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| Visions & Revisions |
Sweet Dreams
04/01/2007
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As a Hershey company, are you going to continue to make your
chocolate in Berkeley?
Scharffenberger: Yes. We
built this factory with room to grow. Where we once had one machine, we might
now have three—and we have room for lots more. Someone told me that Ghirardelli
once had a factory the same size as ours, and in it, the company was making five
times more chocolate than we make today.
In your book, The
Essence of Chocolate, you write about
the difficulty
of procuring the specific kinds of beans that are right for your chocolate. Now
that you have Hershey behind you, is that any
easier?
Scharffenberger: Not really.
We are looking for beans that Hershey is not familiar with. We work with
different bean suppliers, and we are in a different arena. We still have to find
our own beans. With Hershey’s help, we are, however, able to secure larger
quantities of cacao once we find it. Do you plan to broaden the Scharffen Berger line beyond your
current offerings?
Scharffenberger: Once we get
to the point where we can satisfy the demand for our products, maybe. But I
don’t see us offering a chocolate-brownie mix anytime soon. What business goals do you have for the next five years?
Steinberg: I hope our
product will continue to be extremely high-quality. I also hope that the farmers
who produce high-quality cacao beans will be rewarded. There must be expansion
on an agricultural level. It will require more education of farmers and more
rewards for them financially. There must be more of a connection between quality
and price rather than the tendency to view chocolate solely as a commodity. I
hope that chocolate will be a force for improving the world in that way. It may
be overreaching for me to think in those terms, but I would like to see that for
some small part of the world.
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