Chocolate in beta testing, offered by a Wired founder
By Katie Hafner
December 10, 2007, 10:03 AM

SAN FRANCISCO--In a vast refurbished warehouse on one of this city's historic pier, Louis Rossetto, the co-founder of Wired magazine, is at it again. Only this time, his project has nothing to do with media or high technology. It is hand-crafted chocolate.

But Rossetto, 58, is applying the language of high-technology business to chocolate making. Rossetto and his business partner, Timothy Childs, explain that their company, TCHO, is still in start-up mode, its chocolate still in beta. Beginning today, Tcho's dark chocolate will be available in 50-gram beta bars, representing Version .10.

The $4 bars, made of Ghanaian beans and wrapped in brown paper, will be sold only locally at first, only to those who have signed up on the Tcho Web site, and only to those willing to go pick up the chocolate at Tcho headquarters. "A lot of people think companies like See's and Godiva are chocolate makers," said Childs. "But they're not.

They're confectioners who take someone else's chocolate and do something with it." Others, said Childs, simply remelt other people's chocolate and put their brand on it. Slightly less fresh-faced than he was in the early 1990s, but with no less fervor for his product, Rossetto likes to say that Tcho is "where Silicon Valley start-up meets San Francisco food culture."

CNET News/The New York Times
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