A Frenchman, the Gold Rush and a waterfront shop.

Guittard begins with the Gold Rush. Etienne Guittard (1838–1899), from Tournus in Burgundy, came to California in the 1850s, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2011, bringing French chocolate — from his uncle’s factory, the company says — to trade for mining supplies. After about three years of failing to strike gold in the Sierra he went back to France to save for chocolate-making equipment, the San Francisco Examiner reported in 2000, and in 1868 he opened Guittard Chocolate on Sansome Street, on the San Francisco waterfront. At first he also sold tea, coffee and spices.

He ran the business for 31 years, until his death in 1899, the company says. His son Horace C. Guittard was in charge when the 1906 earthquake destroyed the Sansome Street factory. After a short time on Commercial Street the company moved to Main Street, south of Market, where it expanded in 1921 and 1936, according to the Examiner, and concentrated on chocolate alone.

In the 1950s the city needed the Main Street site for the Embarcadero Freeway. Guittard sold the property and moved down the Peninsula to Burlingame, where it still has its headquarters on a street named Guittard Road. The Examiner dates the move to 1954; the company’s own timeline and fact sheet give 1955. The move was led by the third generation, Horace A. Guittard.

His son Gary Guittard, the founder’s great-grandson, joined full-time in 1975 and became president and chief executive in 1989, the Chronicle reported. He still holds those roles, according to the company, which says the fifth generation of the family has now joined the business.

Couverture for chefs, chips for home bakers.

Guittard makes chocolate for three kinds of customer: food manufacturers, who buy chocolate, cocoa butter, chocolate liquor and cocoa powder in bulk; pastry chefs and chocolatiers, who buy couverture; and home bakers, who buy chips, wafers, bars and cocoa in shops. Among its industrial customers, Fortune reported in 2012, is See’s Candies.

The home-baking line began with chocolate chips. The company says Gary Guittard created its first chips for home bakers, and its timeline marks 1978 as the debut of its Real Semisweet Chocolate Chips — with the words “Behold the gold bag.” The company says all its baking chips have been Fair Trade Certified since 2017, having introduced its first Fair Trade chip in 2004.

In April 2000 Gary Guittard launched Collection Etienne, a range of single-origin and blended chocolates that the company says he developed from his great-grandfather’s handwritten journals, in a small-batch French tradition. The couverture range now carries French names, from Soleil d’Or milk chocolate to L’Etoile du Nord dark, alongside single origins from Hawaii and Madagascar. The company says it buys beans through direct relationships with farmers in regions including Ecuador, Madagascar, Ghana and Hawaii, chooses them for flavour, often blends several origins, and roasts in small batches using vintage machines alongside modern ones.

Guittard chocolates won Good Food Awards in 2014, 2015 and 2019, the last for the Eureka Works bar made for the company’s 150th anniversary in 2018, according to its fact sheet. It also runs the Guittard Chocolate Studio in Los Angeles, opened in 2008, as a place for classes and product development, after an earlier studio in New York in 2000.

In 2007 Gary Guittard led a petition called “Don’t Mess with Our Chocolate,” opposing an industry request to the US Food and Drug Administration to allow cheaper fats to replace cocoa butter in products still called chocolate; the company says the campaign succeeded.

Couverture and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make chocolate, and they come from four countries: Valrhona, Michel Cluizel and Pralus from France, Amedei from Italy, Felchlin from Switzerland, and Guittard and Askinosie from the United States. They sit at different points in the chocolate trade, from names known mainly to pastry kitchens to small makers known mainly by the bar on the shelf.

At one end are couverture houses, whose chocolate is sold in blocks, pistoles and callets to chefs, chocolatiers and bakers as much as to shoppers, and whose brand often reaches the public second-hand, through a restaurant dessert or a patisserie window. At the other end are bean-to-bar makers, who buy cocoa beans, roast and grind them in their own workshop and sell finished bars, and whose identity rests on the farm, the origin and the maker’s name. Many firms sit somewhere between the two, selling to professionals and to the public at once.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now, where its beans come from and where its chocolate is made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Family-owned, two Bay Area plants.

Guittard describes itself as the oldest continuously family-owned and operated chocolate company in the United States, a description the San Francisco Chronicle repeated in 2011, and as one of the few independent wholesale chocolate suppliers left in the country. We found no outside owner in the sources we checked.

It makes its chocolate in two places in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to its 2026 fact sheet. Burlingame handles bean testing, roasting and chocolate making, along with research, quality control and sales. A second site at Fairfield, in Solano County, handles manufacturing, depositing, warehousing and shipping. The company’s timeline says construction began at Fairfield in 2001, and its fact sheet dates the second manufacturing facility to 2006 and an expansion of depositing to 2018. In 2023 it added a dedicated dairy-free, kosher pareve line there, and in 2023 and 2024 new moulding and refining equipment.

Its sustainability programme is called Cultivate Better, launched in 2016, according to the fact sheet. The company says it works with the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana and has supported the Ghana Fine Flavor Cocoa initiative for more than ten years, works with a Fair Trade cooperative in Sassandra, Côte d’Ivoire, and installed a one-megawatt solar system at Fairfield in 2021, which it says supplied 52% of the site’s electricity in 2022. It lists itself as a founding member of the World Cocoa Foundation and of the Fine Chocolate Industry Association.

Packaging has a documented history, all from the company: the gold chip bag of 1978, a “major brand revamp” in 2013 that introduced Collection Etienne baking bars, a move to gusseted bags in the 2010s and post-consumer recycled material in its flexible film from 2022. We found no published account of who designed its logo, and no official colours.

For a design guide, Guittard shows how a long family history and one memorable colour — the gold bag — can carry a brand that sells to both factories and kitchens. Compare Dandelion Chocolate, a younger San Francisco maker, and Valrhona, another couverture house built around chefs. For this guide we use bittersweet brown, gold and fog grey with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Guittard’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.