Amano has been in the news a lot of late. Here are a few of the stories:

At the Salt Lake Tribune they had a story up about our new Chuao bar. Salt Lake Magazine mentioned us as well.

The Daily Herald has up a video story and a regular print story on our new factory outlet.

Fox 13 did a story on our chocolate as well.

Our long promised factory outlet store is finally open! You can purchase our full range of products here as well as special Amano confections. We’ve brought on pastry chef Rebecca Millican from New York. She’s been a regular at the national pastry competition and has been featured in several Food Network challenges as well. Each day she’s prepared some new treats that will blow your mind.

One of the favorites is a “peanut brittle” made not with peanuts but with cocoa nibs. She also has made a variety of filled chocolates. She’s made some brownies using our Madagascar and Dos Rios chocolates that are selling out within hours.

Come down and try out some of the amazing food she’s prepared.

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We are releasing a new chocolate bar in the next month or so.  (If all goes well, barring delays etc.)  The chocolate is absolutely fabulous!  This is a little project I’ve been working on for some time and it is nice to see it come to fruition.

These are some of the cocoa beans we used to make our new chocolate with. If you know your cocoa, this could be a major clue!

To celebrate, we are holding a “Guess the Origin” contest.  We will have a drawing among all those who guess the origin correctly for a “Year’s Supply of Chocolate”.  This is 10 bars a month or 120 bars a year. This is over $830 in chocolate!

To enter, just fill out the form here:

http://www.amanochocolate.com/promos/guess-the-origin-contest.html

If you are a blogger, you get an extra chance to win since we are having a separate contest (also for a “Year’s Supply of Chocolate”) for bloggers who announce the “Guess the Origin” contest on their blog.

The link to the blogger drawing is here:

http://www.amanochocolate.com/promos/guess-the-origin-contest-blogger.html

Good luck to everyone!  We are super excited to announce this chocolate (as we always are) and as always, we know you will love the flavor of this chocolate immensely.

Ok, well it is actually Clark’s wife Nicole. Born this morning, 8lbs, 3oz. I’m still waiting for a name from Clark but, I’m sure she will eat her share of chocolate as she gets older! A big congratulations for Clark and Nicole!!!

Sorry we’ve not updated the blog for a while. Big things are coming. Look for future announcements here.

Some of the awards for the 2010 San Francisco International Chocolate Salon were announced today. Amano won Gold for Best Dark Chocolate and Best Dark Chocolate Bar. The major awards will be announced at the Chocolate Salon on March 25th. We’ll look for you there.

They just announced the 2010 Awards for the best chocolatiers and confectioners in America. The Awards are based on the cumulative number of Gold and Silver Awards received by each entrant in the 2009 TasteTV Chocolate Salons in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

Amano won the top award (“Grand Award” ) for which we are very humbled and excited. Thank you to everyone who has supported us over the years and come to the chocolate shows. We have been exceedingly excited and humbled to have won gold for best dark chocolate at all the shows. I keep saying humbled, but we honestly never expected to have this kind of feedback so early in our short history.

Part of what maintains our love of making the chocolate is all the positive feedback from each of you. It’s at these chocolate shows where we can encounter our fans one on one that really keeps the excitement alive when we’re back at the factory making the chocolate.

We’ll be at this year’s San Francisco International Chocolate Salon coming up in just over a week. It’s on March 20 at 10:00 at Fort Mason Center. This show has grown bigger, and bigger each year. I was shocked at the turn out last year and I hear this year is going to be even better with more vendors and people. This is always our favorite event. Partially because San Francisco is one of the great food cities in the nation but also because it was the very first chocolate show we ever attended.

We look forward to seeing you there.

We’re making chocolate as fast as we can to replenish all our stocks. More people purchased Amano Chocolate over Christmas and Valentine’s than we’d expected.

As some of you may have noticed we were temporarily out of stock on our Ocumare Milk due to overwhelming demand over Valentine’s. We’re happy to announce that you can once again purchase our award winning Ocumare Milk Chocolate.

I should also note that due to problems with the recent harvests in Bali we will soon be discontinuing our award winning Jembrana 70% Dark Chocolate Bar and our Jembrana Milk Chocolate Bar.

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Looking for a gift for that special someone? Thinking about giving some Easter chocolate for adults as well as kids? Consider a variety pack of our chocolate in a gift box.

We’ve made this box so all our chocolate displays beautifully. It is the perfect presentation piece for sharing your love of Amano Chocolate.

Order Here

For those in love, Valentine’s Day is one of the most significant days. It is the time to celebrate the love that each has for the other and there is no better way to celebrate love than with a gift of chocolate.   For those of us in the chocolate industry, it is a time for us to share our love of chocolate with lovers throughout the world.

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Nothing says Valentine love like dark chocolate. To help you express your love to your special sweetheart we’re doing free FedEx Ground shipping for orders above $50 through Valentine’s.

Valentine’s is Sunday so if you are shipping via FedEx Ground I’d suggest having your orders in by Wednesday. (FedEx will do Saturday deliveries for residential areas when ordering by Ground mail)

I mentioned that Art Pollard, one of the founders of Amano Chocolate, will be at Fortnum and Mason on the 14th of February in London, England. In addition to that he’s the featured guest at the 70% Tasting on February 11th from 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society at 19 Greville Street, London. This is not a free event. But you can get a discounted ticket of £22.50 using PayPal.

I’m sure Art will take lots of pictures we’ll put up here at our blog. Art hasn’t been in London since winning the gold at the London Academy of Chocolate in June. So this is a great opportunity for our English fans to give us some feedback.

Art Pollard, the founder of Amano chocolate, will be in London all next week. I’ll put up any events he is going to so that all our British fans can meet him. The biggest event he is doing is at Fortnum and Mason on the 14th. Fortnum and Mason is famous for its selection of fine chocolate and is one of London’s oldest department stores. (They are also certified purveyors to the Queen.) We are really privileged to have our chocolate in their fine store. Art will be holding a tasting there and meeting people curious about our chocolate. And for the really curious, this is one of the few times you’ll ever catch Art wearing a suit. (Shhhh…. Don’t tell anyone that Art ever wears suits!)

Art will also be holding tasting events for SeventyPercent.com, Paul Young, Melt, and will be catching up with Damien Allsop London’s first chocolatier to use Amano’s chocolate for his confections. Damien is really excited about the truffles he has made with our chocolate. They have turned out fabulous — both in Damien’s opinion as well as ours.

For all of you who were hoping we’d be available in your local store in England please talk to the managers of your favorite stores. We have a distributor for England and we can make sure that our chocolate is available locally for you. Since Art will be in London he may even be able to stop by the store directly.

One of the things we love to do here at Amano is get out with the public through tasting events. We’re always shocked at how many people have never had gourmet chocolate – only the bars they buy at the local gas station. The look on people’s faces when they taste what I like to call “real chocolate” always makes all the labor and hard work worth it. Yes, we’re biased about chocolate. But I’ve found that once a person tastes good artisan chocolate that they become just as biased. It’s really hard to go back to eating regular chocolate.

Because we love to get the word out about our chocolate we regularly attend chocolate shows or put on chocolate tasting events. We can then let people taste our chocolate and experience the difference for themselves. We have several of these tastings coming up this month. We’d love to see you at the stores where we are sampling our chocolate. Bring any questions you might have about the chocolate or how we make it.

Here’s the list of tasting events we’re doing this month.
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The Food Network is rebroadcasting their special on Amano Chocolate starting on Monday, February 8th. We’re very excited by this as it helps get the word out about American gourmet chocolate.

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