My dad and I were involved in the Boy Scouts growing up. The Boy Scout Motto has always been "Be prepared". The motto in engineering school was, "you don't have to know everything, just know where to find it when you need it". And at Microsoft, our motto was "have a Plan A, Plan B and Plan C, as things never go as planned". The single most challenging event I ever was a part of was the original XBOX launch, where we got to Plan "G" before it was all said and done.
As Kyya enters it's 4th year of operations, these words continue to ring true. We spent thousands of hours creating hundreds of batches of chocolate to learning every aspect of the bean-2-bar chocolate. A day doesn't go by that we don't learn something. And then late last year in the middle of holiday, we ran out of capacity, creating angst all around.
We know it's time to get ready, to be prepared, and fancy pictures on Instagram will not help. This is about investing in world class beans, the best equipment, leveraging our 10+ years of process experience and of course good people. So we are excited to announce we are adding 3 more conches (aka chocolate machines to our lineup), complimenting our 2 automated tempering/molding machines. For chocolate geeks, we're increasing capacity to 19,000 bars per month or 2+ metric tons of chocolate.
For a team of passionate chocolate people, this sight is just a dream come true.
For those who haven't been in the shop lately, we are also doing some remodeling. We are adding pieces to create our first molding line so that we can keep up with demand.
We have some more exciting news to share with you next week. We have been working on new chocolate origins (soon). We are excited that our single origin BonBons have picked up such a strong following (even our staff are eating them).
These are exciting times around Kyya, as we prepare for Holiday 2016.