How Dandelion Chocolate scales craft

Todd Masonis and a few friends took over a garage and started making chocolate just to see if they could. They roasted beans, built small machines out of whatever they could find, and sold bars at farmers markets on weekends.

That was over a decade ago. Now Dandelion has a factory, cafes, and a warehouse operation that ships hundreds of thousands of orders during the holidays. But that impulse, to do things just to see if they could be done, never went away.

Take the gold foil they wrap their bars in. Most companies would pick something off the shelf, but Dandelion spent months engineering foil that would crumple a certain way when you unwrap it, just to get that feeling right. It’s the kind of detail that big chocolate would never bother with, and that’s exactly why it matters to them.

That same stubbornness shows up across everything they do. Beans are roasted in small batches. Flavor develops over days, not hours. Every step involves someone paying attention, making judgments, tasting and adjusting.

The challenge with growing a company like this is that complexity tends to follow. More products, more people, more dependencies. The kind of overhead that can quietly pull your attention away from the craft itself.

Amber Feng is Dandelion’s CTO, which might sound like an odd role for a chocolate company. But someone has to build the systems that keep a business like this running: the online store, the inventory tracking, the software that makes sure the right box reaches the right door. And as Dandelion grew, so did the number of people who needed to stay in sync.

That’s where Linear fits in. It gives Dandelion a shared language across teams. Engineering, product, and chocolate makers all work differently, but they draw from the same underlying information, each seeing it in ways that match how they operate. The complexity has somewhere to live, rather than in people’s heads, so they can stay focused on the craft itself.