San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday)
Guittard keeps tradition aliv
How family-owned business stays relevant — and delicious
A dusting of cocoa powder covers everything like a light layer of new snow inside the Guittard chocolate factory. The air is hot from roasting and heavy with an indelible smell that blends toast, baking brownies and hay. Vintage machinery clamors and bangs as it turns cocoa beans into chocolate, winnowing, sorting, grinding, refining.
“I never get tired of milk chocolate,” says Gary Guittard, scooping up a small handful of the sticky paste coming out between huge rollers that mash together ground chocolate, milk powder and sugar. These ingredients comprise the base of milk chocolate, which he has sneaked tastes of since his childhood.
Wiry and focused at 72, Gary is head of Guittard Chocolate Co., the Burlingame company with roots in Gold Rush-era San Francisco. His great-grandfather Etienne immigrated here from France with chocolate in his luggage. Soon thereafter, he opened a chocolate business in 1868, selling its wares on the waterfront. Changing with the times, it focused on wholesale business for nearly a century before rebranding itself with a high-end chocolate bar line in 1997, releasing the first U.S. single-origin chocolate.
As the company reaches a milestone of 150 years, Gary’s daughter, Amy, 36, and nephew Clark, 46, make up the fifth generation to work there. It’s a constant push and pull between tradition and reinvention as new bean-to-bar competitors appear on the scene. Though tiny compared to the big players like Hershey’s — which bought out competitor Scharffen Berger — Guittard is much bigger than niche companies like Dandelion, yet remains family owned. Under Gary, it has taken a sometimes confrontational role both in trying to preserve heirloom cocoa beans and maintain quality standards in U.S.-made chocolate.
“There are some other chocolates that are super citrus-y or super this or super that. There’s a secondary complexity that doesn’t always suit what I’m going for,” says pastry chef Nicole Plue of the San Francisco Cooking School, who, along with cookbook authors Alice Medrich and David Lebovitz and confectioner Michael Recchiuti, are among the company’s prominent buyers and fans. “I have always loved Guittard chocolates because they taste so much like chocolate.”
For the anniversary, Guittard released a baking chocolate called Eureka Works that uses cocoa beans from the same regions that Etienne could have been able to buy from — Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia and the Hawaiian Islands — in the late 1800s, before the Panama Canal was built. Essentially, Gary is trying to hold on to a flavor that’s 150 years old.
It is an embodiment of one of his favorite sayings: “Taste has memory.”
Etienne Guittard arrived in San Francisco in 1860 and, like so many with gold fever, soon realized that selling supplies would be a better way to make money. The chocolate he had brought from his uncle’s factory was popular with San Franciscans, so he returned to France to get chocolate-making equipment before opening his company on Sansome Street.