I haven’t had my dinner, but it’s got to be dessert time somewhere.

It is only 10:30 a.m., and I am at Theo Chocolate company, nibbling away while following employee, or “theonista,” Kate Kraay as she moves from display to display, crumbling chocolate bars into samples.

Theo Chocolate was founded three years ago and is an organic and certified Fair Trade chocolate factory. The company calls Seattle — more specifically, Fremont — home, though it distributes to all 50 states through stores such as the Puget Consumer Cooperative and Whole Foods, as well as small neighborhood chocolate shops, said retail store manager Audrey Lawrence.

The Theo Chocolate store, housed only a floor away from its factory, sells chocolate and offers samples of its products. Kraay’s favorite chocolate is the Madagascar origin bar, which is made with cocoa sourced completely from that island. Because of the minerals in the soil, she said, people get hints of dark fruits such as black cherry.

“Let the cocoa butter rise up to your body temperature,” she advised.

I sat a piece on my tongue, resisting the urge to crunch, and simply let it melt. This lets the flavors emerge completely and is like sniffing and swishing wine across your tongue while tasting. The chocolate was dark and rich, with undertones of raspberry.

Theo Chocolate also gives tours through its factory, which is housed in a 100-year-old brick building at 3400 Phinney Ave. N. The building used to be a brewery, and before that, it was a barn for Seattle trolley cars.

Now it houses pallets of cocoa beans from countries such as Ghana and Venezuela, as well as a laboratory, roasting room and confectionery kitchen.

I toured the factory with a group of 24 students from Japan who attend the Northwest School, a private middle and high school in Seattle. After first learning about the history of chocolate, we slipped hairnets on and entered the 80-degree roasting room. We walked carefully around the gargantuan machines, keeping our feet between the yellow lines for safety reasons, and learned about the various equipment necessary to process the beans into bars and other confections.

For chocolate that in many cases has few ingredients, a lot of work and machinery goes into it.

First, there’s the labor of the farmers, who cut the cocoa pods off the tree’s trunk with a machete, then break them open and allow the fruit to rot away. The seed dries and dies on the inside, earning the classification of “bean.”

“It’s dead on the inside, but it sure does taste good,” said theonista Abby Culin, who led the tour.

Eighty to 100 beans go into just one of Theo’s bars.

“Every step of the process is very labor-intensive,” she said.

Theo’s Fair Trade certification means that regulators visit each source country to make sure there is no slave or child labor being used.

“We are really trying to give them a sustainable wage to live on,” Culin said.

Besides being laborious, the process is also slightly disgusting for such a delicious food item. However, chocolate wouldn’t be chocolate if it weren’t allowed to rot. In fact, the fermentation process, sometimes lasting for 10 days, gives chocolate its chocolate flavor.

While touring, we tasted cocoa nibs, chips of cocoa bean that are not sweetened in any way, and soon enough, a garbage pail was passed among the sour faces.

We passed from the roasting room, filled with the smells of the bitter chemicals released from the beans, into the confectionery kitchen, which gave me a sugar high just upon entering. There we tasted ginger, mint and lemon chocolates that didn’t pass the perfection inspection, while batches of caramel and ganache waited to go into new sweets. Waste chocolate is formed into sculptures, like the various Buddha heads that sat on the cooling conveyor, and bars that are sent to food banks. When each batch is finished, the pipes of the machines are cleaned with chocolate before a different batch is made because, as Culin said, “Chocolate and water don’t mix.”

After the tour was finished, Andy McShea, Theo’s chief operating officer and a biochemist, led me to their laboratory, or, as a sign on the door announced, their “super-secret laboratory.” It could have been a chemistry lab at the UW with its cream-colored machines and a white coat draped over a chair, except for the splatters of chocolate on a table and the test tubes and bottles of chocolate arranged on the counters.

A machine that resembled a washer or dryer was actually a centrifuge used to separate chocolate into parts for analysis. Another machine is used for DNA analysis.

McShea opened a cabinet and lifted out various test tubes, each containing one of a cocoa bean’s chemical compounds, such as acetophenone, nonanal and heptanal.

“What makes good chocolate doesn’t involve tubes,” McShea said.

The journey toward making chocolate production more natural, fair and healthy is getting better, McShea said, though Theo Chocolate is just a drop in the ocean of chocolate companies. However small a drop the company is, the theonistas seem to be having fun.

After munching on more chocolate, this time an orange chocolate bar produced just the day before, tour guide Culin said with a laugh, “It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.”

Reach managing editor Erinn Unger at

features@dailyuw.com.