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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On July 7, 2001, Frederick Schilling and his girlfriend, Tracey Holderman, arrived in New York to attend the Fancy Food Show and launch Dagoba, an organic-chocolate company. Schilling had just turned thirty, Holderman was twenty-nine, and the show was the first entrepreneurial event of their lives. Dagoba had no employees and no orders. It had a lease for a ground-floor industrial space in Boulder, Colorado (the "factory"), and an investment of twenty thousand dollars (borrowed from Schilling's mother and an uncle), which, after flights, a hotel, and a fee for the smallest possible booth, against a dark wall in the basement of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, was gone. It also had "launch products"--seven bars, including infusions of raspberry and mint--an amateurish jamboree, confected and poured into molds by a man who had never liked chocolate, hand-wrapped by a woman who rarely ate more than two ounces a year, and tested only by their Boulder friends and roommates, a scraggly crew of ski bums and folksingers. Dagoba was more bedroom than boardroom. In New York, that changed.
"I was overwhelmed," Holderman told me. "The magnitude of the show, the number of other chocolate companies--I had no idea." Their venture had begun a few months earlier, on Valentine's Day. Holderman and Schilling were on a chairlift, skiing in the Arapahoe Basin, when Schilling said he could wait no longer ("I need to do this now!"). He raced down, shopped, got home, melted two batches of organic chocolate, infusing one with milk chai, the other with raspberries and rose hips, poured them into heart-shaped molds, and served them on a silver platter to the hundred friends who came over for a party that went on till the next morning, with guests naked in a hot tub, "praying for peace," as a red sun brightened the Continental Divide.
The Fancy Food Show runs for three days. By the end, Holderman and Schilling's samples had disappeared in a bewildering thirty-six-hour gobblefest, their picture taken so often that they felt like celebrities--the boyfriend-girlfriend team with wacky organics--and Schilling, a self-described alchemist, entered the happiest period of his life. He became a chocolate-maker.
I found Schilling at this year's show slumped uncomfortably in a plastic chair. His face was in a cup of coffee, absorbing steam. He was wearing an oversized floppy cotton shirt, the top buttons undone, a hairy chest on display, jeans, clogs, a discolored shiny leather bracelet. He was wolverine thin, with an unshaven scratchy face, sagging cheeks, and soft round sacks under his eyes, and his breath smelled so powerfully of red wine from the night before that a staff member gave him two sticks of cinnamon gum. He had just returned from a trip to Bali, Java, and Sulawesi, including a stint in the tropical backcountry, and he kept running a hand through his hair, as if to make sure that a soft-tissue creature hadn't made a home there. He wasn't on a New York clock yet, he explained, but realized, counting slowly, that he'd been here five days. He looked up, perplexed, his eyes so red they could have been rubbed with sand.
Schilling is thirty-six, no longer a novice but still not the obvious founder of a manufacturing company with many millions of dollars in sales. His education has been scattershot. He applied to one college, St. John's in New Mexico, didn't get in, prepared to enter a monastery, and, at the last minute, was offered a scholarship by Ohio Wesleyan to play lacrosse. ("I love lacrosse!") He intended to study religion, hoping to satisfy a spiritual need, but, in the summer, attended a music festival "in the sacred valley of Telluride" and never returned. He worked for a record store, the sum of his business experience. He played guitar. He wrote songs, smoked "an insane amount of herbal blends," and was the lead singer in a band. After six years, he moved to Boulder, but, fundamentally, his life never changed.
At the show, Schilling and I walked past the French chocolates of Michel Cluizel and saw a photograph of the white-haired patriarch surrounded by his offspring: four scrawny young adults, each assigned to a different division of the business. Dagoba is an inverted version. Schilling has no children, but his mother, a soft-spoken sixty-one-year-old divorcee, looks after the front office. She was running the stand that morning. An older sister, unmarried, keeps the books. And his father, a misanthropic ex-I.B.M. corporate manager, retired at forty-nine ("So I could golf, drink beer, bowl, and play blackjack at Indian casinos," he told me), was summoned one weekend to give lessons in how to run a business and stayed for years. "How do I travel so much?" Schilling said. "I've got Papa Jon nearby, Sister Becky doing the accounts, and Mother Mary working the phones." He beamed. His smile was disarming because it was so trusting, confident that the affection it conveyed would be reciprocated, and his manner, despite the hangover and the slouch and the exhaustion, was irrepressibly cheerful. "Theobroma cacao," he exhaled--the scientific name given to chocolate by Linnaeus--stretching out his arms as though to embrace his products in a loving hug. "Theos, god. Broma, food. The food of the gods."
In the past five years, dark chocolate has had astonishing sales, especially in the United States, and has grown ten times faster than milk chocolate. In 2006, its sales increased by fifteen per cent. Dark chocolate represents a quarter of what Americans buy, four billion dollars last year, and industry analysts, who believe that sales will reach nearly five and a half billion by 2011, don't see an end. One says that it "will drive the chocolate sector for the next hundred years." An appreciation of dark chocolate is now a sign of a discriminating palate. Most chocolate has no such pretensions. It ends up in a candy bar or a chocolate Easter egg or an M&M-like treat referred to by the trade as "bagged product." But taste is a powerful force--in effect, "taste" is "culture"--which I hadn't fully understood until Schilling introduced me to his high-end hands-on fellow-manufacturers.
They were uniformly earnest. They told no jokes. They seemed to have no interest in selling, wanting to talk only about what they made, bars invariably (anything else--a filled confection like a truffle, for instance--was frivolous), in the compulsive, insistent way that upmarket vintners go on about their wines. The intellectual index was the wrapper, the compact culinary encyclopedia of what was inside. It might tell you where the beans came from. (Madagascar is this year's hot real estate.) It might reveal the varietal. One of the rarest is a Porcelana, from South America; Amedei, an Italian company, sells it for a hundred and twenty-seven dollars a pound. There were "crus," named after specific farms. Some bars had a harvest year. I got one from an Internet supplier, a 2002, made from Chuao Valley beans in Venezuela, three years past its sell-by date. Suspecting a gimmick, I ate it to confirm its staleness. I was surprised. It seemed fresher than other bars I'd bought. If kept dry, a chocolate with a high cacao content, I've discovered, rarely spoils.
The cacao content is a wrapper's most important datum, and the acceptable benchmark is seventy per cent. The figure is a measure of "cocoa mass." (The English language uses "cacao," the Mayan word for the tree, and "cocoa," an eighteenth-century corruption, interchangeably.) The mass is what you get after you grind up the beans, a gooey wet gob. I did this at home. I put old, dry beans in a coffee grinder, and was surprised by the amount of liquid they produced. It is fat, a lot of it, half the bean's content, although the fat is mainly unsaturated, the kind that's good for you, like an avocado's. This benchmark figure is now the heart of contemporary dark-chocolate culture. It provides a confederation of obsessives with a name, "the seventy-per-cent club" (pure chocolate, "no bonbons")--the snobbiest of the snobby, according to Schilling. It is the number on most of the chocolates I saw. Amedei's Porcelana is seventy per cent. So is an Ocumare Grand Cru, an award-winning new product, named after a Venezuelan valley unknown to anyone except other fanatics.
I tasted it with Schilling. His face gave little away. "Good chocolate," he said finally.
I had a bite and thought: Harmonic, pure.
"Expensive beans," he added, quietly. "But good." He had another bite. "In fact," he declared, "this is very good." It was too emphatic. I wondered if he had a reservation he wasn't expressing, maybe out of respect to the maker, Art Pollard. In 1996, Pollard had a midlife cacao epiphany and has been on a quest for perfect chocolate ever since. This was one of his three products. It might be years before he produced another. I studied him: pale skin, soft middle, a wife he never sees, talking, talking, talking. His life was this bar.
Schilling took me to...
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