It’s official: TCHO is going vegan! The popular Berkeley, California-based chocolate company announced late last year that it would soon transition to making all of its chocolate animal-free. The transition is beginning this year and is expected to finish by 2023, a TCHO spokesperson told me in an email.
It’s a massive change for TCHO. The local company supplies tasty chocolate squares for consumers to buy from fancy places like Whole Foods Market, but they also supply chocolate for professional kitchens. Their professional chocolate line is expected to go vegan early in 2022. TCHO’s Consumer chocolate will follow soon after.
TCHO’s vegan shift didn’t mean just removing a few animal ingredients from its bars. Instead, it required a wholesale reworking of TCHO’s entire product line to both eliminate animal products and also to update packaging, reveal new flavors, and enhance TCHO’s work on sustainability and sourcing Fair Trade ingredients. The company was certified as a B Corp in 2021, which means that it’s officially set up to benefit people rather than only earning profits. Last year, TCHO also started buying exclusively Fair Trade cacao.
The vegan move, then, is part of a bigger trend within the company. TCHO is leaning into its emphasis on enhancing sustainability and helping communities, while ideally making tasty chocolate at the same time. As a preview of their cow-free future, TCHO sent me some of their new vegan chocolate bars to try out.
Trying TCHO’s Vegan Bars
When you hear “plant-based chocolate”, your first thought might be “why would they be animal products in chocolate in the first place?” It’s a fair point. Cacao is a plant, after all, so shouldn’t all chocolate be plant-based already?
It turns out that’s not always the case. Firstly, there’s milk chocolate, which TCHO has always excelled at creating. TCHO’s Dark Milk Chocolate is unique and beloved. Many chocolate bars also use other animal ingredients, like whey protein, which is derived from milk. Some chocolate concoctions work in other milk products, too. Ganache uses heavy cream, for example, and fudge often uses sweetened condensed milk. There are an awful lot of animal-derived ingredients lurking in many chocolate bars — including several of TCHO’s top-sellers. That’s why the change is such a big deal.
In the box I received from TCHO, there were six different vegan bars. Each of them featured simplified, bold, colorful, new packaging. Gone are TCHO’s naturalistic gradients and subtle colors. In are bold vibrant hues, a playful square format, sans serif fonts, and catchy names. One bar featuring local almonds is called “AWW Nuts!”, and a Peruvian chocolate bar with fruity notes is called “Born Fruity.”
Inside each box are nine chocolate pieces, wrapped in three tear-able (and apparently compostable) wrappers. The interiors of each box also feature lovely photography and information about the communities that grow TCHO’s cacao. All of the packaging is designed to be sustainable and recyclable. Again, that’s part of TCHO’s shift towards more sustainable practices overall.
At least two of TCHO’s new bars appear to be deliberate attempts to replace its dairy-based milk chocolate and toffee flavors. “Toffee Time” is a sweet chocolate bar made with cashew butter, coconut sugar, oat milk, and cacao. The bar features little pieces of vegan toffee. Like a dairy-based bar, it has a subtle, sweet chocolate flavor paired with deep caramel notes and a pleasant crunch from the embedded chocolate pieces. Especially with the cashew butter mixed in, I wouldn’t know that this one was dairy-free unless you told me.
TCHO’s “Choco Latte” takes a similar tack. This bar is a collaboration with Blue Bottle Coffee, a Bay Area staple, and features oat milk and roasted coffee beans. It kind of tastes like a cappuccino transmuted into a chocolate bar, so the name feels appropriate. Again, the dairy substitutes are convincing. It’s not quite TCHO’s Dark Milk bar, but it’s a nice homage to that cow-adjacent flavor, with a caffeine kick thrown in.
Other bars in TCHO’s vegan line don’t try to replace dairy ingredients. Rather, they lean into the company's new emphasis on single-origin chocolates from Fair Trade communities. “Holy Fudge” is made with organic Ghananian dark chocolate. “Born Fruity” is a bit more piquant and less sweet, highlighting deeper and more complex notes from its Peruvian single-origin dark chocolate. “Dark Duo” was one of my favorite bars, combining the shell from Holly Fudge with the center from Born Fruity. It’s a nicely balanced bar, complex, and yet a bit sweeter and easier to eat than the two bars from which it’s derived.
“AWW Nuts!” is tasty too, and features local almonds made into creamy butter and enhanced with Pacific sea salt. I don’t like big chunks of nut in my chocolate bars, and this feels more like eating a peanut butter cup than crunching on almond brittle. TCHO’s new flavors are tasty, and I love the bold and vibrant packaging. These are definitely made to stand out on store shelves in a market that has become pleasantly saturated with great chocolate options.
Still, going 100% vegan is a big risk for TCHO. It means self-canceling several of the company’s most popular flavors, and trying something wholly new at a time went the company likely invested a ton of capital into a new factory in Berkeley. Some customers are likely to be angry when they learn that TCHO’s popular milk-based flavors are on their way out. Chocolate hoarding is definitely a possibility.
TCHO acknowledges these risks but says that the move to producing vegan chocolate is essential to accomplishing the company’s broader mission. “Reducing our reliance on dairy is one of the quickest ways TCHO can lighten our impact on the environment. While this will not be an easy transition for us, we know it’s the right one,” said Josh Mohr, Vice President of Marketing at TCHO in materials sent to me. “From the beginning, TCHO has been committed to working with our farming partners in the field, improving farming techniques, bettering soil conditions and doing what we can to help minimize deforestation — all of which speaks to a plant-based model.”
The Move to Alt-Milk
The move also has the potential to open up a whole new category of chocolates, which TCHO has dubbed “alt-milk chocolate.” These bars (of which Choco Latte and Toffee Time are examples) seek to replicate the experience of eating milk chocolate, only without the dairy.
Convincing, less-cruel, and more sustainable vegan alternatives to animal-based products of all sorts are super in right now, so the timing feels good for TCHO. You need only look as far as Impossible Meats, or, well, oat milk in general in order to see why there’s a lot of potential in the “alt-milk chocolate” concept. If TCHO succeeds in creating a whole new category of milk-like yet milk-free chocolates, their vegan move could have broader implications for the whole chocolate market.
“Taking out dairy and focusing entirely on plants opened up a whole new world for us,” said Brad Kintzer, Chief Chocolate Maker for TCHO and President of the Fine Chocolate Industry Association, a trade group. “We’re proud of the unique flavor profiles we’ve created. Our alt-milk is an entirely new cacao experience.”
Look for TCHO’s new bars as they debut over the next year, and slowly replace the company’s remaining supply of animal-based bars. TCHO’s move feels very much in line with its Berkeley and Bay Area origins. Let’s hope the company's Dark Milk devotees aren’t too mad, and that TCHO’s new cow-free chocolate finds a receptive audience here by the Bay.
Thomas Smith is a Bay Area food and travel writer and photographer.
