Scharffenberger's biggest nonfamily backer in the chocolate company was a venture capitalist, Jim Kohlberg, who was a casual friend and fellow foodie. "I knew there wasn't an artisanal high-end chocolate in this country," Kohlberg told me. "I thought the timing was right. Organic food was beginning to burst, and high-end food was making good headway against mass-market food." Impressed by Scharffenberger's business instincts and marketing flair, Kohlberg in 2001 helped provide the money to buy out Wais. Later, as the company grew, Kohlberg helped Scharffenberger bring in a chief operating officer. "That's when the culture changed," Nancy Arum, who was the national sales director, told me. Things became more businesslike. Willy Wonka fans will recognize the trajectory, from the golden dawn of the Wonka Bars to the workaday ethos of the Oompa-Loompas.
Once the company was operating in a more businesslike way, the next step was preordained. In January 2005, about seven and a half years after the making of the first batch of Scharffen Berger chocolate, a representative of Hershey, the enormous mass-market American chocolate company, expressed an interest in the small artisanal manufacturer. Scharffenberger says he wasn't keen on selling: Revenue was $10 million and growing rapidly. But Hershey kept raising its offer, reaching a sale price near $50 million when the deal closed in August. With a little more than a fifth of the company, Scharffenberger bagged a healthy profit. He signed a three-year consulting contract with Hershey, which he renewed for two years last August. And he looked toward his next adventure.
Like sparkling wine (what do you do with acidic grapes?) and chocolate (how can we find another use for this coffee roaster?), ham appeared on Scharffenberger's radar screen as a situational opportunity. His friend Mac Magruder raised grass-fed cattle and sold the beef to high-end restaurants, but because of a pesky problem, the meat could not be labeled organic. The cattle required an occasional wormer to treat them for parasites such as tapeworms, which would pass through their guts and infect another cow. Pigs are omnivores, and when they ate the cow poop, the pathogen was killed. Why not release pigs into the cattle pastures as pathogen neutralizers? Their feed could be essentially free, as they gorged on (in addition to cow manure) the otherwise wasted acorns from oaks that stretched to the horizon. Or so Scharffenberger and Magruder reasoned.
When I visited Magruder last fall, he was still on what he described as "a big learning curve." This was his second year as a part-time pig farmer. He was raising about 100 pigs, trying out crosses between the wild ones he had captured and two heirloom varieties, Old Spot, which was once raised for lard, and Berkshire, which has been rediscovered recently for its flavorful meat. Magruder was finding that fencing pigs, especially young ones, is a much trickier proposition than confining cattle: "It's like fencing in a bar of soap." There were other unforeseen complications, too -- for example, the black bristles of slaughtered feral pigs were harder to remove than the hair of domestic pigs. But the critical challenge was the time needed to raise the slower-growing wild pigs. That was the main reason Magruder was hybridizing them with domestic breeds. "How much value can you add to your product to compensate for the slow growing?" he asked. "Restaurants can have loins delivered for $1.70 a pound. I sell these for $4 a pound. You have to have a story. That's what John is trying to do -- to have value added." Because it was impossible to compete on price with factory farms, he and Scharffenberger needed to emphasize the superior flavor, romantic origins, and old-fashioned livestock-raising techniques of their product.
Magruder was selling all the meat except for some of the hams, which went to Scharffenberger. Although he knew Scharffenberger's predilection for the attenuated body of the Iberian pig, he remained skeptical. "John kept talking about this long pig, but this one doesn't have much back end on him," Magruder told me, as we approached one of Scharffenberger's paragons, a lean black boar. "How much story and prestige are you really going to get away with? You look at that one's rear end and this one's rear end." He pointed first to the boar and then to a waddling Old Spot sow. "It's finding something that has the right shape but will also grow. The shape of the hams will be great, but they won't grow fast enough to be economical."
Afterward, when I spoke with Scharffenberger, he emphasized that he was taking things slowly. The correct breed of pig was only one part of a large jigsaw puzzle. "My plan, just like the early days of the chocolate business, is to approve a production model," he said. "And then to see what would happen with a very limited commercialization. My interest would be to find someone who wanted to get involved in the processing." The acorns, the historic Spanish breed, the traditional curing: He knew that a good story would get customers (and people like me) interested. But if he wanted to keep them coming back, he would have to concoct a product that was reliable, affordable, and -- most important of all -- delicious.
Arthur Lubow wrote the March cover story, about apparel maker Marc Ecko.
