Think chocolate can't get any better? These Willy Wonkas beg to differ

Meet the new Willy Wonka: Timothy Childs is a former space shuttle technologist who's building a 29,000-square-foot chocolate factory on prime waterfront property in the Embarcadero. He stands in the factory's laboratory inspecting a sample of split-open cocoa beans, pointing out the ones that have been properly fermented and talking intensely about the hedonics of chocolate -- as in the hedonistic sensation of eating it, how it melts in the mouth, when it starts to break apart and the way in which flavors and sugars are released. "We're freaks about it," says Childs, chief chocolate officer (his official title) of Tcho.

By Betty Hallock

July 16, 2008