The Ghirardelli Story (Ghirardelli Chocolate Company ‪)‬

People love chocolate, but how many people know that the country's second oldest chocolate company is Ghirardelli? Founded in June 1852, it has been operating for more than one hundred and fifty years now; only Baker's Chocolate, founded in 1780 in Massachusetts, is older. (1) And Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, the company's factory from 1894 to 1964. is the granddaddy of industrial sites adapted to become public attractions, now common to many American cities. (2) The fifteen-foot-high letters on the chocolate factory's towered brick "castle" are as local a landmark to San Francisco as the TransAmerica Pyramid or Coit Tower. Ghirardelli also stands for chocolate with the potential for intense pleasure that rivals other brand names like Mars, Hershey's, or Godiva. Few people do not recognize the name. But just be sure to say Chirardelli with a hard G as in ghost or spaghetti, and leave the J sound to gin and gypsy. My grandfather, a member of the chocolate-making family and the company's second-to-last family president, said it the right way. This lively individual, Alfred Ghirardelli (1884-1956), also realized that there was a fascinating story to be told in the origins and evolution of this Italian-American clan and its business. In 1945, anticipating the Gold Rush's centennial a few years later, he commissioned a succinct scholarly history of Domingo Ghirardelli's company, which pinned down important facts about the Italian founder's life and times as a pioneer businessman. (3) Some four decades later, Alfred's daughter Polly Ghirardelli Lawrence (1921-1997), my mother, resumed the effort by combining archival research and personal reminiscences in a volume of interviews (shared with two of her cousins) published by the Bancroft Library's Regional Oral History Office in 1985. (4)