Thursday, July 26, 2007

Chocolate to the Trade: A Candy Industry Magazine Clipping

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the latest issue of the trade magazine Candy Industry quoted me in a profile of Scharffen Berger product development honcho Brad Kintzer (more specifically, they quote me quoting John Scharffenberger).

I've had many serendipitous encounters with the staff of Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker during the short life of Chocolate in Context. At the Fancy Food Show earlier this month, I ran into the marketing department's Liz Kaplan and her husband, who recommended a slew of places for me to visit in the Anderson Valley during my then-upcoming road trip in California (alas, I only made it as far as the Russian River). A few days later, I ran into Kaplan's colleague Norm Shea on the street in the East Village--we ducked into a bar for a couple of Coca-Colas and talked about culinary travels in New York and San Francisco. I can hardly imagine a more good-natured bunch of chocolate company executives, Brad Kintzer included. During my first tour of the Scharffen Berger factory last year, Brad let me look on while he analyzed cross-sections of several cacao beans (looking for adequate fermentation and signs of mold). At a press lunch at Cafe Cacao in the Scharffen Berger factory building last month, Brad let me corner him for almost an hour to ask about the World Cocoa Foundation (an organization of which he speaks very highly). And, most recently, he generously filled an entire box with flavorful cacao beans from the Dominican Republic so that I would have some props for my talk at the San Francisco Chocolate Salon.

You have to monkey around a bit with the July 2007 section of the Candy Industry site in order to see the piece on Brad ("Sweet Profile," page 64)--but it's an interesting article about an interesting guy.

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