Mark Lieuw never could have predicted he\u2019d be spending his days turning sugar and cacao into edible works of art. Back in 2012, he was preparing to take the medical school admission test after studying biology, math, and chemistry in college. Then his mother suggested he give pastry school a try.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was just something I did as a kid,\u201d Lieuw says. \u201cI would bake, I would make cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e. But it was never something I considered as a career.\u201d<\/p>\n
As is often the case, his mom was right: Liew enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu and immediately fell in love with the process of pastry-making. After graduating, he gained a foothold in the world of fine dining, landing jobs at Eleven Madison Park in New York City and Atelier Crenn and Saison in San Francisco. Now, he\u2019s striking out on his own with a chocolate pop-up, Stay Sweet (opens in new tab)<\/a>, which regularly sells out of photo-worthy confections infused with flavors like shiitake mushroom caramel and Japanese brown rice.\u00a0<\/p>\n Indeed, San Francisco is already a pretty crowded marketplace for chocolate. But for Shekoh Moossavi, who moved her 6-year-old company Shekoh Confections (opens in new tab)<\/a>, from Palo Alto to San Francisco in February, the chocolate scene has room for new points of view. \u201cThe way you make chocolate has everything to do with the person who makes it,\u201d she says. \u201cWe bring our personalities, our interests, into our chocolate. It makes it the same but different.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Moossavi, similar to Lieuw, started off in the world of science, working in glaucoma research. But she found herself craving change, and at her sister\u2019s recommendation, decided to go to culinary school.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI loved the creative side of it, that there were no boundaries,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n If Dandelion and Tcho are dedicated to the flavor nuances of cacao, not unlike a winemaker\u2019s approach to grape varietals, then this current wave of chocolatiers is all about showcasing the individual maker\u2019s personality.\u00a0<\/p>\n Moossavi, who was born in Iran and worked as a chef at the Ritz-Carlton, ran multiple restaurants in the South Bay before completing a program at the Ecole de Grand Chocolat Valrhona (opens in new tab)<\/a> in France. Now she imbues her not-too-sweet sweets with Persian flavors like sour orange and rose, and sources those ingredients from growers in Humboldt and Sonoma.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Lieuw, who officially launched Stay Sweet out of his parents\u2019 garage in late 2024, similarly features farmers market-sourced ingredients and nods to his Cantonese heritage. He cites Sunday dim sum feasts with his family, followed by lengthy cooking sessions with his grandmother, as core to his identity as a chef. \u201cI want this to be such an authentically Bay Area, San Francisco product that it can\u2019t be replicated anywhere else,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n Part and parcel with the San Francisco-ness of these businesses are the challenges of, well, running a business in San Francisco, including high startup costs and notoriously byzantine permitting processes. Add to this a steep increase in the price of cocoa (opens in new tab)<\/a>, which peaked in late 2024 due to weather and pest issues in West Africa, and you have a difficult set of conditions for a chocolate entrepreneur. \u201cI chose to start a chocolate business when chocolate pricing is the highest it\u2019s ever been!\u201d Lieuw says, laughing.<\/p>\n But being in San Francisco also comes with benefits, including a sophisticated consumer base with an openness to higher-priced, premium products \u2014 and a real interest in food. Todd Masonis, the CEO of Dandelion Chocolate, recalls how quickly his company\u2019s customers went from relative novices to well-versed in the language of chocolate.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOur first year, people would come into our Valencia Street cafe for a hot chocolate and would be asking all kinds of questions. By year two, they were bringing their friends in and answering the questions for them,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dandelion, which now has two pop-up locations (one on Union Street and one in Union Square) in addition to the original Valencia Street location, a Ferry Building shop, and a production facility in the Mission, is proof that there will always be a demand for chocolate. When forced to shut down its stores in 2020 due to the pandemic, the company pivoted to online sales and hugely expanded its national business; now, the bulk of sales are online, a direct reversal of the cafe-dependent model from 2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n