TCHO, a small company based in a warehouse in San Francisco, sounds like a typical high-tech start-up. The brainchild of an engineer who previously worked on computer-vision systems for the space shuttle, the firm is developing “beta” versions of its new product. Volunteer testers are invited to submit feedback via the web. Louis Rossetto, the co-founder of Wired, a technology magazine, is on board as chief executive. All the employees have stock options. But Tcho is not about to launch a new website or mobile device; it is a technology firm that makes chocolate.

Its founders believe there is vast scope for innovation in the way chocolate is made and sold. Most cocoa farmers have never tasted chocolate, and produce cocoa beans without any idea of how they will be used, says Timothy Childs, Tcho's founder. The resulting chocolate is classified and sold in a very unsophisticated way, labelled at best by country of origin and percentage cocoa solids. (It is rather like labelling a wine “France, 13% alcohol”.) So Mr Childs wants to put things on a more technical footing—just as Americans formalised techniques for winemaking in the 1970s. He has developed ways to analyse and grade beans, and a six-segment “flavour wheel” to map out their natural aromas. Using a variety of jury-rigged spice grinders, heaters and temperature sensors, he has worked out how to get cocoa beans to reveal their complex flavours and to get chocolate to solidify evenly.

Tcho is also working with cocoa growers, in conjunction with two research groups it has equipped with satellite-internet connections, to help them improve the quality and consistency of their beans. Tcho hopes that the most effective techniques will then spread in an “open source” fashion to other growers. Beans will be turned into chocolate on Tcho's elaborate production line, which is being used as a test-bed for remote video-monitoring of industrial processes by researchers at Fuji Xerox in Palo Alto.

The firm will sell much of its chocolate to other food companies, for use in other products. Such customers, says Mr Rossetto, like the idea of buying chocolate based on a consistent flavour profile; Tcho's flavour wheel could become a de facto industry standard, he suggests, as IBM's PC did in the computer industry. Tcho will also sell chocolate using its website, and through a shop and visitors' centre due to open in the summer.

San Francisco, a capital of food culture as well as technology, is the logical place to produce a high-tech chocolate. John Kehoe, Tcho's sourcing director, says chocolate is going down the trail blazed by speciality coffee, as consumers become more discerning. Chocolate today, he says, is where coffee was five years ago. Having been ahead of the curve with Wired, which launched just as the web was emerging, Mr Rossetto seems to have spotted another trend.