The background to this one starts with the lead up to last Christmas, which was pretty insane for us. To keep up with orders we ended up working 28 out of the 31 days of December (one of those three days off was Christmas Day) which is obviously far from ideal.
So a big priority for the beginning of this year was to prioritise making production improvements over and above launching even more delicious things.
So we thought the nerdy among you might find our first little improvement kind of interesting, (the rest of you, not so much).
Late in 2025 we'd saved up enough to buy this machine, a new cacao bean winnower. It crushes roasted cacao beans to separate the nib (the good stuff) from the husk (the super dry, astringent shell).
Up until then we'd managed with a tiny table-top machine that we had to run for hours to just winnow 13kg (our minimum batch size), and so the hope was this was going to be a huge breakthrough.
But like every single chocolate machine we've bought so far, (whether brand new or second hand) it didn't quite work properly out of the box. The beans are supposed to be crushed as they are pushed through the little rods, but the vanes that push the beans through were so close to the rods that we had to run the machine about 25% of its maximum speed to stop it from jamming.
We tried a ton of different settings, and had many discussions with the supplier - all to no avail.
So at this point we do what we always do - take things apart. After dismantling the machine we dug out a ruler and pencil and drew out a new crusher design that we guessed would solve the problem.
A quick trip to a local fabricators in-between batches (loaded with a ton of bars and the faint whiff of desperation) led to our sketches coming to life. (The eagle eyed among you will notice the 3.5mm wider diameter of the circle joining the centre points of little rods).
The new crusher crushed it on its first attempt, leaving us very happy indeed. And the reason why you might care? It's already freeing up time to develop more delicious things. More on that soon . . .
