Charles Siegel makes fine chocolates and decries food snobs.
The rarefied world of high-end artisan chocolate can be just a tad intimidating for the garden-variety, Hershey-imbibing chocoholic—what is raspberry Grenache anyway? However, fancy-pants chocolatier Chuck Siegel claims there is no place for snobbery when it comes to the appreciation of his fine confections. The creator of the Charles Chocolates line, Siegel comes by his everyman attitude toward chocolate naturally. An unpretentious Midwesterner, Siegel is entirely self-taught. He started his chocolate journey in college in the ’80s to impress his girlfriend and pay for ski trips, then went on to found the San Francisco–based gourmet chocolate company, Attivo Confections. Siegel sold his first company in 1994 to work for a dot-com company, but was lured back to the chocolate world after answering many calls to work as a confectionery consultant. He started Charles Chocolates (“Chuck’s Chocolates” didn’t sound right) four years ago. At his company, the fine art of handcrafting chocs is quite transparent—anyone can come in off the street for free to watch his staff hard at work from behind a plate glass window overlooking the production floor. Siegel and others also give regular “tours” from behind the glass complete with samples of his ode to the Rolo, the Turtle, and other treats. Recently, after enjoying this hospitality, I cornered Siegel to get a better handle on one of my chief cravings.
Paul Kilduff: We’re in a recession, right? But at the same time artisan chocolate sales are up—why is that?
Chuck Siegel: It’s true, but it’s deceptive, because like all businesses, and especially small businesses, we’re certainly affected by the bad economy. But there’s another trend working against that, and the reason artisanal chocolate sales are going up is because more people are switching from kind of commodity, grocery-store chocolate to higher-end chocolate.
PK: So it’s not just because they’re depressed and they need a better chocolate fix?
CS: No, I think in a case of depression, any port in a storm. There are days when a Snickers bar looks good. But really what we’re dealing with is an overall trend in our industry. And it’s no different than trends toward artisan breads, high-quality wines, olive oils, you name it—when someone has the opportunity to taste a really great example of a foodstuff, they tend not to want to go back and buy the bad stuff. And it doesn’t cost a lot more. It does cost more because like all artisans, what we do, we do by hand and it costs more to make so it’s a little more expensive. But the difference in taste and experience and everything else between our product and a grocery-store chocolate is enormous so people are willing to pay that little extra. That trend started five years ago and is really accelerating now, so the fact that we’ve just kind of been dumped into a recession affects it because it affects every business. But at the same time the recessionary factor is working against that pressure of more and more people wanting to eat higher-quality chocolate.
PK: So, it was going on before and it’s not like you’re spending that much more—it’s not like you’re buying a Jag instead of a used Corolla.
CS: Yeah, but we may sell someone a 10-piece box of chocolates instead of a 20-piece box because all of a sudden people are very aware of the money that they’re spending and what they’re spending it on. One of the other concepts is affordable luxury, that in a bad economy people are canceling their trip to Vietnam. They’re canceling the trip to Paris.
PK: So, stay at home with a box of Charles Chocolates—but maybe opt for the 20-piecer. Is that what you’re advocating?
CS: We advocate that anyway, but we don’t always get it. People want to treat themselves because they don’t get to do what they want to do, and they’re depressed about it and they want to treat themselves to something. Well, this is really an inexpensive indulgence.
PK: Can you OD on chocolate? Ever hear any stories like: “Hey man, I powered through a whole box in one sitting and ended up in the emergency room?”
CS: No, usually they’re saying it was willful. It’s not that they woke up with a stomachache or they had to go to the hospital. They just feel guilty that they plowed through 20 pieces of chocolate in a day.
PK: You seem like the antithesis of a food snob. Is that because you’re a solid Midwestern guy from Flint, Michigan?
CS: Well, I certainly don’t walk around with a lot of pretensions attached to me or associated with what I do or in anything in life. I just tend not to be that kind of person.
PK: Why the open kitchen?
CS: I want people to really appreciate and understand what we do and this seems to me to be the best way to get that across. The whole kind of anti-snob thing, well, I don’t like that in anything. I don’t like snobby restaurants. I don’t like snobby wineries. Where it’s about food it should be about good food. It shouldn’t be about pretensions and airs. I’ve been known not to go back to restaurants if I thought that they were too into themselves just because that’s not enjoyable for me. But the other part of it is that chocolate is a really unique food product. It’s probably the most universally loved food product in the world. And very few people walk away from a chocolate experience with a frown on their face. The effect it has on people is just fantastic and I don’t think that needs to be colored with a lot of the snob appeal that exists in our industry today. I think it should just exist for what it is, which is pure pleasure.
PK: Is it an aphrodisiac?
CS: So I’ve been told.
PK: Do you have a special product with those qualities?
CS: No, actually one of my favorite stories about that—I don’t know if you remember Sandra Boynton who had all of those gift cards with the hippopotami. She wrote a book: Chocolate, the Consuming Passion, a real tongue-in-cheek look at the world of chocolate. And she had a chapter on all of the myths and dispelled all of them. [She wrote,] so, chocolate’s bad for your skin and then here’s why the American Dermatology Association says it’s not. It’s bad for your teeth and here’s why the ADA says it’s not. And the very last one was chocolate’s an aphrodisiac. And underneath it said, “Well actually this one’s true.” There are chemical stimulants in chocolate and there have been studies done about the effects of chocolate on people’s emotions. And so there is something there. There are neuron triggers in chocolate that make you feel good. That’s why they say oftentimes that chocolate’s a replacement for love, and why all of these other kinds of urban myths and attitudes toward chocolate have come into being. And like so many things, there usually is a kernel of truth somewhere behind them.
PK: What about the antioxidants in chocolate—isn’t it more than broccoli? Do you tout that?
CS: When you read a lot of the health benefit studies about chocolate, it’s dark bittersweet chocolate alone. We’re adding sugar, cream, butter, nuts, fruits—by the time we’re done with it, it doesn’t really have any of those health benefits. And if it does, we’ve kind of supplemented them with so many things that aren’t good for you, that we really can’t make a health claim. The component of the cocoa bean is called chocolate liquor. So the cocoa bean has two things in it: chocolate liquor, which is like the essence of chocolate, and cocoa butter, which is the fat. And they’re about equal parts in a cocoa bean. Well, pretty much every benefit, everything good is in that 50 percent that’s the chocolate liquor. So, when you’re eating chocolate, you have to look at how it’s being diluted down. So, it’s automatically being diluted 50-50 with fat. Then you add sugar, so it becomes a smaller component. If it’s milk chocolate, you’re adding milk and you’re going to see an even smaller component. Then you take that and you turn it into a truffle. You’re adding more milk, more cream, more butter, you’re adding some fruit, whatever it is, so the percentage of the finished piece of chocolate that’s actually chocolate liquor is so small that again, you’d have to eat a lot of it to get the health benefit out of it. And you’d be ingesting other stuff like cream and butter that isn’t good for you.
PK: So much for my all-chocolate diet plan. This isn’t a health food.
CS: Nor have we ever tried to pass it off as a health food.
PK: Maybe it’s good for your emotional health. Your friend up the street John Scharffenberger sold out to Hershey a few years ago (and now they’re shutting down the Emeryville plant). Do you have a price? If somebody from Mars showed up with a stack of cash, would you bite?
CS: Well, everyone has a price. Just ask my wife. But I use John Scharffenberger’s line because he was talking about how people in Berkeley were really upset that he sold to Hershey. I mean, that’s “the man” in Berkeley parlance. And I guess one person in particular was really strident, and John stopped and said, “You have to look at it from my position. The phone rings one morning when I wake up, and someone at the other end of the line says, ‘I love what you’ve built. I think it could benefit the company that we have. How do you feel about your family being financially secure for generations to come?’ What are you going to say?”
PK: How’d you get my phone number, you corporate weasel?
CS: I started this by myself, put pretty much my entire net worth into it, work absolutely ridiculous hours, but I love it. I don’t complain because I’m doing what I love. If it ever came—and this is years down the road, we’re a tiny little company and I don’t even think they know who we are, let alone want to buy us—but if it ever got to that point, I’d certainly entertain it. Because not only looking at it from a personal perspective, from the perspective of what we’re building here, the opportunity to take that to so many more people and so many more markets—assuming that they maintain the integrity of the product—is to me just phenomenal.
PK: The dark chocolate revolution—any signs of it slowing down? I mean I can’t go into Rite Aid without seeing the Baby Ruth 78-percent dark cocoa bean bar.
CS: No. Actually, I think we’re about to embark on a milk chocolate revolution.
PK: You heard it here first.
CS: We’ve been living in the bittersweet-chocolate, dark-chocolate revolution for 10 years now. That’s really what’s become popular.
PK: Because of the perceived health benefits or taste?
CS: No, this is actually part of the snob thing. The snob appeal of “I only like bittersweet chocolate” and yet milk chocolate’s the top-selling chocolate.
PK: And, I read books.
CS: Yeah, exactly. And I go to Peet’s.
PK: Not Starbucks. Even though in the Bible it is written that Peet’s begat Starbucks.
CS: So, people love milk chocolate. It’s really, really popular. What’s happening is all of these manufacturers of really high-quality bittersweet are now making really high-quality milk chocolates. And I think that’s going to be the next trend we see because it tastes so good. That creaminess is already wonderful. But if you make it well, you use the really high-quality cocoa beans, and you pay attention to the manufacturing the same way you have with the good bittersweet chocolate . . . they’re out of this world.
PK: Are you crossing over to the milk side?
CS: We have several milk chocolates right now. I like all chocolates. My attitude is: if it’s good, it’s good. And we shouldn’t basically create this prejudice in our minds that if it’s not bittersweet, it can’t be good, because [that’s] really narrow-minded. It’s shutting people off to a whole world of wonderful experiences.
PK: Speaking of milk chocolate, have you ever had Toffee Crisp from England? Outstanding.
CS: I like Cadbury fruit and nut. I like Flakes.
PK: Why don’t we have American versions of those bars?
CS: I don’t know the answer because you’re right. In some countries, while bittersweet is popular it’s never been as popular as milk. Even at the very high end. If you go to Austria, or Switzerland, or England, milk chocolate rules. And they’ve got some really good examples of it. In France, it’s more dark chocolate and there are a lot of places where really high-quality milk chocolate has been kind of the gold standard for what good chocolate is. Now in America, it really wasn’t that long ago that pretty much all chocolate was milk. It’s only in the last 20-odd years that we’ve even started introducing bittersweet chocolate to the American palate. In 20 years it’s come a long way, but it’s a pretty new phenomenon. We’re going to see people liking bittersweet, but realizing that you can get an equally great experience from a milk chocolate as you can a bittersweet chocolate.
PK: You know how See’s Candies uses the reassuring visage of its founder Mary See as its logo? Have you thought about having a similar sort of icon for Charles Chocolates?
CS: I hope not because if it’s me we’re in deep doo-doo.
PK: For some reason I can’t see a big bust of you outside like Colonel Sanders with a little goatee, string tie, and a white suit.
CS: I don’t see that either.
PK: You go by Chuck, but your company is Charles Chocolates.
CS: Chuck’s Chocolates didn’t even sound good, let alone sound high end.
PK: Chuck’s Chocolates sounds like something you’re cooking up in the garage.
CS: Exactly.
PK: Charles Chocolates—I hate to say this, but it sounds almost elitist.
CS: It’s the name my parents gave me.
PK: But you don’t go by it.
CS: I don’t use it because in America people use their nicknames. My brother Richard has never been Richard. He’s always been Rich. My brother David is occasionally David at work, but he’s Dave. We don’t live in a society that tends to use people’s formal names all the time. We’re a society of nicknames. I wasn’t Charles because no one was Charles.
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Suggestions? E-mail Paul Kilduff at PKilduff@sbcglobal.net.
The Kilduff File Archive
Age: 46 | Birthplace: Flint, MI
Astrological sign: Cancer
Extinct species I’d like to be reincarnated as: Tyrannosaurus Rex. “I’ve never been the big guy.”
Planet you would emigrate to ?: Pluto. “It’s having a hard decade. I just thought I’d bring a little respect to it.”
