By Jecca Berta

Each of our bar labels shows, among other details, the chocolate’s cocoa origin and tasting notes. Picking up a 70% Tumaco, Colombia bar (2023 harvest), you’ll see that we taste: dulce de leche, chocolate wafer, and almond. Those notes reflect a broader focus on flavor families, or flavor profiles. And arriving at the profile which best represents those beans takes weeks. Our Cocoa Sourcing Manager, Ron, and Senior Chocolate Maker, Trevor, know the process well: 

In simple terms, what is a flavor profile? 

Trevor: A flavor profile is basically the flavors that we taste in each chocolate bar. And the way we create that is through our testing. We have aromas that we call flavor families — chocolate, sweet aromatic, fruity, nutty, woody … We have this whole flavor map that we use.

Ron: We worked with a company to create a chocolate flavor map that we use internally. It’s based on the universally known flavor compounds that can be found in chocolate, then tweaked to Dandelion’s viewpoint. That company, DraughtLab, originally started with the craft beer industry. We use an app they developed that not only collects tasting data for us, but it tracks flavor for us on the production floor to ensure we’re hitting specific parameters along the making process.

How many flavor families are there? 

Ron: There are twenty different general flavor families that we use, and then sub-categories within each one. For example, fruit is a main category. Within that, you have dried fruits, fresh fruits, stone fruits, melons, and so on. And if you go to berries, then it’s blueberries, strawberries, raspberries … 

When we say “flavor profile” we’re also talking about the machine settings that we’re coming up with to produce those particular flavors of a chocolate.

How do you develop and fine-tune a flavor profile?

Trevor: For our machinery, the levers that we can pull here are: the roaster and our rotary conche. For the roaster, we can change the time and temperature. Dark roast, light roast, somewhere in between … that will definitely affect the flavor. Afterwards, our rotary conche also really changes how the flavor ends up.  

Ron: When we first got the Semuliki Forest, Uganda beans, based on our original sample, we thought it was something on the chocolate side (in terms of flavor families) and tried to achieve that, but we kept getting this super fruity, acidic, punchy flavor. In that situation, you’re trying to put a square peg in a round hole. It turned out to be one of my favorite bars — it’s also a guest favorite.

Backing up a step, what’s a rotary conche? 

Trevor: A rotary conche is this big machine that holds lots and lots of chocolate. It stirs it and heats it. Its main function is for flavor development. To do that, you add heat (with something called a water jacket), stirring it, and emulsifying the fat to make it smoother on the palate. The biggest thing is air flow and oxidation. 

We have a mistral, which is like a really powerful hairdryer. It adds constant heat as the chocolate is circulated, to help with that oxidation and airflow. There’s also a grated lid on top, which allows for the air to actually come out and release all of these volatiles from the chocolate. We do this for twenty-four to thirty-six hours. It does take a while, but it is a very noticeable difference. 

How many different origins are you working with? 

Ron: We’re working with up to eighteen different origins, and we want them all to be distinct. For origins that we already know, we have an idea of where we want to hit. Our Maya Mountain, Belize chocolate is a classic example. It always has this distinct strawberry note — we like to highlight that. When we’re testing a new harvest of Maya Mountain, we want to make sure we’re highlighting the strawberry note, even though there might be other unique flavors that we haven’t had before. And then there’s Kokoa Kamili, Tanzania chocolate, which tends to be more stone fruit and floral in flavor, so we want to highlight that each harvest. 

I keep a flavor roadmap with all of the flavor families that we have, and I look for any gaps. Are we missing a chocolatey chocolate or a fruity chocolate or something more herbaceous? When we’re tasting samples of beans we receive from cocoa producers, we’re looking for those flavors or unique combinations that would fit into our assortment. 

How long does it take to arrive at a final flavor profile?

Ron: For a harvest change, it’s anywhere from two to three weeks. For a new origin, it’s about four weeks. We tend to experiment more and longer with new origins. We iterate multiple times. 

Trevor: For new origins, we work with smaller tabletop melangers. 

Ron: In production, we roast on 70-kilo roasters. For testing, we use a 5-kilo roaster and 1-kilo stone grinders or mini-melangers. We probably do up to 15 mini-milanger batches. We hand-temper them, have people taste them, gather feedback, and decide what our next steps are. 

Trevor: We’ll do a few rounds of tasting with different roast profiles, and there are typically one or two that really stand out, that are far and above the best. If there ends up being two that are close, that’s when the origin lead makes the final decision.

The label on each of our bars lists two or three tasting notes, such as: honey mango, crème fraîche, and cocoa powder. How are those determined? 

Ron: We usually begin with the top three or four flavor families that people have called out in testing, whether that’s chocolatey, dairy, fruity … 

Trevor: And there’s sweet aromatics — sugar, honey, brown sugar, vanilla. More uncommon ones are: floral, herbaceous, spice, woody. We definitely have one or two bars with those notes, which we love to highlight. Chocolate, dairy, fruity … you’ll most likely see a bar with at least one of those three. 

So you start with the flavor families. Then what?

Ron: Then we’ll sit in a room and taste the chosen profile over and over again to determine what we’re tasting. The tasting notes on the label are the result of that. There may be a definitive fruitiness to a bar, and a resulting tasting note might be strawberry jam. But whether you interpret that as strawberry jam is specific to you. 

A lot like wine. Or coffee. 

Trevor: When tasting the samples that we have out at our stores, don’t be discouraged if you don’t taste what’s on the bar label. Those are really just our suggestions, based on what we taste. At the end of the day, you’re not wrong with what you taste. If you taste something totally different, then that’s what it tastes like.  

Ron: We all had this “aha” moment at Dandelion with the Ambanja, Madagascar bar. Originally, eight or ten years ago, it had no chocolatey note at all. It was the first chocolate that we tasted that didn’t taste anything like chocolate! It was acidic and fruity and yogurty. You either loved it or you hated it. I hold that up to Dandelion’s philosophy even now. Chocolate isn’t just one thing or three things. It can be all of these different things.  

Trevor, you spent a few years working at Dandelion Japan. How did those flavor families differ? 

Trevor: Flavor is very memory-based. So when you taste two-ingredient chocolate, it often reminds you of something specific. Japan’s cuisine is very different from ours. They categorize things differently, they have more fermented foods. So you get pretty different flavor callouts on their bar labels.

Ron: Their bars lean more toward savory, almost under-roasted in some cases. It’s interesting to see how, culturally, the flavor profiles differ. 

Editor’s note: A look at the Dandelion Japan bars we currently have reveals the following tasting notes: chocolate mousse, almond milk, and orange blossom tea (70% Wampu, Honduras); cream cheese, grapefruit, and gin (70% Zorzal Comunitario, Dominican Republic); and praliné, cream cheese, and herbal tea (85% Wampu, Honduras). 

You’ve both been at Dandelion for a decade (plus). What shifts have you seen in terms of craft chocolate? 

Ron: Trends come and go. Inclusion bars are really popular right now with other chocolate makers. The combinations are interesting to customers, and it’s fun for chocolate makers to play with those. It’s more like being a chef in a lot of ways. 

Do bar trends, like the popular Dubai chocolate bar, affect Dandelion’s two-ingredient philosophy? 

Ron: Our bars are the best way to connect our customers to the producer, and so we should always tell that story — this is the producer, these are the flavors they get, this is why we like it. Our Confections team gets to take our chocolate and combine it with different ingredients, and answer to the customer who might like something beyond just chocolate. 

I think we should stay true to what we do with two-ingredient bars, and educate customers on why that is really interesting. Our bars highlight all these different places in the world that grow cocoa, and different things affect those flavors — genetics, terroir. What we do at the factory is bring out those flavors. 

As do the producers we work with.

Ron: Producers have gotten very good at what they do, so their consistency is great. We’ve grown up alongside them — they’ve gotten better at fermenting and drying just as we’ve gotten better at making chocolate. In a few cases, they’re smoothing out some of the rough edges that we might find interesting. Some flavors can be less accessible to people’s palates, but when we have eighteen origins we want to lean into these unique and complex flavors and flavor combinations.

Fortunately, we have such close relationships with producers that we can work with them to achieve some really exceptional things. If we liked how acidic a certain harvest of theirs was, we can work with them to ramp that up. 

Does our flavor profile process differ from that of other craft chocolate makers?

Ron: Often the feedback we get from other makers is they can’t believe how much time we take to do it. But I think the process is generally pretty similar — you try different things, you taste it, you iterate on that.

Trevor: Different chocolate makers use different machinery too, so it’s hard to replicate. When we get new machinery, the same beans won’t get the exact same flavors. Some companies willingly share what their roast profiles are, some don’t. Some don’t even really keep track. All makers have different styles and ways … that’s the craft part. That’s what makes each maker unique in that aspect. 

Well said. Thank you, both.