Engineering Chocolate Chips

People have enjoyed chocolate chip cookies since 1937, when Ruth Graves Wakefield chopped up a Nestlé chocolate bar and baked it into cookies. She served her creation at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. Two years later, Nestlé Toll House morsels hit store shelves with Wakefield’s cookie recipe printed on the bag.

For more than 80 years, the shape of chocolate chips has basically remained the same—until now. Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco, California, teamed up with engineer Remy Labesque to redesign the chocolate chip.

A classic chip’s shape is the result of how it’s made: A drop of molten chocolate is put on a flat surface and left to cool. But this shape melts unevenly in the oven. The Dandelion team wanted to make their chip as flat as possible to ensure an even melt. It’s only ¹/₄  inch high at its tallest point!

“Remy designed a mold for the chip shape,” says Jennifer Roy, of Dandelion Chocolate. But that meant that the company also had to design a machine to fill the mold. That step took a couple of years!

Since Dandelion makes only small batches of chocolate, the chips’ flavor varies depending on the cocoa beans they’re using. Each cocoa-growing region’s bean has a different flavor. “Because the chocolate has such distinct flavors, the bakers are loving it!” says Roy.