Not at all, apparently.

California’s Bay Area has been making chocolate for 160 years, since Ghirardelli was founded in 1849 as the second-oldest chocolate company in the U.S.* And we think that the Bay Area tradition is stronger than ever. Here’s an incomplete list of local chocolate makers, confectioners and other devotees to this “food of the gods“. It’s sorted roughly by year of founding (click to see larger image):

NOTE: logos aren’t linked to their sites… use Google!

*Baker’s Chocolate started in 1780 in Massachusetts is the oldest. It’s now owned by Kraft Foods.

We haven’t posted in a couple months because we’ve been busy building our marketplace. Please check it out at foodoro.com!

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Someone mentioned that our blog needed more eye candy. So, here are some photos we took at an event in San Francisco recently.

The average supermarket carries about 45,000 different items according to the Food Marketing Institute. That’s nearly 1 different item for every square foot of space. You may wonder how people decide what to buy during a trip to the grocery.

Actually, it’s carefully orchestrated marketing that largely affects what consumers “decide” to buy. Some of the most important marketing tools include:

• End Caps: Display spaces at the end of aisles
• Features & Displays: Signs featuring promotional pricing, new items, etc.
• Shelf Space: Eye-level space generates higher sales than those stuck at the top or bottom
• Front End: Impulse-inducing items like candy and magazines are placed near checkout
• Promotions: These include coupons, flyers, newspaper inserts and other promotional tools
• Brand Marketing: Think Coca-Cola’s cute polar bears

Larger consumer food companies employ small armies of sharp MBAs and ad agencies to push and pull these various marketing levers in order to get you to buy their products.

We think that marketing, at its essence, should always work to make people feel good about the products and services they buy. There is value in many of the traditional marketing tools—those Coca-Cola polar bears really are adorable—but huge budgets are needed to fuel this kind of marketing. This leaves the producer of the small-batch, hand-crafted cola struggling to get noticed among the 44,999 other products (if they even get distribution at the supermarket).

Yet, some of our favorite food discoveries came when we heard from a friend about a cheese from a small Wisconsin farm we just “have to try” or read an article about a chocolate maker who goes to the ends of the earth to find the absolute best cacao beans for her chocolate bars.

One of our goals at Foodoro is to build marketing “tools” that help folks discover the lesser-known gems.

Foodoro went on a field trip to taste some of the best American foods under one roof: Slow Food Nation’s Taste Pavilion. What’s Slow Food? As its name suggests, Slow Food is a movement to combat fast food based on principles of location, sustainability, etc. Here’s the Wikipedia article for more details.

The San Francisco event generated a ton of local press in recent weeks, some positive, some negative. We’re not here to judge but two things about the event that jumped out at us were:

The food tasted very very very good. Every shining example of chocolate, salumi, wine, tuna, pickled plums, ice cream and other food we tasted had a story behind it that really made us appreciate the passion that went into creating it. Did we mention how tasty it all was?

The event was exclusive. Slow Food Nation did have events scattered throughout the city, several which were cost-free, but tickets to the Taste Pavilion cost $45 to $65 (we saw ticket prices exceed $200 on Craigslist). The Friday showing we attended was “invitation only.” In addition, the entire event was curated and only certain producers passing particular criteria were able to showcase their food.

Much of the criticism around Slow Food Nation targets its exclusivity, but we understand that they have to draw a line somewhere. For Foodoro, our hope is that the community of food producers and consumers will help guide us in drawing our own boundaries.

Enjoy some photos from our field trip.

E-commerce customer service has come a long way. What used to be transactions with unknown agents has evolved to something much more friendly and approachable. Perhaps no company exemplifies this better than Zappos.com, which anoints itself a “customer service company that happens to sell shoes.” Stories abound how even the CEO, Tony Hsieh, responds personally to emails; we reached out to him and ended up having a brief but personal chat over email.

However, Zappos seems to be the exception. We’ve had three online experiences in the last 24 hours that illustrate the broad spectrum of online customer service:

• Big Box Office Supply: We bought a printer under rebate and they gave us the classic runaround: “We can’t help you. You need to call someone else.”
• Event Tickets: We bought tickets to attend a high-demand event directly from the organizers. The ones running the event oversold tickets and claimed not to have received our order. Maybe an honest glitch but they said “too bad.”
• Gift Certificate: We bought a gift certificate that never got delivered. They said “sorry, our fault,” called us immediately and increased the original value by a fair amount for free.

One out of three isn’t bad but we think it should be much higher. Foodoro plans to do what it can to raise the average. We understand nobody is perfect, but admitting mistakes and making up for them goes a long way to making customers happy.