My friend, Louis Rossetto, the founder of Wired, has started an organic chocolate manufacturing company in San Francisco with another friend of mine, Timothy Childs.
It's called Tcho.
Beginning today, Tcho's dark chocolate will be available in 50-gram beta bars, representing Version .10. The $4 bars, made of Ghanaian beans and wrapped in brown paper, will be sold only locally at first, only to those who have signed up on the Tcho Web site, and only to those willing to go pick up the chocolate at Tcho headquarters.Mr. Childs, 43, a technologist who is a longtime friend of Mr. Rossetto's, has been working with chocolate for the last five years. The two decided to go into business together two years ago when Mr. Childs called Mr. Rossetto to tell him he had found a chocolate factory for sale in an old castle in Wernigerode, in the former East Germany. Mr. Rossetto agreed on the spot to buy the equipment and to have it shipped to San Francisco, where it arrived still coated in chocolate. The machinery has been refurbished and is being updated with modern control systems and video cameras for monitoring.