A Space Shuttle coder and a chocolate veteran.

TCHO began in San Francisco in 2005. English Wikipedia names its co-founders as Timothy Childs, a technology entrepreneur who had developed vision systems for NASA’s Space Shuttle programme, and Karl Bittong, a veteran of more than 40 years in the chocolate industry. The trade site Confectionery News, reporting the company’s sale in 2018, said it was established in July 2005; Wikipedia gives December 2005.

A 2010 feature by David Baker in the UK edition of Wired tells the story slightly differently. It says TCHO “was set up in 2005 by Childs and Louis Rossetto,” the founding editor of Wired, and that Childs, Rossetto and Bittong moved into an old warehouse on Pier 17, on San Francisco’s Embarcadero. English Wikipedia describes Rossetto as TCHO’s first investor, putting money in during 2006, and as its chief executive from 2007 to 2014, so we name all three.

The Wired article explains how a software engineer ended up in chocolate. Childs had worked in real-time 3D graphics and on visualisation software for the Space Shuttle at Cape Canaveral; in 2005 he visited Interpack, the processing and packaging fair in Düsseldorf, and was struck by the size of the industry. The factory equipment, the magazine said, came from a disused chocolate plant that Bittong found in East Germany — 1970s tanks, moulding lines and coolers from makers including Nagema and the Scottish firm MacIntyre — refitted for the pier. English Wikipedia says the pier was built in 1912 and was historically used for trade that included cacao beans.

TCHO treated its first chocolate like software. By December 2007, Wired reported, it was selling “beta-version” bars with names such as “Beta C Ghana 0.21” through its website and asking buyers for feedback. The first batch of 4,000 sold out, and after 12 months and 1,026 iterations the company launched its first “v1.0” bar, TCHO Chocolatey, at the end of 2008. Small-scale production of bars, drinking chocolate and catering packs began at the start of 2009, the magazine said.

Flavour words, not percentages.

The naming was deliberate. Rather than lead with cocoa percentages, which Childs called “meaningless” in the Wired interview, TCHO built a flavour wheel of plain words — chocolatey, nutty, fruity and citrus, with floral and earthy — and named its early dark bars after them. The magazine also reported that every pack carried the words “No slavery,” part of Rossetto’s campaign against forced and child labour in cacao growing.

The design came from Berlin. Erik Spiekermann, the German typographer, wrote on his blog in January 2010 that he had been involved with TCHO “as a designer and an investor” for several years, and that Susanna Dulkinys, his wife and business partner, “has won several prizes for her work on the TCHO brand and packaging.” A year later he wrote: “We have been designing for Tcho since before the company even had a name.” English Wikipedia lists particular packaging awards from 2009, but without citations, so we leave them out here.

Behind the bars sits the sourcing programme TCHO calls TCHO Source. Wired described a data network linking the San Francisco lab with growers in Peru, Ecuador, Ghana and Madagascar, including weather monitors and temperature probes placed in fermenting beans in northern Peru. Rossetto’s Wikipedia entry describes the programme as passing technology and expertise to partner growers in Peru, Ecuador and Ghana.

The company’s own account, on its website in October 2026, centres on its “Flavor Labs,” which it describes as mini bean-to-bar labs at origin where farmers can make chocolate from the beans they grow and train in tasting. TCHO says that when it began sourcing only about 20 percent of beans met its standards and that the figure is now about 80 percent, and that it pays a quality premium on top of the fair-trade and organic premiums it already pays. Those are the company’s figures; we have not seen them independently audited.

Chocolate and its makers.

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.

From Pier 17 to Berkeley, and to Japan.

In April 2014 TCHO left Pier 17 and moved its offices and factory to West Berkeley, English Wikipedia says. Four years later it changed hands. In February 2018 the Japanese confectioner Ezaki Glico, maker of Pocky, agreed to buy TCHO Ventures, The Mercury News and Confectionery News reported. Confectionery News said the seller was Emil Capital Partners, a venture firm backed by Germany’s Tengelmann Group, that the price was not disclosed, and that TCHO then had about 37 employees, with production in Berkeley. Glico said it aimed “to enhance its chocolate business” by entering the premium category.

Under Glico, TCHO changed its recipe base. In December 2021 it announced that it would stop using dairy, and in September 2022 VegNews reported that the last dairy production at its Berkeley factory had taken place that August, ahead of an end-2023 target, with oat milk used in its milk-style bars. The company describes itself as a certified B Corp and its chocolate as organic and Fair Trade certified. Its website in October 2026 quotes Brad Kintzer as its chief chocolate maker.

For a design guide, TCHO shows how a chocolate brand can borrow the language of software — beta versions, version numbers and plain flavour words in place of percentages. Compare Scharffen Berger, another Bay Area chocolate name later bought by a larger confectioner, and Dandelion Chocolate, a San Francisco bean-to-bar maker. For this guide we use a cacao brown, a bright orange and an off-white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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