When I
first learned at the end of June of the
imminent closure of the factory at Theo Chocolates in Fremont, I knew immediately that I would want to take their factory tour one last time, before it was no longer possible to take them at all.
I emailed Alexia pretty close to immediately, thinking she might be interested in this tour, especially if she has never done it—I emailed two date proposals, actually: the Theo Chocolates Factory Tour, which would have to be done by the end of August when they are to stop for good, with my own weekend availability already being only either August 19 or August 26; and a tour with the Seattle Architecture Foundation happening on Saturday September 2. I sent her that email only one day after I learned about Theo Chocolates: the email went out July 1.
Alexia responded that day, saying "Let's do both!" Not only that, but she offered to pay for both, as a thank you for all the time I've spent looking after Cassie, her cat (actually I still had a ten-day stretch yet to do in July).
We fairly quickly settled on August 19 for the Theo Chocolates Factory Tour. She had it booked by July 5, which was good planning, because as you might expect, all the remaining factory tours filled up quickly.
So, the tour happened yesterday. It made the
seventh time I have taken the tour, since first discovering it in 2007. (My collection includes eight photo albums because it also includes when Shobhit took his mom, without me, during her 2008 visit.) I went four times in 2007 alone, I was so delighted by it—back when the tour cost only five bucks ($7.37 in 2023 dollars)—that I knew I had something new to take my nieces to on their next visits.
Hey, let's go through the whole history!
1.
Saturday, March 31, 2007 (with
Shobhit, Barbarand Angela), $5
2.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007 (with
Auntie Rose for my Birth Week), $5
3.
Saturday, June 30, 2007 (with
Shobhit nd Becca), $5
4.
Saturday, August 11, 2007 (with
Shobhit and Nikki), $5
5.
Sunday, August 19, 2012 (with
Tristen), $6
6.
Saturday, November 3, 2018 (with
Danielle and Elise), $10
7. Saturday, August 19, 2023 (with Alexia), $16
. . . From $5 to $16 in sixteen years: that's a 320% increase? Had those prices just stayed in line with inflation, it would just cost $7.37 today. But, that's supply and demand for you, I guess.
Yesterday's tour was very similar to the one in 2018, just with some newer, updated designs in wall graphics and a bit more sophistication in presentation. I still miss how the tours had been in 2007 and even as recent as 2012, when we weren't just corralled into a sealed-separate room surrounded by the factory, and we could
put on hair nets and walk
right around the factory equipment. (There was a new change even by the 2012 tour though: at least one point of it had the tour guide talking to us from
the other side of a pane of glass.)
It's interesting reading on my old blog now what had
changed between 2007 and 2012:
The tour now starts at the back entrance closer to the canal, rather than in the retail store as it used to. This makes sense as it allows for a lot more space for people to gather in while waiting for the tour to begin. They said the tour lasts about an hour; it started at 11:00 a.m. but we actually didn't walk outside the building until 12:20. Then again, we did spend some time in the retail store -- where, naturally, the tour ends -- and partook in plenty of the sampling available. When I did the tours in 2007, they had large plates full of "scraps" (perfectly good chocolate that just didn't make the cut for packaging due to missing corners or cracks or other similar types of imperfections) at the end of the actual tour. Now they put those in small bins among all the bars for sale out in the retail store. In a way this was better, as actually there were more flavors available to sample. I actually took more bites than Tristen did; I can still remember when I took Becca in 2007 -- she was 11 then -- she really went whole hog with the sampling.
They offer 10% off confections at the retail store if you've taken the tour, so I decided to get Tristen and me each one. I took a cherry one that wasn't quite as good as I'd hoped; the lemon confection I got to sample during the tour was far better. Tristen, with all those amazing options, opted for a marshmallow. And they were offering a 2-for-1 sale on those, so he actually got two. He probably figured I'd make him wait until after lunch to eat those, but I decided we'd eat them as soon as we left the building.
And then what had changed
between 2012 and 2018:
I think Danielle and Elise enjoyed the tour fine, but having the more elaborate tours of the past to compare to, I must say I was mildly disappointed: the tour now goes through all of three rooms, only one of them literally in the factory area; we used to get to put on hair nets and walk amongst the machinery, and evidently they don't do that anymore. That struck me as slightly backward given that the tour cost was $5 in 2007, then $6 in 2012 -- and is now $10, for less accessibility to the actual factory. That definitively lowers the value, but I guess it's still worth doing every once in a while. They still offer a whole lot of chocolate samples, and it's basically just as educational about the farming and production of cocoa into chocolate as it's ever been. This visit yielded another 20 photos.
Well, my
full photo album from yesterday—my first such album dedicated
only to the factory tour since the very first one in 2007 (that one having 32 shots)—yielded a good 31 shots. Okay, just 29 of them were actually at Theo Chocolates.
Neither the tour itself nor the sampling were quite as extensive as they were in years past, but I still found it well worth doing, especially when it was our last chance. The retail store—which in the early days was basically just
a reception area—seems to get filled with more stuff every time I go in there. I was last in the store there just this past June, when Gina and her friend Jennifer joined me to view the Fremont Solstice Parade and Festival.
Alexia definitely enjoyed it. Pretty much everyone does when it's their first time, and every single time I've done this tour, I've gone with someone doing it for the first time, without the same past ones to compare it to that I've had. You still learn plenty about the chocolate and where it comes from and how it's both harvested and manufactured, regardless of what different ways it might be conveyed over the years.
After that first burst of four tours in 2007, I started to get a little tired of them—I was like, I can wait a few years to do that again. So, I waited 5 years before taking my nephew, Tristen. It was six years after that when I returned again with Danielle and Elise. And yesterday's tour was five years again after that.
One thing that was actually definitively
better than in years past was that, as opposed to the 10% off confections deal offered to tour goers in 2012, yesterday we were told we could scan a QR code that was on the window in the room surrounded by the factory floor, and that would give us 20% off our
entire purchase in the retail store. They also had several bars already on sale in there, so I bought about six bars and a good half of them were 50% off, before I even used the 20% off digital coupon. I got six bars or about $15. That's an average of $2.50 per bar, when most bars are at least a dollar more than that, and often more (the 3oz bars currently retail at PCC for $4.19).
When I got home again, Shobhit and I actually agreed that it was good that he didn't come on this tour. Every time he does, he spends way too much at the retail store. He once spent in excess of seventy dollars. I only spent fifteen!
Getting back to that secluded room surrounded by the factory floor we could only see through glass, I do wonder if there has been any change in laws and regulations over the years that might have necessitated that separate room. Our tour guide this time told us that the machines have sensors for any kind of foreign object, and someone once accidentally dropped a pen into one, which made everything stop and sound a blaring alarm. Apparently even certain pens are absolutely not allowed on the factory floor (Sharpie, for instance) because the chance for contamination is too high. This includes glass: the tour guide wore glasses, and he said he would not be allowed to go into the factory floor with them on. If any kind of glass gets broken, such tiny bits of glass can fly all over the place, they'd have to remove all the equipment and decontaminate it before any further manufacturing could be done.
Something tells me this was not so dire a concern back in 2007. Honestly, perhaps it could have been. But Theo has grown as a company, which I presume shifted it into stricter safety parameters.
The tour lasted one hour, and I was impressed by how well the guy stayed on schedule. We were out in the retail store, which of course as always they filter everyone into at the end of all tours, at 2:00 on the dot. Alexia and I spent a little more time browsing shops within a two-block radius of Theo Chocolates, which we had also done for a while before the tour, getting to Fremont a bit early, Alexia driving us in her car.
Oh, I almost forgot about Gerald, the adorable Theo Chocolate mascot, which plenty of people assume at first is an anthropomorphized chunk of melted chocolate—we were informed by our tour guide he's actually a sasquatch. He also said Gerald has been their mascot for "several years," but I had no recollection of seeing him before. I certainly had no photos of him before yesterday. I actually cannot find any Google results referencing him prior to 2020, so it seems pretty clear he hadn't popped up on the scene yet back in 2018. (Our tour guide's presentation was a bit imperfect at times: when discussing cacao grown in Hawaii, more than once he referred to "the island of Honolulu," even though Honolulu is on the island of Oahu.)
I also had a movie watch with Alexia last night, returning to our "Harrison Ford-athon" for the first time since June 9, when we skipped ahead in his filmography to watch
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I could sort of say it's actually been since July 7, when we took a slight detour in the Harrison Ford-athon to watch
The Hunt for Red October, even though Harrison Ford wasn't in it—but he
did play Jack Ryan in
Patriot Games, which was the movie we watched last night, which was the character played by Alec Baldwin in
The Hunt for Red October. I thought
Patriot Games was all right, although I did enjoy the climactic sequence with the attackers in his house with the power cut off. They were clearly taking a page from the
Silence of the Lambs script and giving it more action.
We postponed the movie watch a couple of times, first planning it for Friday night but then Alexia had another obligation. So, we were going to watch yesterday afternoon after getting back from the Theo Chocolates factory tour, but then Shobhit asked me to attend a steering committee meeting put on with the hopes of reinstating a Capitol Hill Community Council, at Local Bigger Burger on Broadway from 4-5 pm, so we pushed the movie to between 5:30 and 6. Shobhit had to work so he asked me to go in his stead; two other primary District 3 City Council candidates came: Joy Hollingsworth and Bobby Goodwin. They both recognized me and said hi to me. Joy brought her brother, and there was also a young lady I would have loved to talk more with from the Cal Anderson Park Alliance. Aside from that, it was the two people from the Capitol Hill Pride Festival who I had not realized were the ones spearheading this. Once it was 5:20 and the old guy from CHPF brought up
the debacle (my word, absolutely not his) they created with "Taking B(l)ack Pride" in 2021, I was out. I needed to go back and make myself a quick dinner before also popping some microwave popcorn and taking it for the movie with Alexia.
Alexia made and shared nachos in the middle of the movie. I definitely ate too much yesterday. I'm not blaming her, though. I take full responsibility!
[posted 6:19 pm]
