Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker
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Scharffen Berger Chocolate with headquarters in Berkeley, California was founded in 1996 by champagne maker John Scharffenberger and physician Robert Steinberg. The company primarily produces chocolate bars, focusing on dark chocolate varieties with high cocoa solid content. In 1997 they made the first batch in the South San Francisco factory using vintage European equipment and basic ingredients including Venezuelan criollo beans and whole Tahitian vanilla.
Scharffen Berger imports beans from a range of cacao-growing countries and regions, including Venezuela, Ghana, Madagascar, the Caribbean, and Indonesia. Each bean variety is individually roasted and melanged in small batches, then blended with large-crystal cane sugar and whole bean Tahitian and Bourbon vanillas before being conched into liquid chocolate. Manufacturing takes about 40 hours.
Scharffen Berger is the first American company founded in the past 50 years to make chocolate from bean to bar and the only one to use small batch processing. Today, Scharffen Berger makes about a half million pounds of chocolate a year. The phrase "from bean to bar" refers to the fact that the company selects its cacao beans from specific growers around the world and then performs every step to transform those beans into chocolate bars itself: from roasting, to conching, to tempering and molding.
On July 25, 2005, Scharffen Berger announced that it was being bought by The Hershey Company [1].
