ““Production in general has changed 180°. Every single month you can see it increasing. We’ve just continued to grow so fast.”
But as the issue of growth reappears, the old question of efficiency and automation also pops up again. So is a fully automated operation in Charles Chocolates’ future?
“Never,” Doob says. “We’ll automate bars, but we’ll continue to hand-shell and hand-deposit the shorter shelf life products.”
In this period of flux, the production staff has been working on ironing out the details of Charles Chocolates’ complete line of confections.
“We’re constantly adding new things, but we’re also trying to stabilize our product line,” Doob notes.
From pate de fruit to solid chocolate gift boxes, there’s no shortage of creative juices flowing to develop fresh, new confections. And if the product is not unique, don’t expect to see it on shelves any time soon.
“We try to do things a little bit differently from what everyone else is doing,” Siegel says. “My attitude has always been that if what we do can’t be significantly better than someone else’s, then we won’t do it.”
Take Siegel’s marzipan, for example.
“I never liked marzipan because it typically has a Play-Doh texture and is sickening sweet,” he says. “It’s just sugar and almonds, though it’s comprised usually of 60% sugar and 40% almonds.”
So Siegel reversed the ratio—40% sugar and 60% almonds—and blended it in the Stefan vacuum mixer for a shorter time to retain texture.
“Then finally we took the simple syrup and infused it with Myer lemon or orange peel and then added the peel and mixed it in as well, so we’re infusing that fresh fruit flavor.”
Or take the fleur de sel caramel, for instance. Clearly fleur de sel has found a confectionery following, with most confectioners sprinkling the French sea salt on top of the caramel.
Though this offers an interesting taste contrast initially, the salt draws moisture out of the tongue. So rather than using the salt as a topping, Siegel infused it into the caramel. “We want the effect of the salt to be similar to salting a piece of meat,” he notes. “You don’t put salt on a steak to make it taste salty, you do it because it accentuates flavor.”
But while he found ways to distinguish his marzipans and caramels, Siegel found frustration when trying to create a unique peanut butter confection.
So in the pursuit to create a product like no other, he abandoned traditional peanut butter altogether and instead opted to alter a traditional hazelnut chocolate paste recipe. Substituting peanuts for hazelnuts, the recipe does not call for roasting and grinding. Rather, Siegel roasts the nuts over an open flame with sugar.
In a double rack oven, the nuts roast slowly—15-20 minutes per batch. Separately, a syrup of sugar and whole vanilla pods and beans heats in a copper kettle. Once the nuts reach 200° they are added to the kettle.
The syrup dries to the nuts—a process called sanding. Once each nut is coated then the heat is turned up, which roasts the nuts and caramelizes the sugar together.
“It’s a timing thing—if you go too fast, the sugar caramelizes before the nuts are ready. If you go to slow, the nuts are burned before the caramel is ready,” Siegel explains. “It’s really a balance that can be learned only through experience.”
Once completely coated, the nuts are laid out on cooling table. Once cooled, candymakers remove the whole vanilla beans and transfer the nuts to the Stefan vacuum mixer.
“The Stefan vacuum mixer is quickly becoming one of the most significant advances in artisan candymaking because its ability to blend under vacuum is a huge advancement,” Siegel explains. “It helps texture and shelf life all without adding any garbage to your product.”
After only five minutes in the Stefan, the coated nuts transform into a creamy praline. Because the friction of the Stefan’s blade heats the mixture, the praline cools in a holding bin to room temperature before being piped into the butterfly shells.
The thin chocolate shells are filled, scraped clean, and then turned over to remove excess. Two varieties of butterflies are available—a 41% milk chocolate or a 65% bittersweet counterpart. Siegel uses blends of E. Guittard, El Rey and Cocoa Barry for each of his confections.
Once the cavities settle, workers hand-pipe the cooled praline. After a rest overnight, candymakers back the moulds—the final step in creating a truly unique peanut confection.
Another Charles Chocolates confectionery trinket is the Tea Collection. While chocolate has traditionally been paired with wine—and even beer nowadays—the growing prevalence of tea shop popularity inspired Teance Fine Tea owner Winnie Yu and Siegel to experiment with this new combination.
Created
in tandem with Teance Fine Teas in
“We found five that worked beautifully with the ganaches,”
Siegel says. “Each ganache is different—there are
different blends of bittersweet and milk chocolates for each ganache.”
To add an authentic touch, Teance owner Yu’s father, a master Chinese calligrapher, created characters on transfer sheets to top each confection. Each symbol represents the type of tea infused in each truffle.
The Tea Collection truly exemplifies Siegel’s mission to create products that are unexpected, exclusive and truly taste like nothing you’ve ever tried before.
And with its far-reaching confectionery portfolio, professional staff and beautiful new surroundings, it’s really no wonder why Siegel wants to show off as much of Charles Chocolates as possible.
“I just want people to see everything,” Siegel says. “Premium chocolate is a phenomenal trend, and I want to share it with every one of our customers.”
Man on a lifelong mission.
The times they are a-changin’
Chuck Siegel ventured into unfamiliar territory when he established his first chocolate company, Attivo Confections, in 1987. As consumers’ fine-tuned tastes continue to evolve, it’s easy to think that opening a chocolate shop today might be less daunting. However, the reality is a bit more complicated.
“The expectations are much higher,” Siegel explains. “When I started my first company, premium chocolates were truly a brand new industry, so consumers thought everything we made was really spectacular — because they didn’t have much to compare it to. What’s happened since is that this industry, while it’s nowhere near mature, is still a very high growth industry, and there’s a lot of opportunity for chocolatiers in it.”
While Siegel started his business at the age of 25, he advises not to expect special treatment if planning to start a business young. Whether made by a seasoned professional or an amateur fresh out of pastry school, consumers have come to count on getting a quality product.
“Consumers are expecting whether you’re 25, 35 or 75, that the product you turn out will be exceptional because there’s a lot of great stuff out there and they’re not going to spend their money on it if it isn’t great,” he says.
But don’t let this completely squash all dreams of starting a candy company—there is a bright side.
“It is easier on another level—the resources exist now to start a business in chocolate more than they ever have before,” Siegel says. “Everything from a phenomenal number of equipment makers making small, entry level equipment, to brand new schools, and a real abundance of ingredients that were never available before.”