When Ocho founder Denis Ring first started experimenting with chocolate candy bars a decade ago, he thought it would just be a small hobby business. He quickly realized that his candies had more upside potential than he expected.

In the early days, the former Whole Foods executive assembled a small team of food science majors from UC Davis to make everything by hand. He jokingly referred to the team as Oompa Loompas, a nod to Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

A year later, the company was making candy 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with a team of about 55 people, cranking out almost 12,000 bars a day.

Today, thanks to an automated and one-of-a-kind assembly line in a 25,000-square-foot West Oakland factory, Ocho can produce about 10,000 bars per hour. Here’s how they do it:

1. The Tempering

For most Ocho bars, the journey through the 110-foot custom-made European assembly line begins when liquid dark or milk chocolate is piped from 1,000-gallon vats into a tempering machine.

Rather than a classic — and more efficient — extruded candy bar that’s enrobed in a waterfall of chocolate, Ring realized early on that he wanted his bars to feature a tempered chocolate shell.

Tempering is a technique used in candy-making to stabilize melted chocolate by slowly raising and then lowering its temperature. It provides Ring’s candies with a smooth, lustrous sheen and satisfying snap when bitten, and also serves a canvas into which he can tuck his take on classic candy fillings.

Ocho isn’t a bean-to-bar factory, and Ring prefers not to spill the beans on the names of his suppliers. But he says that most of the company’s organic, fair trade chocolate comes from the Dominican Republic and Ecuador.

2. The Molding

From there, exact amounts of the tempered chocolate are poured into a hopper fitted with small nozzles at the bottom, which distributes the liquid into warmed polycarbonate molds. (Warming the molds prior to adding the chocolate promotes even distribution.) Chilled dies are then pushed into the molds to quickly set the hot shells in 11 seconds. This forms a pocket for fillings.

The piping equipment that feeds the chocolate into the molds is flushed with liquid cocoa butter in between candy batches, and it takes a team of three people several hours to pull apart and clean the automated assembly line.

3. The Filling

Because of allergen and cross-contamination concerns, the factory makes only one flavor of candy daily. (Full disclosure: I’m obsessed with Ocho’s chocolate peanut butter bars, so to see that production line whipping out thousands of peanut butter mini-bites during my visit, I truly felt like I was Charlie and had won the Golden Ticket.)

The production line may be high tech, but the fillings — peanut butter, coconut, caramel and the newest flavor, peanut butter and jelly — are still made by hand.

Ocho only rolls out about one new flavor each year, but Ring says his product development team is always playing around with new recipe and product ideas. “We look at what’s trending, we look at what’s achievable and we look at what’s delicious,” he says.

Coconut is the company’s biggest seller, which Ring chalks up to a nostalgia for Mounds and Almond Joy candy bars, as well as the current coconut as a health food craze. After trying a variety of organic coconut from the Philippines and Sri Lanka, they opted for Vietnamese coconut, which has “a beautiful, clear snow white color” and a textural consistency that works well with their machines.

Fillings are loaded into a custom-made depositor, which meticulously pipes the fillings into the chilled shells. The filled shells are then agitated to evenly distribute the filling and remove any air bubbles. As they continue down the line, the shells are topped off with a final dollop of chocolate to seal up the candies. Excess chocolate is gently scraped off and recycled so there’s minimal waste.

4. The Packaging

The candies pass through a cooling chamber to allow the chocolate to completely set. When set, they are released from their molds onto the conveyor belt, which then passes through a metal detector to catch any potential undesirable particles, as well as a final visual inspection by an Ocho employee. (For extra quality control, samples of finished bars from each batch are collected and stored for one year.)

From start to finish, the entire process takes about 1½ hours.

The approved candies are then packaged and boxed up, ready to be shipped all over the country to retailers like Whole Foods, Safeway, Target and Walgreens.

“Wherever there’s a Snickers, there should be an Ocho,” says Ring when asked about the company’s endgame. Yes, this is a business, but Ring also keeps perspective. “Everybody has bad days,” he says. “But when you go home at the end of the day you still smell like chocolate.”