Rebuilding the Factory
We’re all terribly sorry for not regularly updating the blog. We have a slew of stories and photos we want to put up, but we’ve all just been overwhelmed between a slew of chocolate and trade shows along with doing pretty thorough renovating of our factory. We’re nearly doubling its size. We’ve also received quite a lot of equipment. I’d say new equipment except that it’s really not new and much of it was in an old Caribbean chocolate factory. All the equipment needs a lot of work. Months of work.
We’ve also been modifying a lot of our other equipment to make it more efficient, safe and productive. It’s been quite an undertaking with many plumbers, electricians, carpenters and others around not to mention all of us here at Amano doing quite a bit of work.
To let you in our what we’re doing I thought I’d share a few photos.
Seattle Chocolate Salon
Just a note that we’ll be at the Seattle Luxury Chocolate Salon this July 12th. There will be quite a few other chocolate companies there. We hope to see you there. We had a lot of fun there last year.
New York Fancy Food Show
First our profound apologies for not keeping up on the blog. We promise that once we get back into chocolate production in a few weeks that the blog posts will go back to normal. We’ve been busy with travel (someone’s been gone nearly every week) and then renovations of our factory. We’ve received quite a bit of new machinery and are expanding the size of our factory. As you might imagine that takes a lot of work to get everything ready for chocolate making at the best of times. Combine all that renovation with numerous chocolate shows, award shows, and other travel and it’s been a very busy Spring and early Summer to say the least.
Those of you who have been in New York may have seen us at the New York Fancy Food show. We’ll be back tomorrow night. But in the mean time we’ve been spreading the word about Amano Chocolate.
Amano at the Aspen Food and Wine Classic
Amano will be at the Aspen Food and Wine Classic this week. We’ll be sampling chocolate and mingling with the Chefs. So please visit us there.
We’ll be there from June 19th through the 21st and are sure we’ll have a good time.
Best in State
We were at the Best in State gala over the weekend. It was quite an honor to be there with all the winners. We won for best production of gourmet or artisan foods. At the gala they also announced the winner of the overall category of production and manufacturing. We won there also! This was doubly humbling as we weren’t just competing against other food manufacturers but also electronics, mining, printing, and other goods.
In other news Art was at London the same time picking up our awards from the London Academy of Chocolate. Much to our surprise they gave us a special award and trophy. Unfortunately I’m not sure the exact title but it is related to bean to bar manufacturing and innovation. We’ll put up a picture here on our blog when Art is back at the factory.
Log Haven
Sorry we’ve been so busy that we’ve not updated the blog that frequently. I think you’ll all be excited about what we have coming up though. We’ve finally finished the big part of our renovations. We still have a little bit more to do but we’re excited the hard parts are over. We’ll put up a blog post with pictures when we are done with all the changes.
In other news we’ll be at Log Haven this Thursday, May 28th for “Meet the Makers.” We look forward to seeing you there.
The New Art
We’ve had a few requests for some images of the new paintings commissioned for our bars. Here they are. We’re really ecstatic about how they turned out. The art for our Montanya bar in particular I love. We were worried it wouldn’t show up well when reduced for the bar. But it is.
Let us know how you like these. Would you be interested in prints? We’ve been thinking about having a local print shop print them up for order if there is enough interest.
Amano Available in Utah County
We get a lot of requests from Amano lovers here in Utah county for our chocolate. The BYU Bookstore and the BYU Museum of Art store now are selling our chocolate bars. So if you are in Utah county and have wanted to avoid a drive up the freeway to Salt Lake City now you can buy us locally. You can also continue to buy us at the Sundance resort at their cafe or at their spa. (They do a special chocolate spa using cocoa chaff we provide for them)
As you know we have been letting people stop by the factory to purchase locally the past month. We’ll be ending this shortly as we start to go back into heavy production. (Our building is also fairly non-descript and not easy for everyone to find)
Chef John and Amano Chocolate
Chef John put up a video cooking guide using our chocolate. I was fortunate enough to meet him while at the San Francisco Chocolate Salon.
His recipe is for Burnt Caramel Sea Salt Dark Chocolate Coins. I’ve not tried making these yet but they look amazing. I hope to try them myself soon.
Chocolate Recipes
We’re hoping to put together a few recipes for the blog. It’s just really difficult to put together the photography while simultaneously running a factory. To hold you over here are a few recipes.
A lot of people think cacao is just for deserts. But our cacao nibs can be used in many other means. So our first recipe is a savory one.
Amano on TV
The Food Network is rebroadcasting the episode of Unwrapped about Amano Chocolate. So tell your friends if you want to see a virtual tour of our factory.
New Bars Available!
We’re proud to announce that starting on Thursday (April 6th) we’ll have several new bars available for order. (Both at stores or retail off of our website)
New Classifications for Cacao
The Bittersweet Blog has up a nice post on botanical classifications for cacao some of you might enjoy. We’ve long tried to explain that there’s far more to good chocolate than it merely being made of beans from criollo trees. There’s just more diversity than that. New genetic research is showing some of that diversity.
Best in Show
The San Francisco International Chocolate Salon awards were announced today. We’re very ecstatic yet humbled to have won in so many categories. We one for Best in Salon, Top Artisan Chocolatier, Most Gifted Chocolate Maker, Best Dark Chocolate, Best Milk Chocolate, Best Dark Chocolate Bar, and Best Milk Chocolate Bar.
Read the rest…
Back from the SF Chocolate Salon
We spent the last week in San Francisco at the San Francisco Chocolate Salon. So we apologize for not having any stories the past few weeks. Before that Art was in Europe meeting with stores selling our chocolate and speaking to the media. It’s been a very long month but we’ll hopefully get back to a more regular schedule of posting here. (We’re still catching up on our sleep!)
The Chocolate Salon was great. There were 10 to 15 times as many people there as in previous years. It was so busy that we ran out of chocolate around 3:00. I never even had time to tour the room and see what all the other chocolate makers and chocolatiers were doing. Either Art or I will have some write-ups on it soon.
Thanks to everyone who did say hello.