Guittard Chocolate Today, Guittard is the last of the group of original family-owned food
businesses that defined nineteenth century San Francisco. Guittard's newest
product line—E. Guittard—is named to honor Gary's great-grandfather, Etienne,
and reflects a return to the family's traditional French methods and original
formulas. E. Guittard meets a niche in a growing market—the artisan foods
market. After five years of testing several hundred small, handcrafted batches
of varietal cacao bean blends, Gary announced the first of the E. Guittard line
in May 2001, with additions to the line released in early 2002.
Gary foresees E. Guittard as taking on a major part of the artisan chocolate
market. As ever at the Guittard Chocolate Company, Gary notes that one of the
company’s strengths continues to be the demonstrated ability to remain flexible,
personal—“artisanal." He looks forward to the advent of more at-home chocolate
candy-making, to serving consumers with increased sophistication of awareness of
cacao history and bean varietals, to bringing more of the European interest in
artisan chocolate to America, and to what appears to be a still deeper love
affair with Theobroma cacao—the bean that first captivated Europe nearly five
hundred years ago. |