Cars to cookies: Tesla designer revolutionises the chocolate chip

If you’re a lover of chocolate chip cookies and think you know what a good one should taste like, you might be shocked to learn that it could taste even better.

Remy Labesque, a senior industrial designer at Tesla, was so convinced of this that he’s spent three years on a side project to prove it. Outside his day job, where he focuses on things like car accessories and solar roofs, Labesque dedicated his time to completely redesigning the shape of the humble chocolate chip.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Labesque explained that traditional teardrop shape of a choc chip isn’t ideally suited to its function but rather for mass production.

“The chip isn’t a designed shape. It’s a product of an industrial manufacturing process,” he said.

Labesque reimagined the choc chip for Dandelion Chocolate, a bean-to-bar chocolate factory in San Francisco whose pastry chef could no longer keep up with demand for her hand-piped chocolate disks, which are used in the chocolatier’s best-selling chocolate chip cookies.

The new design, which supposedly maximises taste and that melt-in-your-mouth texture, is shaped like a faceted, square pyramid with two thick and two thin edges. Though these chips hold their shape when baked, the centre melts and they don’t turn waxy like many cheaply-manufactured versions.

Apart from using the chips in their chocolate chip cookies — which sell for about R66 a pop — Dandelion also sells the chips by the bag.

Their three varieties of 70% cocoa, single-origin chocolate chips are made with beans from Ecuador, Belize and Costa Rica and cost nearly R500 for a 500g bag.