You don’t need a golden ticket to enter Santa Barbara’s chocolate factory, nor will you encounter orange-skinned creatures, navigable rivers of chocolate, or gravity-defying beverages inside. But if you do walk through the doors of Twenty-Four Blackbirds Chocolate on East Haley Street, you’ll smell the warm aroma of roasting cocoa in the air and find delicious treats to plop in your mouth, curious machinery to entertain your eyes, and, like the fictional Willy Wonka, a mad scientist of sweets.
That’s owner Mike Orlando, a risk-taking entrepreneur and problem-solving inventor whose work is changing the world of craft chocolate. “We were one of the first to do it,” said Orlando of his entry into America’s craft chocolate movement in 2010. “We lucked into the timing of craft chocolate. Eight years later, there must be more than 200 bean-to-bar companies in the United States alone.”
When Twenty-Four Blackbirds began, only about 10 other American producers were making chocolate bars out of fermented cocoa beans that they sourced directly from cacao farmers in the tropics. This hands-on, single-origin, “bean-to-bar” process is much different than the industrialized, corporate-controlled chocolate industry, which has ruled the planet since the 1800s and treats cocoa as a gross commodity like wheat rather than a customized product like wine.