Spinnaker Chocolate was started in a garage. Inspired by San Francisco's Dandelion Chocolate, which also got its start in a garage, brothers Chris and Kelly Van Arsdale began making chocolate, tinkering and testing and eventually building their own equipment.
Kelly joined members of The Chocolate Explorers Club on Zoom to share Spinnaker's story and lead us in a chocolate tasting of the Spinnaker bars featured in our member-only subscription box. He shared the brothers' journey from admirers of Dandelion Chocolate to makers of chocolate in their own right.
A Garage Full of Equipment
As Chris and Kelly went further down the rabbit hole of their new passion, they built new machines and collected old machines, using their technical skills to improve upon the chocolate-making process. A couple of years later, when the garage was full of equipment, the brothers decided they might want to do this for real. The timing was perfect. After working at several Silicon Valley startups, Kelly realized he wanted to work more with his hands.
They and their immediate families moved back to their hometown of Seattle and started Spinnaker Chocolate in 2021. Truly a family business where everyone plays a role, Kelly has taken on the role of CEO and is assisted by their sister Alyssa with social media, and Kelly’s wife, Julia, with branding, package design, and photography. Chris continues to advise and assist on the business while maintaining a full-time job in tech.
Chris, Kelly and Alyssa
Between them, Kelly and Chris have backgrounds in engineering, economics, physics, math, customer experience and product marketing – the perfect combination of skills for running a chocolate business. Using a scientific approach, they look for similar equipment and figure out how they can adapt it to improve their manufacturing process, modifying a cashew-shelling machine, for example, to filter out flat cacao beans.
Spinnaker’s nautical branding comes from a family love of water sports. Kelly’s and Chris’ mom is an avid sailor, and Chris was learning to sail at the time they began making chocolate. They donate 1% of Spinnaker's proceeds from every sale to cleaning up the ocean.
Spinnaker recently moved into a larger facility located on the cusp of Fremont and Wallingford in Seattle where you can see the entire chocolate making process. Stop by their café for a cup of drinking chocolate, a chocolate bonbon and a pastry. I recommend Bourbon drinking chocolate, Founder’s hot chocolate or Spicy Hot Chocolate. Sit, relax and watch the chocolate-making process unfold before you.
One Bad Bean
It turns out the skills that make a good engineer — curiosity, rigor, a willingness to build what doesn't exist yet — also make a good chocolate maker.
Cacao fermentation is one of the most important drivers of flavor in chocolate. Cacao that’s poorly fermented can result in unpleasant flavor notes or overwhelming astringency (tannins that dry your mouth - think walnut skins). It only takes one bad bean to ruin the flavor of an otherwise great batch of chocolate. Before beginning the chocolate-making process, it’s important to sort the beans to remove imperfect, unripe and poorly fermented cacao. Not all makers do this or do it well.
Hand sorting cacao beans is an incredibly expensive task with no guarantee that a human will catch bad beans. This is one of the areas where Kelly and Chris used their scientific approach to improve the process. They built their own equipment and created three ways to identify and discard poor quality cacao. This is the first step in a chocolate-maker’s ability to impact flavor.
The second step in impacting flavor is how the chocolate maker roasts cacao. Cacao beans vary in size and moisture content, which can result in uneven roasting. Spinnaker winnows their cacao into nibs before roasting, breaking up the beans into small pieces that are more uniform in size and surface area. They roast these nibs, which gives them more consistency from roast to roast and batch to batch. Every chocolate maker has their own approach to roasting to reflect their personal taste. Spinnaker has chosen a lighter roast profile for their chocolate.
Five Bars, Four Origins
This month's member subscription box features five single-origin bars from four origins, each chosen to showcase a different growing region and Spinnaker's approach to coaxing the best from each one.
Colombia 85%
Cacao is endemic to Colombia, and interesting native varieties can be found in the Tumaco region, which is located on the western coast. Farmer associations in Tumaco have been doing research with the University of Nariño to identify native cacao genetics found in the region. After years of study, they’ve narrowed down nine genetic varietals that they believe are the native cacaos of that region. Tumaco cacao offers a distinct and chocolate-forward profile. This chocolate has notes of maple, tart cherry and chocolate fudge.
Haiti 70%
Haiti has faced significant deforestation in recent decades, and the Haitian practice of growing cacao in biodiverse “Creole gardens” offers a critical opportunity to support reforestation and preservation. Cacao in Haiti is often inter-cropped with coconut, plantain, mango, palms, root crops, and a wide variety of other plants. This cacao comes from an organization called PISA that partners with farmers to give them pricing transparency and a consistent market. Haiti offers notes of brown sugar, tropical fruit and butter.
Puerto Rico 70%
As a result of tariffs and an increase in the amount of cacao planted in Puerto Rico, there is a recent influx of American craft chocolate makers working with cacao from Puerto Rico. The cacao for Spinnaker's chocolate comes from Hacienda Jean Marie, nestled in the heart of Western Puerto Rico. I taste notes of papaya, caramel and mandarin orange.
Madagascar 70% with Sea Salt
Ask almost anyone in the craft chocolate community what started their journey in craft chocolate and they’ll tell you it was when they tasted chocolate made with cacao from Madagascar. This is true for me and it’s true for Kelly. Madagascar’s tart cherry and raspberry notes are eye opening. They demonstrate how chocolate can taste fruity without bitterness. Kelly’s partiality to Madagascar and salty foods makes this his favorite bar. The flavor begins with a savory salt note followed by roasted chocolate flavors and bright cherry notes before ending with another hint of salt.
Colombia 58% Oat Milk
The fifth bar circles back to that same Colombia origin — this time with oat milk added to the recipe. Tasting this version of Colombia side by side with the 85% allows you to experience how additional sugar and “milk” impact flavor. The flavors remind me of shortbread, butterscotch and cream.
See It For Yourself
The full Spinnaker experience is on display at their Seattle cafe, where you can sip drinking chocolate, sample all of their bars and watch every step of their chocolate-making process. You'll see some of the homemade equipment in use, such as the winnower Kelly built to remove husks from roasted cacao beans.
If you'd like to taste what we're tasting and meet the makers behind the chocolate, The Chocolate Explorers Club is a specialty chocolate membership club delivering single-origin and small-batch bars curated each month by me, along with a live event with the featured maker — conversations like the one we had with Kelly. If you're ready to explore, we'd love to have you. Join us!
