Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker

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The company logo features an Ibex, chosen for its ability to navigate rough terrain. According to factory docents, this is a nod to the vagaries of entrepreneurialism in the wine and chocolate business.

Scharffen Berger Chocolate is Berkeley, California-based chocolate maker, founded in 1996 by champagne maker John Scharffenberger and physician Robert Steinberg. The company is a manufacturer of chocolate -- as opposed to the far more common chocolatiers, who make their products using chocolate acquired wholesalers and manufacturers -- the first American company founded in the past 50 years to make chocolate from "bean to bar". Scharffen Berger primarily produces chocolate bars, using small-batch processing and 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. Today, Scharffen Berger makes about a half million pounds (200 tonnes) 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.

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.

On July 25, 2005, Scharffen Berger announced that it was being bought by The Hershey Company^[1]. On 2005 August 15, Hershey announced the completion of the acquisition ^[2].