Spinnaker Chocolate in Seattle, WA.

Kelly Van Arsdale, Co-Owner

Origins

My brother, Chris, started making chocolate at home as a hobby. He had ideas for ways to identify and eliminate lesser-quality beans and make higher quality batches of chocolate.

At some point, he kind of roped me into it, because he needed help building machines. I’m kind of a DIYer to an unhealthy extent. A certain part of me just wants to do everything. It became a hobby that would never die. We started taking over more and more of his garage and filling it with equipment that chocolate makers didn’t need or want anymore. We started giving chocolate to people, and there was a noticeable switch from when people said, “Oh this is really good” to “we should really be paying for this.” That’s when we decided we wanted to make an actual business out of it. I was working at a tech company in San Francisco called Light. The company made computational imaging cameras, and I was managing the customer relationships.

I started helping Chris in 2018. In February of 2019, I quit my job to start working on it full-time, getting the garage space and doing a ton of R&D. We had been planning to sign a lease on a space in San Francisco, but in 2020, the pandemic exploded all of our life plans. My wife got let go from her job at Air B&B as part of their pandemic layoff. We found out she was pregnant, so we decided maybe we should pump the brakes, so the whole business paused.

My brother had already moved up to Seattle. We bought a house in August. My daughter was born in November, and then we shipped all of our chocolate equipment up to Seattle. Then I spent April through August doing all the build-out work for that space with a lot of elbow grease. In September, we started really fully making chocolate in that space, and then in early October, (2021) we opened the store. That was our first true day of being a business.

Company Mission

It boils down to our production process. Once we became a business, we changed from roasting whole cocoa beans to roasting just the nibs. The industrial chocolate world mostly roasts nibs because there’s less cocoa-butter migration into your shell. There’s a clarity to the flavor of the chocolate when you roast nibs versus beans. You can really taste the distinct individual flavors of the cacao. The rest of what we do is all relatively similar to other craft chocolate makers. But I think the way we do everything is really geared towards how every single step of our production process can maximize flavor. We do temperature tests, roasting tests. We monitor the temperature and humidity of our space, of the machinery. We test for moisture content before and after roasting.

Signature Products

The customer favorite is our 70% Belize bourbon bar. It’s very giftable. Everyone has an uncle who loves bourbon or something. After that, it would be our sea salt bars and our dark milk. I’m obsessed with salty things, so I really like our sea salt bars, but I also love the single-origin bars. It’s really fun to introduce somebody to single-origin chocolate. Everyone can sort of understand what the flavor might taste like, but if you read 70% Tanzania on a package, you don’t really understand what you’re buying. So you’re limiting your risk by buying something with sea salt or something with coffee. The inclusion bars almost always sell significantly better outside of our shop. In our shop where we have sample cups and tasting cups of every single flavor, it’s a little different story. Some of the darker percentages sell really well. We’ve got some 80%, 90%, 100%. My favorite bars are Madagascar with sea salt, just because Madagascar has this incredible fruity cherry flavor.

Equipment ‘Must-Haves’

We have utility knives all over our shop because we’re constantly cutting things open. From a chocolate-making standpoint, I’d say our tempering machine, and then our package-sealing machine because previously we would seal packages one by one, with a little heat sealer that you clamp down on top of the package. At some point, we switched to a continuous heat sealer, a little $200 machine that does a serious number of packages every day. It’s amazing how efficient and helpful that little machine is.

Production Tip

We spend a tremendous amount of our time focusing on efficiency. We time everything. We test constantly. The whole idea for growth is to scale our equipment without scaling people so that we can keep our team small and well trained. We have five full-time chocolate makers making about 18,000 bars a month. If you asked me four years ago what I thought was the hardest part of running a chocolate business would be, I don’t think I would have told you shipping, but it is absolutely the most difficult problem we deal with, just because chocolate melts when it’s shipped.

We use pretty standard corrugated boxes, but then inside the boxes we have a craft paper – sort of butcher paper – in a three-walled paper insulation. We use sustainable or recyclable packaging. For the shipments themselves, we take a little card that we scan and put into a box, and it does temperature tracking over the course of the shipment. Then the customer scans it again on the other side, so we can see both the internal temperature of the shipment and the ambient temperature. We are working with Keep It Cool, which integrates with ShipStation we use for shipping. Keep It Cool has an app that basically analyzes every shipment as it comes into our shipping system and makes the recommendations in the system for how much ice and insulation we need based on the product, the amount, the season, where it’s going. We ship on Mondays when we can, so shipments don’t sit in a warehouse over the weekend.

Secrets of Success

We print our own packaging, with this efficient giant printer that we lease. We know roughly the number of packages we think we’ll need for a batch, and then the team will go make the whole batch of chocolate and then they’ll come back and say, “hey, I need eight more packages.” We print those eight more and so we’ve got the exact number we need for every batch with no waste and no up-front planning every time.

It also gives us the ability to do custom packaging. Say someone comes in for a tour and then we find out it’s their birthday. We will print them a Happy Birthday, John package while they’re on the tour. Their minds are just blown.

Future Plans

We moved into our current space at the end of April last year, so we’ve been scaling up to the size of this space. The short-term goal is to get a little bigger in terms of bars made per month. The longer-term goal is to get into more wholesale shops around the country. We just started having our bars in 30 or 40 specialty stores in New York, so that’s really exciting for us. We started working with a broker here to try and expand specialty grocery-store coverage around our region.

There will be a natural inflection point where we will have to decide if we want to expand again or stay at that size for a long time. I wish I knew the answer to that question.

For more info, visit www.instagram.com/spinnakerchocolate

(This article appeared in the Summer 32 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)