* Photo: Todd Tankersley * When Louis Rossetto launched Wired 15 years ago, he rethought magazines (or so we like to tell ourselves). Today, he's rethinking chocolate. Rossetto and his business partner, Timothy Childs, have launched Tcho, a startup that aims to do for cacao beans what Starbucks did for those other beans. To them, chocolate isn't just a processed food; it's an agricultural product with its own terroir. It starts at the pod: The company plans to help farmers in Africa and Latin America apply more-scientific techniques to growing and fermenting. Tcho's San Francisco factory crafts beans into morsels labeled with the cacao varietal, origin, and a whole new lexicon that's not unlike wine-speak. Is your palate craving floral or earthy? Waiter, the chocolate list, please.
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