Being "elbow deep in chocolate" is all in a day's work at Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate in Eureka. "Sometimes we have the I Love Lucy thing where the chocolate bars are rolling off the conveyor belt and you gotta take care of them before the pile builds on the floor," says Adam Dick, who co-founded the company with his friend Dustin Taylor. The two carpenters had been playing in a band and building houses together when a friend sent them a video about making chocolate from scratch. The company now ships its products across the world.
In this episode of Talk Humboldt (initially aired in two parts), the chocolate makers take Keith and Tom through their factory for an overview of their process. They then sit down for a conversation about old-fashioned printing presses, why the melting point of chocolate matters so much, and if taste-testing jobs are available.
Adam Dick:
Well, we're going to head on around the back. We'll give you guys a rundown of how we make chocolate and what makes us unique. We’ll give you a walk through the facility to show you the machines and all the processes that happen to go from raw cocoa beans to finished bars of chocolate.
All right, follow me.
This is where all the early processing of cocoa beans will happen. So we buy cocoa beans that have been fermented and derived in the country of origin.Then we import them. And then the first steps in the process all happen here in this room. First step is roasting the continent. First step of anybody who makes a chocolate bar.
Tom Jackson:
Is chocolate always roasted?
Adam Dick:
Yeah, generally speaking, chocolate is always roasted. So we roast all the beans. Then, the next thing we have to do is crack the beans into smaller pieces to remove the shell. So, the cocoa beans have an inside part of the meat of the bean, which we call the nib. And what's neat about cocoa beans is that they're almost 50% cocoa butter.
So there's about half vegetable fat. And what you see right there cocoa butter. Cocoa butter is about 50% of the cocoa beans. And then what they do with the stuff that's left over, they grind what's left over into a powder called cocoa powder.
Keith Flamer:
Whoa!
But what's really cool about cocoa butter and I think most people don't get it, but this is like a really key thing: cocoa is the only vegetable fat that melts almost exactly at the human body temperature. So either we were made to eat chocolate or chocolate was made to be by us, depending on which side of the argument you fall on.
Keith Flamer:
Both of them work for me! [Laughter] So I'm okay with that.
Adam Dick:
We don't think about it that much, but if the melt point was slightly lower, you'd have something like coconut oil, so it’d be hard to have that feeling of picking up the chocolate bar and getting it to your mouth.
But if the melt point was slightly higher and even just a little bit, you put the chocolate in your mouth and you had two and two and two and two and you would never have that magic sensation of it melting.
Keith Flamer:
You were the only one I've ever heard describe it in chocolate as magic. And it's magic.
Adam Dick:
I mean, you know, you hold the chocolate bar in your hand as a solid, you put it in your mouth and it becomes a liquid, but it's not dissolving like sugar.
Sugar dissolves in your mouth. The cocoa butter and the chocolate melt.
So after this, now what we need to do is take these cocoa nibs and grind them finer and finer and finer so they resemble something like chocolate. So now we're going to go into our main production room, it’s loud in here. [Machine noises] Follow me.
First thing we have to do is, we have to take all those components that we saw in the other room and they are solid. And now we need to start grinding them and refining them into what seems like chocolate. So the first step here is in this machine called the hammer mill, and I'll let you guys to taste this.
So all this is is just brown cocoa nibs. We call it liquor. You'll notice the flavor unsweetened and also notice the texture. It's liquidy, but it's not real smooth. It's not sweet at all yet. No sugar in it. So we'll collect all this and we'll run it through another machine called the ball mill, which basically will take it from what you tasted there down to about 18 microns, which is half the thickness of a human hair.
So then what we'll do is be mixed sugar into it, add up certain ratios to hit our recipes. Once the sugar is addedm, itt's sweet for the first time, but now it's chunky again because the cane sugar is coarse. And so we have to refine the cane sugar. And we do that in this giant machine here called a roll refiner, which has these three big rollers that are pressed real tightly together.
And when you flow this mixture of liquor and sugar through there, you can really precisely grind the sugar down to about 18 microns as well. And it's at that point that everything's real nice and smooth. So this is our conch. This is the last step of the process. This is a 48 hour process and it just stirs and mixes and needs.
This is a whole batch that came out of the machine. But you'll notice it looks really splotchy. This looks like when you get the chocolate bar melting on your dashboard and then it cools down and you're like, oh, man, it's ruined. But it actually isn't ruined. And the reason why it looks like this is because the cocoa butter is polymorphic.
So at different temperatures, the cocoa butter crystallizes in completely unique and distinct forms. And so what we need to do to make this look like a chocolate bars re melt it and then run it through a tempering process so that it will have that nice sheen and the crisp snap. And we'll do that in that room across the hall.
Dustin Taylor:
So in here, like Adam was talking about, we've got that chocolate that's on temperance. We need to get into that nice snap machine that you're used to in a fine chocolate bar. So the way we tamper chocolate is very Frankenstein. There's we have an old donut depository that we modified normally that would spit out donuts, but we modified it.
So that spits out just a little blob of two ounces. Splat, splat, splat. Three chocolate bars come out on here. And now it's kind of a rush against the clock. The chocolate is starting to harden as it cools. So if I wait too long, it's going to kind of harden for this by hand.
Keith Flamer:
You do all this by hand?
Dustin Taylor:
I think we're one of the few that still do things by hand.
[Refrigeration sounds] You know, it's just cold in here. We'll load this rack up with chocolate bars and then in that last room, we had them will go into flow wrapping and we start hand wrapping.
Keith Flamer:
So what's that stuff on the back? That's tempered chocolate that's broken up. That's getting ready to be melted.
Keith Flamer:
Oh, I see.
Dustin Taylor:
This is what it looks like before we melt and then start the tempering process.
Keith Flamer:
And you probably don't even smell the things that we can smell.
Dustin Taylor:
Yeah, Yeah, the smell. Which I guess is a blessing. If we worked at the fish plant, we would want to look up, not smell stuff. But yeah, you go out and people say, Oh, your clothes, you smell of chocolate and you don't smell it as much.
Keith Flamer:
Okay, I got it. This is wonderful.
Dustin Taylor:
So then after those chocolate bars are tempered and molded and put in their space in that machine you guys saw in the other room is our flow wrapper, which seals the bars into little airtight, sealed pouches.
But then from there, we stuff the bars down into the envelopes, and these are printed just right up the street from another Humboldt alum, Lynn Jones, with Just MyType letterpress.
And then she hand-letter presses everyone, one at a time, on a press from 1936. “Pop, pop, pop.” Put on some good techno music and you can do 20 an hour in that thing.
So when we first started making chocolate, we're like, Well, if we're going to do it, we want to look good. We want to be able to compete on the larger level, even though our big aspirations were just the local Co-op, we didn't think we'd ever sell out there.
This was all going to be a hobby. We were going to Farmer's Market and that was it. And so it's really expensive to have letterpress done. So we bought an old print shop, drove down there at four in the morning, brought all the print equipment back, learned how to print, start printing ourselves in my parent's garage, and that's how we started printing. And still, our print equipment is now over at Lynn's.
Then we finish out our bars, 16 cases of 12, and then packed up sealed up in the big boxes of 20 cases and then shipped all over the world from there. And we can talk more about that later.
[SEGMENT BREAK]
Keith Flamer:
This is a dream come true. I tell you, I walked in the front door and I was in heaven. It smelled so good!
Tom Jackson:
Right now we are in the Dick Taylor Chocolate Factory with Adam Dick and Dustin Taylor. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Dustin Taylor:
Oh, thanks for having us. Pleasure.
Tom Jackson:
Can you talk a little bit about how the name and how you got into chocolates?
Adam Dick:
The business is made up of the owners who are myself, Adam Dick, and Dustin Taylor. We started this together, but it is really a family thing. We've got grandparents and uncles, sisters-in-law that work here. So I think is also really nice to have people around you that are really supportive and really into the vision.
Tom Jackson:
What makes Dick Taylor Chocolate different?
Adam Dick:
We're a bean-to-bar chocolate manufacturer, so we buy cocoa beans from around the world and all under one roof. Make them into finished chocolate bars confections. But what's different is what I think people think of as chocolate is what we would consider a chocolatier. That’s somebody that buys already-produced chocolate and then make truffles, confections, and flavored bars.
So essentially, they're re-melting the chocolate and making it into another form. There are a lot of people that have an incredible amount of creativity and talent that are in that sphere. They just don't buy cocoa beans and make it into chocolate.
Tom Jackson:
Where's the furthest that you send your chocolates in the world?
Dustin Taylor:
South Africa, New Zealand. We're in Europe, Japan. South Korea. There's a coffee shop in Berlin, Germany that buys our bulk chocolate to put in all their mochas. And they were voted the number- two coffee shop in the world. They also have now a shop in Dubai. Really exciting to see how proud locals are when they're traveling the world.
They’d say ‘Hey, I saw a Dick Taylor chocolate bar at this little shop in the middle of nowhere, and I saw this in France.’ And then they'll send us pictures and stuff. So it makes us very proud to be part of the community and have this product that is, you know, all over the world.
Tom Jackson:
When we were touring with you earlier, you were talking about the importance of roasting the bean and how you roasted it in a way that manipulated the bean and the flavor in so many words, farmers who produce the bean, what do they do to manipulate that? Or is it just their origin and where they happen to be?
Adam Dick:
That's really a great question. The farmers have a ton of impact on what they do. The first thing they do, obviously, is have great genetics. They then have to grow them really well. They have to have the right terroir, which we talk about. And when wine grapes, the fermentation, and the drying those two aspects that the farmers do at the origin are absolutely critical to our finished chocolate bar.
So we can buy really poor-quality cocoa beans and you'll never make those into a great chocolate bar. You can take great cocoa beans and ruin them. We've done that plenty, but you really do have to have a really great raw ingredient to make a great finished chocolate bar.
The farmers are legends. They're really, really good at what they do. And you know, it's different than what we do, but we rely on them heavily.
Keith Flamer:
The first time I saw you both, you were in a band. How did you get to where you are as a team?
Dustin Taylor:
We both met when it was just, you know, we're kabali, but actually we were both Recreation Administration majors, and so that was our actress thing. Who wants to major in fun? I'm the one we at a song and everybody go, Yeah, so how Adam was a couple of years ahead of me, but then we both graduated with that major.
We both come from carpentry backgrounds, Adam’s dad's a contractor and my dad was the county carpenter forever. And we were on that trajectory of, you know, carpentry and the skill of becoming craftsmen in that field. Adam comes from Kansas, and he’d go back there and go this big, the Winfield Bluegrass Festival, and come back with this bluegrass excitement.
And he was just learning the mandolin and banjo. And, you know, I could hack a G-C-D on the guitar and [Adam] came back, “hey, we should start a little string band and play”. And that was 20 years ago. And we still play with that band. That's taken us all over the place. We played the wedding circuit for a while up and down the West Coast, you know.
Keith Flamer:
Is that right?
We were doing music and doing carpentry and really having a great time. But then you're like a lot of people in Humboldt, you end up working under the table, we didn’t have retirement. We don't have health care, we don't you know, we weren't adults. We were just playing the game. And so but all of a sudden, Adam was married and had a kid, and we started thinking more along those lines, like, what are we gonna do? Are we going to become contractors?
And so right around that time, a good friend of ours knows that, you know, we like to know how things are made. And so he saw this great video on these chocolate makers in Brooklyn, and we were on our way to go play a wedding in Santa Barbara. So we had a long time to drive and watch this video over and over and over again.
It’s like, ‘this is crazy, looks really easy in the video…’.
Adam Dick:
Little did we know. And it's like much of the same way that you like homebrew beer - you know? We were like, could we homebrew a chocolate bar? Let's give it a shot.
Keith Flamer:
That's how that started.
Adam Dick:
Yeah. So we started experimenting with this thing that was, you know, a quasi-hobby, making terrible chocolate in my laundry room. And then next thing you know, you've got a lot of chocolate and you can only eat it so fast. So you're giving it to your friends and whatever. And then one of your friends, sure enough, is like, ”you should sell this stuff”.
And we're like, “Yeah….we should sell this stuff…” [laughs].
Dustin Taylor:
That's a terrible idea.
Adam Dick:
But that was the beginning of it all.
Tom Jackson:
We're here in Eureka, California, at the Dick Taylor Chocolate Factory, sitting with Adam Dick and Dustin Taylor. I'm just wondering, where's the job for tasting chocolate?
Adam Dick:
Just apply, man!
Dustin Taylor:
I think we could pay $25 a month.
Adam Dick:
$25 a month… [laughter] But you're going to have to be really analytical. Really give us the flavor notes and things like that. But yeah, we've got a job for you.
Tom Jackson:
Well, seriously, though, what are the jobs that go into this factory?
Adam Dick:
I think total, we have about 22 or 25 employees, somewhere in there. It's a lot of evaluating and interacting with the chocolate that we're making and trying to decide whether or not, is it is it done enough? I like to think of the people that work here as skilled craftspeople.
We've never hired anybody that had chocolate making experience or just aren't that many of them. You know, somebody that that really likes to tinker, somebody that likes to really be hands on and is not afraid to have chocolate up to their elbows is, you know, the people that really seem to to thrive here are people that are meticulous.
Keith Flamer:
There are jobs for us!
Tom Jackson:
I think so, yeah.
Adam Dick:
So, yeah, I mean, we have we have lots of jobs, you know, Sometimes we have the I Love Lucy thing where the chocolate bars are rolling off the conveyor belt and you got to take care of them before the pile builds on the floor. So we have those kind of things.
Tom Jackson:
So for those who don't know the I Love Lucy reference, that's you're just going to have to watch Youtube.
Adam Dick:
That’s dating me a little bit.
Tom Jackson:
When did you know this was going to take off?
Dustin Taylor:
We'll let you know when we figure that out.
Tom Jackson:
Adam Dick, Dustin Taylor, thank you very much.
Adam Dick:
Oh, thank you for the time. Appreciate it!
Keith Flamer:
I had so much fun.
Adam Dick:
Chocolate does that. That's what's great about chocolate.
Adam Dick:
Well, we're going to head on around the back. We'll give you guys a rundown of how we make chocolate and what makes us unique. We’ll give you a walk through the facility to show you the machines and all the processes that happen to go from raw cocoa beans to finished bars of chocolate.
All right, follow me.
This is where all the early processing of cocoa beans will happen. So we buy cocoa beans that have been fermented and derived in the country of origin.Then we import them. And then the first steps in the process all happen here in this room. First step is roasting the continent. First step of anybody who makes a chocolate bar.
Tom Jackson:
Is chocolate always roasted?
Adam Dick:
Yeah, generally speaking, chocolate is always roasted. So we roast all the beans. Then the next thing we have to do is crack the beans into smaller pieces to remove the shell. So the cocoa beans have a inside part of the meat of the bean, which we call the nib. And what's neat about cocoa beans is that they're almost 50% cocoa butter.
So there's about half vegetable fat. And what you see right there, cocoa butter. Cocoa butter is about 50% of the cocoa beans. And then what they do with the stuff that's left over, they grind what's left over into a powder called cocoa powder.
Keith Flamer:
Whoa!
But what's really cool about cocoa butter and I think most people don't get it, but this is like a really key thing: cocoa is the only vegetable fat that melts almost exactly at the human body temperature. So either we were made to eat chocolate or chocolate was made to be by us, depending on which side of the argument you fall on.
Keith Flamer:
Both of them work for me! [Laughter] So I'm okay with that.
Adam Dick:
We don't think about it that much, but if the melt point was slightly lower, you'd have something like coconut oil, so it’d be hard to have that feeling of picking up the chocolate bar and getting it to your mouth.
But if the melt point was slightly higher and even just a little bit, you put the chocolate in your mouth and you had two and two and two and two and you would never have that magic sensation of it melting.
Keith Flamer:
You were the only one I've ever heard describe it in chocolate as magic. And it's magic.
Adam Dick:
I mean, you know, you hold the chocolate bar in your hand as a solid, you put it in your mouth and it becomes a liquid, but it's not dissolving like sugar.
Sugar dissolves in your mouth. The cocoa butter and the chocolate melt.
So after this, now what we need to do is take these cocoa nibs and grind them finer and finer and finer so they resemble something like chocolate. So now we're going to go into our main production room, it’s kind of loud in here. [Machine noises] Follow me.
First thing we have to do is, we have to take all those components that we saw in the other room and they are solid. And now we need to start grinding them and refining them into what seems like chocolate. So the first step here is in this machine called the hammer mill, and I'll let you guys to taste this.
So all this is is just brown cocoa nibs. We call it liquor. You'll notice the flavor unsweetened and also notice the texture. It's liquidy, but it's not real smooth. It's not sweet at all yet. No sugar in it. So we'll collect all this and we'll run it through another machine called the ball mill, which basically will take it from what you tasted there down to about 18 microns, which is half the thickness of a human hair.
So then what we'll do is be mixed sugar into it, add up certain ratios to hit our recipes. Once the sugar is addedm, itt's sweet for the first time, but now it's chunky again because the cane sugar is coarse. And so we have to refine the cane sugar. And we do that in this giant machine here called a roll refiner, which has these three big rollers that are pressed real tightly together.
And when you flow this mixture of liquor and sugar through there, you can really precisely grind the sugar down to about 18 microns as well. And it's at that point that everything's real nice and smooth. So this is our conch. This is the last step of the process. This is a 48 hour process and it just stirs and mixes and needs.
This is a whole batch that came out of the machine. But you'll notice it looks really splotchy. This looks like when you get the chocolate bar melting on your dashboard and then it cools down and you're like, oh, man, it's ruined. But it actually isn't ruined. And the reason why it looks like this is because the cocoa butter is polymorphic.
So at different temperatures, the cocoa butter crystallizes in completely unique and distinct forms. And so what we need to do to make this look like a chocolate bars re melt it and then run it through a tempering process so that it will have that nice sheen and the crisp snap. And we'll do that in that room across the hall.
Dustin Taylor:
So in here, like Adam was talking about, we've got that chocolate that's on temperance. We need to get into that nice snap machine that you're used to in a fine chocolate bar. So the way we tamper chocolate is very Frankenstein. There's we have an old donut depository that we modified normally that would spit out donuts, but we modified it.
So that spits out just a little blob of two ounces. Splat, splat, splat. Three chocolate bars come out on here. And now it's kind of a rush against the clock. The chocolate is starting to harden as it cools. So if I wait too long, it's going to kind of harden for this by hand.
Keith Flamer:
You do all this by hand?
Dustin Taylor:
I think we're one of the few that still do things by hand.
[Refrigeration sounds] You know, it's just cold in here. We'll load this rack up with chocolate bars and then in that last room, we had them will go into flow wrapping and we start hand wrapping.
Keith Flamer:
So what's that stuff on the back? That's tempered chocolate that's broken up. That's getting ready to be melted.
Keith Flamer:
Oh, I see.
Dustin Taylor:
This is what it looks like before we melt and then start the tempering process.
Keith Flamer:
And you probably don't even smell the things that we can smell.
Dustin Taylor:
Yeah, Yeah, the smell. Which I guess is a blessing. If we worked at the fish plant, we would want to look up, not smell stuff. But yeah, you go out and people say, Oh, your clothes, you smell of chocolate and you don't smell it as much.
Keith Flamer:
Okay, I got it. This is wonderful.
Dustin Taylor:
So then after those chocolate bars are tempered and molded and put in their space in that machine you guys saw in the other room is our flow wrapper, which seals the bars into little airtight, sealed pouches.
But then from there, we stuff the bars down into the envelopes, and these are printed just right up the street from another Humboldt alum, Lynn Jones, with Just MyType letterpress.
And then she hand-letter presses every one, one at a time, on a press from 1936. “Pop, pop, pop.” Put on some good techno music and you can do 20 an hour in that thing.
So when we first started making chocolate, we're like, Well, if we're going to do it, we want to look good. We want to be able to compete on the larger level, even though our big aspirations were just the local Co-op, we didn't think we'd ever sell out there.
This was all just going to be a hobby. We were going to Farmer's Market and that was it. And so it's really expensive to have letterpress done. So we buy an old print shop, drove down there at four in the morning, brought all the print equipment back, learned how to print, start printing ourselves in my parent's garage, and that's how we started printing. And still, our print equipment now is over at Lynn's.
Then we finish out our bars, 16 cases of 12, and then packed up sealed up in the big boxes of 20 cases and then shipped all over the world from there. And we can talk more about that later.
[SEGMENT BREAK]
Keith Flamer:
This is a dream come true. I tell you, I walked in the front door and I was in heaven. It smelled so good!
Tom Jackson:
Right now we are in the Dick Taylor Chocolate Factory with Adam Dick and Dustin Taylor. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Dustin Taylor:
Oh, thanks for having us. Pleasure.
Tom Jackson:
Can you talk a little bit about the name and how you got into chocolates?
Adam Dick:
The business is made up of the owners who are myself, Adam Dick, and Dustin Taylor. We started this together, but it is really a family thing. We've got grandparents and uncles, sisters-in-law that work here. So I think is also really nice to have people around you that are really supportive and really into the vision.
Tom Jackson:
What makes Dick Taylor Chocolate different?
Adam Dick:
We're a bean-to-bar chocolate manufacturer, so we buy cocoa beans from around the world and all under one roof. Make them into finished chocolate bars confections. But what's different is what I think people think of as chocolate is what we would consider a chocolatier. That’s somebody that buys already-produced chocolate and then they make truffles, confections, and flavored bars.
So essentially, they're the re-melting the chocolate and making it into another form. There are a lot of people that have an incredible amount of creativity and talent that are in that sphere. They just don't buy cocoa beans and make it into chocolate.
Tom Jackson:
Where's the furthest that you send your chocolates in the world?
Dustin Taylor:
South Africa, New Zealand. We're in Europe, Japan. South Korea. There's a coffee shop in Berlin, Germany that buys our bulk chocolate to put in all their mochas. And they were voted the number- two coffee shop in the world. They also have now a shop in Dubai. Really exciting to see how proud locals are when they're traveling the world.
They’d say ‘Hey, I saw a Dick Taylor chocolate bar at this little shop in the middle of nowhere, and I saw this in France.’ And then they'll send us pictures and stuff. So it makes us very proud to be part of the community and have this product that is, you know, all over the world.
Tom Jackson:
When we were touring with you earlier, you were talking about the importance of roasting the bean and how you roasted it in a way that manipulated the bean and the flavor in so many words, farmers who produce the bean, what do they do to manipulate that? Or is it just their origin and where they happen to be?
Adam Dick:
That's really a great question. The farmers have a ton of impact on what they do. The first thing they do, obviously, is have great genetics. They then have to grow them really well. They have to have the right terroir, which we talk about. And when wine grapes, the fermentation, and the drying, those two aspects that the farmers do at origin are absolutely critical to our finished chocolate bar.
So we can buy really poor-quality cocoa beans and you'll never make those into a great chocolate bar. You can take great cocoa beans and ruin them. We've done that plenty, but you really do have to have a really great raw ingredient to make a great finished chocolate bar.
The farmers are legends. They're really, really good at what they do. And you know, it's different than what we do, but we rely on them heavily.
Keith Flamer:
The first time I saw you both, you were in a band. How did you get to where you are as a team?
Dustin Taylor:
We both met when it was just, you know, we're kabali, but actually we were both Recreation Administration majors, and so that was our actress thing. Who wants to major in fun? I'm the one we at a song and everybody go, Yeah, so how Adam was a couple of years ahead of me, but then we both graduated with that major.
We both come from carpentry backgrounds, Adam’s dad's a contractor and my dad was the county carpenter forever. And we were on that trajectory of, you know, carpentry and the skill of becoming craftsmen in that field. Adam comes from Kansas, and he’d go back there and go this big, the Winfield Bluegrass Festival, and come back with this bluegrass excitement.
And he was just learning the mandolin and banjo. And, you know, I could hack a G-C-D on the guitar and [Adam] came back, “hey, we should start a little string band and play”. And that was 20 years ago. And we still play with that band. That's taken us all over the place. We played the wedding circuit for a while up and down the West Coast, you know.
Keith Flamer:
Is that right?
We were doing music and doing carpentry and really having a great time. But then you're like a lot of people in Humboldt, you end up working under the table, we didn’t have retirement. We don't have health care, we don't you know, we weren't adults. We were just playing the game. And so but all of a sudden, Adam was married and had a kid, and we started thinking more along those lines, like, what are we gonna do? Are we going to become contractors?
And so right around that time, a good friend of ours knows that, you know, we like to know how things are made. And so he saw this great video on these chocolate makers in Brooklyn, and we were on our way to go play a wedding in Santa Barbara. So we had a long time to drive and watch this video over and over and over again.
It’s like, ‘this is crazy, looks really easy in the video…’.
Adam Dick:
Little did we know. And it's like much of the same way that you like homebrew beer - you know? We were like, could we homebrew a chocolate bar? Let's give it a shot.
Keith Flamer:
That's how that started.
Adam Dick:
Yeah. So we started experimenting with this thing that was, you know, a quasi-hobby, making terrible chocolate in my laundry room. And then next thing you know, you've got a lot of chocolate and you can only eat it so fast. So you're giving it to your friends and whatever. And then one of your friends, sure enough, is like,”you should sell this stuff”.
And we're like, “Yeah….we should sell this stuff…” [laughs].
Dustin Taylor:
That's a terrible idea.
Adam Dick:
But that was the beginning of it all.
Tom Jackson:
We're here in Eureka, California, at the Dick Taylor Chocolate Factory, sitting with Adam Dick and Dustin Taylor. I'm just wondering, where's the job for tasting chocolate?
Adam Dick:
Just apply, man!
Dustin Taylor:
I think we could pay $25 a month.
Adam Dick:
$25 a month… [laughter] But you're going to have to be really analytical. Really give us the flavor notes and things like that. But yeah, we've got a job for you.
Tom Jackson:
Well, seriously, though, what are the jobs that go into this factory?
Adam Dick:
I think total, we have about 22 or 25 employees, somewhere in there. It's a lot of evaluating and interacting with the chocolate that we're making and trying to decide whether or not, is it is it done enough? I like to think of the people that work here as skilled craftspeople.
We've never hired anybody that had chocolate making experience or just aren't that many of them. You know, somebody that that really likes to tinker, somebody that likes to really be hands on and is not afraid to have chocolate up to their elbows is, you know, the people that really seem to to thrive here are people that are meticulous.
Keith Flamer:
There are jobs for us!
Tom Jackson:
I think so, yeah.
Adam Dick:
So, yeah, I mean, we have lots of jobs, you know, Sometimes we have the I Love Lucy thing where the chocolate bars are rolling off the conveyor belt and you got to take care of them before the pile builds on the floor. So we have those kind of things.
Tom Jackson:
So for those who don't know the I Love Lucy reference, that's you're just going to have to watch YouTube.
Adam Dick:
That’s dating me a little bit.
Tom Jackson:
When did you know this was going to take off?
Dustin Taylor:
We'll let you know when we figure that out.
Tom Jackson:
Adam Dick, Dustin Taylor, thank you very much.
Adam Dick:
Oh, thank you for the time. Appreciate it!
Keith Flamer:
I had so much fun.
Adam Dick:
Chocolate does that. That's what's great about chocolate.
