Life+ Meets: Greg D’Alesandre, The Chocolate Sorcerer (1/3)
This is the first of a three-part interview with the wonderful Greg D’Alesandre from Dandelion Chocolate. Join us as we learn about Greg and his passion for bean to bar, Dandelion's engineering approach to chocolate, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the beauty of the Craft Chocolate community.
You can listen to our Podcast or read the interview below!
— Hi Greg, how are you in San Fransico?
Yeah, I’m right in the middle of wildfires and heatwave and there are all sorts of things going on right now.
— Can you give us an introduction about yourself and Dandelion Chocolate?
My name is Greg D‘Alesandre. I’m the chocolate sorcerer at Dandelion chocolate. My official title is the Chief Sourcing Officer, but, you know, I’ve always wanted to be a sorcerer for my whole life, and as long as you get to choose your title, you might as well choose the title of sorcerer!
My primary job is finding the cocoa that we use to make our chocolate, although I guess the way I usually think about it is finding the cocoa producers we want to work with and then and then we get cocoa.
Dandelion Chocolate is a company that started in 2010. In San Francisco. We focus on two ingredients of chocolate, cocoa beans and sugar. A lot of chocolate classically has other things added to it- extra cocoa butter and things like that. We wanted to explore the space of two-ingredient chocolate. We focus also on single-origin, so beans just coming from one place.
Up until relatively recently, our focus was also on chocolate bars although we started doing chocolate chips. We just got a lot of press for our chocolate chips by an industrial designer who now works for Tesla!
In general, I think part of what we’re looking for is engaging with our customers so they can see what we’re doing — I hate to say this, I hate to ruin people’s perspectives, — but we’re the opposite of Willy Wonka where the factory is closed off to the public and you had this image in your head of what was going on inside. You know exactly what’s going on in our factories. You can walk into them and see for yourselves!
We have locations in the United States, but also in Japan. We’ve done a pop up in Taiwan as well in 2010.
Craft chocolate really kind of got started in 2005 2006. But there was a number of makers who also started in 2010, of which we are one of them. It’s almost like high school classes or college classes together.
—What other classes are there?
There’s 2005, 2006, and then the 2010 and then it started becoming all more chocolate makers all the time. It’s funny to think of Dandelion as a 10-year old company because it still seems like we’re just kind of getting started building trying to figure out what we’re doing.
— What stage of fundraising are you in? Series E,F…? If I may ask.
We did sort of a first round of angel investing and then brought in friends and family. We are doing some fundraising right now, I think technically it’s going to be C round is what we’re calling it.
— Are there many tech background people in the industry, or is it just a characteristic of Dandelion Chocolate?
That’s a good question. I would say the people who started Dandelion have a tech background, and myself. Now we have a lot of food science people in the chocolate making side of things, the people on the retail side of things, we’re hiring baristas who have run coffee businesses before.
(For other examples) There’s Fresco up in northern Washington, Rob’s an electrical engineer or a process engineer. So there are definitely people with sort of engineering backgrounds.
I would say, in general, chocolate making is about problem-solving.
All chocolate-making is problem-solving. Dealing with flavour and texture, fixing the machine working in tempering, and how to create a business….. So I think it attracts people who like problem-solving. Sometimes that is going to be sort of engineering-type people, but I think it’s just in general problem solvers.
I’m constantly impressed at how intelligent everybody I meet in the craft chocolate industry is. As opposed to other industries where people will get into it because they think they can make a lot of money, I don’t think anyone’s getting into craft chocolate because they think what they’re going to do is make a tonne of money. I think they’re getting into it because they think they can be a viable business and something they really enjoy.
When I started in the tech industry, the tech industry was full of people who like tech stuff, geeks for the most part. Over time, it shifted into people going into the tech industry because they knew they could make a lot of money in the tech industry.
It was interesting, you could see the shift, in that you can see the shift, and sort of the personalities of people who were in the industry who originally the people were trying to figure out how to solve interesting, you know, technical challenges.
I would argue that in the craft chocolate industry, we’re still a culture around problem-solving.
— That is REALLY interesting. I never thought of comparing the tech culture to chocolate culture through problem-solving!
Yeah, isn’t that interesting? When I was reading the article, I was like, oh, this makes a lot of sense. And it’s totally fascinating. Early on in the tech industry, everyone was trying to solve problems for how to make people’s lives better. Computers were about making people’s lives better, making things easier for people. Not technology for the sake of technology, but the technology for the sake of people.
— I think this is the time where everybody has to problem solve in their own way. Can you give me some examples from the craft chocolate market?
We were heavily invested in retail. I think retail eventually will come back but the question is when. So I’ve been working pretty closely with all the sort of different parts of the company to sort of figure out different revenue streams.
Our online store has done really well. We’ve launched a number of chocolate experiences. You can get a kit with 12 different ingredients that go into chocolate then a live zoom class (rather than a pre-recorded video).
Those have been pretty good. We’re launching a make your own truffle class in a couple of weeks as well.
— I had an image of you travelling around the world, very different!
Yeah, that image is accurate most of the time! Most of the people I know who do sourcing and rural small communities haven’t been hit that heavily with the pandemic. The last thing you want to do is be an infection vector, for that reason, a lot of people I know have been very cautious about doing any sort of travelling. And a lot of the smaller communities in the cocoa world, just haven’t been letting anybody else in, literally barricading roads.
— I feel like the resilience of the system that you’ve created has been shown, because the local communities have a relationship to craft chocolate makers, they don’t need to cling to the global supply chain.
Yeah, at the same time, one of the main things we try to do is we try not to be the only buyer of someone’s cocoa because it puts them in a risky position of their business. It was really good that we tried to keep about one year’s worth of cocoa. Some of the people we’re working with can’t produce this year.
But interestingly most of the people I’ve spoken to have said this year hasn’t actually been so bad for them for cocoa, which has been good for the people who have been able to produce, they largely have been able to find buyers for most of their cocoa.
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Read and listen more.
Part 2 of Life+ meets Greg D’Alesandre: Cacao and the Pandemic: How the industry is dealing with COVID-19 and helping
Part 3 of Life+ meets Greg D’Alesandre: Collaborative ways to make a new category
Find us.
Dandelion Chocolate — Website / IG
Life+ — Website / IG / Podcast
