A chunk of French chocolate, a home kitchen and a hair dryer.

Scharffen Berger was founded in 1996 by John Scharffenberger, a sparkling-wine maker who was then selling his winery, Scharffenberger Cellars, and Robert Steinberg, a physician who had been his doctor. The Los Angeles Times, in an obituary of Steinberg in September 2008, told the story that the company has repeated ever since: Steinberg had taken a short internship at the chocolate house Bernachon in Lyon in 1993, and on his return he offered Scharffenberger a piece of French chocolate he had been carrying in his pocket. “It tasted better than anything I’d ever had,” Scharffenberger told People in 1998, as the Los Angeles Times quoted him.

The two began experimenting in Steinberg’s home kitchen, working through some thirty varieties of cacao bean with a mortar and pestle, a coffee grinder and a hair dryer to keep the chocolate fluid, according to the same obituary. They split the winemaker’s surname in two for the company, because “Scharffenberger” was already a known name on wine labels.

Production began in a small factory in South San Francisco, using vintage German machinery; Wikipedia, citing the Los Angeles Times, says the first batch was made by 1997, with Venezuelan Criollo beans and whole Tahitian vanilla. In 2001, The New York Times reported, the company moved to a larger site in a historic factory complex in Berkeley, with a café and shop, and widened its range beyond bars.

The company roasted, conched, tempered and moulded its own chocolate from beans it bought from chosen growers — the approach now called bean-to-bar, which was rare among American companies in the 1990s. The Los Angeles Times credited Scharffen Berger with being the first American chocolate maker to put a bar’s cacao percentage prominently on the label, a practice that has since become common across the industry. The same newspaper reported that Julia Child had called it the best chocolate she had tasted in the United States.

Hershey, Robinson and Ashland.

On 25 July 2005 The Hershey Company announced that it would buy Scharffen Berger, and on 15 August it said the deal was complete, according to Hershey’s own press releases. Confectionery News reported at the time that the company had three shops, in New York, Berkeley and San Francisco, and that Hershey planned to use its distribution network to take the bars beyond the natural-food stores and online orders where they had mostly been sold. Food Business News later gave the price as a reported $50 million. Hershey combined Scharffen Berger with Joseph Schmidt Confections, a San Francisco truffle maker it bought the same year, in a subsidiary called Artisan Confections Company, which went on to add Dagoba, an organic chocolate maker in Ashland, Oregon, in 2006.

Under Hershey, production of Scharffen Berger moved to a factory in Robinson, Illinois. In early 2009 Hershey announced it would close both Bay Area plants, with about 150 jobs lost, and move the remaining work to Illinois, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in January 2009. Robert Steinberg had died in September 2008.

The brand also became caught up in a campaign over Hershey’s cocoa sourcing. In October 2012, according to a release from the campaign group Green America, Whole Foods Market said it would stop carrying the Scharffen Berger line; the same day, Hershey announced that it would source 100 percent certified cocoa for its global chocolate lines by 2020.

In 2020 Hershey divested Scharffen Berger, together with Dagoba and Krave, to concentrate on salty snacks and nutrition bars. Food Business News reported in June 2021 that the brand had returned to private ownership, that the brand and its manufacturing had moved to a new facility in Ashland, Oregon, and that it was led by chief executive Paul Cherrie, with John Scharffenberger as an adviser and former Hershey staff among the chocolate makers and engineers. Terms were not disclosed; Hershey told the US Securities and Exchange Commission that the proceeds were immaterial.

Chocolate and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell chocolate under their own names, and six of them are American: Scharffen Berger, Ghirardelli, TCHO, Recchiuti, Vosges Haut-Chocolat and Compartés come from the United States, and Hotel Chocolat comes from the United Kingdom. The phrase “chocolate maker” covers a wide range of businesses, from companies that buy cocoa beans, roast and grind them and make their own bars, to confectioners and chocolatiers who buy in finished chocolate and turn it into truffles, bonbons, boxes and gifts, and many firms do some of each.

That range matters for design. A brand built on the bar lives on the wrapper and the shelf; a brand built on the shop lives in its windows, its boxes and the experience of buying a gift. Ownership matters too, because premium chocolate names are often bought by larger food groups, and a famous label does not always tell a shopper who stands behind it today. The one British name here adds a further model: a high-street chocolatier with its own shops and cafés that also grows cocoa on its own estate.

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

A logo that leads with “Chocolate Maker.”

The independent company spent its first two years rebuilding. In October 2022 Food Business News reported that Scharffen Berger had finished a two-year brand overhaul, led by new packaging that placed the words “Chocolate Maker” at the forefront of the logo, a change the company said would set its range apart from competitors. The same report described baking chocolate repackaged as four individually wrapped one-ounce bars, replacing a 9.7-ounce bar, so that bakers could measure more precisely and waste less; four new flavours for its three-ounce bars; and a line of dark chocolate flats for cheese boards called Chocolate Provisions.

The brand changed hands again in 2024, when it was acquired by Harry & David, the Oregon gift-food company, according to The Wall Street Journal in November 2024; Harry & David is itself a subsidiary of 1-800-Flowers.com, Inc. In October 2026 the scharffenberger.com address redirected to a Scharffen Berger section of the Harry & David website, which calls it “the original farm-to-bar chocolate” and says it is “crafted in-house from the world’s finest cacao beans.” We give that as the company’s claim; we could not confirm from the sources we checked where the chocolate has been made since the 2024 sale, or from which countries its beans now come.

Scharffen Berger’s place in American chocolate is clearer than its recent paperwork. It was among the first of the bean-to-bar makers that later filled the Bay Area and beyond, and its idea of printing the cacao percentage on the front of the wrapper became an industry habit.

For a design guide, Scharffen Berger shows how a craft name can survive three owners by holding on to a few plain words: a maker’s title, a percentage and a founder’s name. Compare Dandelion Chocolate, a later San Francisco bean-to-bar maker, and Guittard, the Bay Area family maker. For this guide we use roast brown, cream and a brick red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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