Introduction: When Fine Art Meets Fine Chocolate

A 300-bar edition that redefines luxury gifting

A Beverly Hills atelier has compressed the Golden State into 73 percent dark chocolate and limited the entire world supply to three hundred. At $295 apiece, the Made in California bar is not merely confection but currency in the parallel economy of collectible luxury, where edible objects cross the auction-room floor as confidently as canvas or bronze.

Each bar arrives numbered, its existence catalogued like a print run, turning the act of gifting into a quiet investment: the recipient becomes custodian of a disappearing artifact that will never be re-melted or re-cast. In a season crowded with opulence, scarcity this absolute renders the box as covetable as anything inside it.

The release rewrites the etiquette of holiday generosity; instead of another silk scarf or vintage cognac, givers can hand over a square of topography you can taste, a literal piece of California that dissolves on the tongue but remains in memory—and in the collector’s vitrine—long after the last shard is gone.

Why Beverly Hills’ andSons partnered with Ed Ruscha

andSons was bred for this collision of disciplines. The second-generation brothers behind the brand grew up in a city where gallery openings and pastry cases share the same zip code, and their previous collaborations with museums have already trained clientele to expect chocolate that thinks like art.

Ed Ruscha, laconic laureate of Los Angeles light and language, seemed pre-destined: his 1971 lithograph "Made in California" already treated words like confections, painted in gel-like squiggles that look piped from a baker’s bag. Pairing his visual wit with their culinary craft let both parties extend the joke—turning a flat proclamation into something you break, bite, and finally swallow.

The partnership also solves a problem luxury brands now face: how to make regional identity portable. By licensing Ruscha’s iconic text and infusing the bar with Sonoma blood-orange olive oil and Tomales Bay sea salt, andSons delivers California terroir in a form customs agents will wave straight through.

How the "Made in California" lithograph became edible

Translation began with topography rather than taste: a custom mold was CNC-milled to replicate the Santa Lucia mountain ridgeline, so every segment fractures along an edible contour map. The visual pun is pure Ruscha—landscape as language, elevation as punctuation—yet the execution is pure patisserie, requiring tempered chocolate to hold the detail of a 1:50,000 scale.

The 1971 lithograph, reproduced on cloth-bound packaging under license from Gagosian, wraps the bar like a gallery wall. When the lid lifts, the familiar yellow ground and honey-colored lettering greet the eye first; only after the wrapper falls away does the dark relief of California itself appear, ready to be broken along fault lines the artist never imagined.

In the moment of consumption, medium finally collapses into message: the phrase "Made in California" dissolves on the palate, carried by fruit-bright olive oil and mineral salt, proving that the state’s most enduring export may be its capacity to turn even self-reference into sensual experience.

The Making of a $295 Edible Sculpture

Hand-cast Santa Lucia mountain-range mold technique

The chocolate is cast in a handcrafted mold depicting a topographic section of California’s Central Valley, from the Pacific Ocean to Santa Lucia Mountains. Each ridge and valley is reverse-sculpted into food-safe polycarbonate, allowing the 73% dark chocolate to pick up every subtle contour when it crystallizes. The result is a bar that carries the state’s geography in relief, turning a simple snap into a miniature geology lesson.

andSons’ production team pours the tempered chocolate at precisely 88°F, then vibrates the mold to eliminate air bubbles that would mar the delicate peaks. After ten minutes of cooling, the bar releases with a satin finish that catches light like sun on coastal hills. Only thirty molds exist, so every casting cycle yields fewer than two dozen perfect pieces; the rest are remelted and tried again.

Once demolded, each bar is brushed with mineral-rich sea salt from Tomales Bay, the white crystals settling into the chocolate’s valleys like snow on the coastal ranges. The topography doubles as a flavor map: higher ridges receive a lighter dusting, while deeper grooves hold more salt, ensuring every bite balances sweet, bitter, and briny.

Sourcing blood-orange olive oil from McEvoy Ranch

Sonoma County’s McEvoy Ranch supplies the estate-grown blood-orange olive oil that perfumes the bar’s interior. The fruit is pressed with the olives, releasing essential oils that taste of citrus peel warmed by Pacific sun.

Sandy Tran folds the oil into the chocolate just before it sets, trapping volatile aromas that bloom on the tongue the moment the bar melts. The collaboration marks McEvoy’s first partnership with a Beverly Hills chocolatier; the ranch’s typical clients are Michelin-starred kitchens.

Harvest records from the 2024 season show only 180 gallons of the oil were produced, and andSons secured a quarter of it. Every bar therefore contains a measurable slice of California’s agricultural scarcity.

Balancing 73% K+M Peruvian dark chocolate with Tomales Bay sea salt

Thomas Keller’s K+M brand in Napa Valley provides the single-origin Peruvian cacao, a 73% dark chocolate roasted in small lots to preserve notes of red fruit and cashew. Tran pairs it with flakes of sea salt harvested by Hog Island Oyster Co. from the same waters that feed their sweet-water oysters.

The salt’s minerality amplifies the cacao’s natural acidity, creating a finish that lingers like ocean mist. Precision is critical: too much salt collapses the flavor into brackishness, too little and the bar tastes flat. Tran’s final ratio—0.

7% by weight—was determined after forty-two test batches tasted blind by the Covitz brothers and a panel of Gagosian directors. The resulting equilibrium is what allows a $295 price tag to feel, if not reasonable, then at least explicable.

Design Details: Packaging as Art Gallery

Cloth-bound box reproducing Ruscha’s 1971 lithograph

Each bar arrives in a handmade, cloth-wrapped box whose lid carries a museum-quality reproduction of Ed Ruscha’s 1971 lithograph “Made in California,” the same squiggled yellow text that once read as a deadpan love letter to the state now hovers above chocolate. The image is printed at true-to-original scale and saturation, so the box feels less like confectionery wrapping and more like a pocket-sized print you might slide out of a Gagosian folder. ","The fabric—natural linen tightly stretched over rigid board—adds tactile weight; when the lid lifts, the slight resistance of the cloth against the lip of the base momentarily suspends the reveal, turning the simple act of opening into a small ceremony. Inside, the mountain-range chocolate rests on a recessed black tray, the contrast amplifying both the bar’s sculptural ridges and the outer artwork’s sun-bleached palette. Because the lithograph is licensed directly from the artist and Gagosian, every box carries the discreet authentication stamp used for gallery editions, blurring the line between retail packaging and certified multiples market.

The collaboration arrives just as the Hammer Museum prepares to open “The Grunwald Center at 70,” a survey of five centuries of works on paper that will include Ruscha’s original 1971 print; the bar’s release is effectively an edible satellite of the show. Gagosian green-lit the image use on the condition that the edition remain capped at 300, mirroring the scarcity logic that governs fine-art print runs and ensuring the chocolate functions as a parallel collectible. ","andSons quietly seeded early boxes with select curators and collectors invited to the Hammer’s preview nights, turning the gallery crowd into unofficial ambassadors who Instagrammed the cloth-bound box perched against white walls. The timing positions the chocolate not as a holiday novelty but as a companion piece to a major institutional retrospective, lending the project curatorial gravitas no traditional food marketing could buy. "]},{"subheading":"Why every box doubles as a collectible art object","paragraphs":["Once the chocolate is gone, the box refuses obsolescence: the interior tray lifts out, converting the vessel into a compact display case perfectly sized for the lithograph lid to stand upright like a mini-easel.

Owners are already stacking empty boxes on coffee tables or sliding them between art books, where the linen spine and stamped title read as a subtle status marker. ","Unlike typical luxury packaging that whispers wealth through logos, this box declares its value through context—its paper band lists edition number, date, and printer specs in the same sans-serif typeface used on Ruscha’s artist proofs, so even discarded ephemera feel archivable. ","Secondary-market listings have appeared at twice retail within weeks, evidence that buyers are treating the entire object—chocolate, mold, box—as a single authenticated multiple rather than a consumable with nice wrapping, a shift that redefines gourmet gifting as art acquisition by another name.

Scarcity & Strategy: Marketing 300 Bars to a Wait-List Audience

Launch timing aligned with 2025 holiday gifting season

The December drop is no accident: andSons timed the release so the $295 bars arrive when gift-givers are hunting singular statements. A 300-unit run guarantees sold-out headlines before most holiday budgets are even drafted, turning scarcity into its own advertising campaign.

By opening the wait list in mid-November, the company captured early buzz without carrying inventory risk. Every email address collected becomes a micro-investor in the brand’s next collaboration, a database goldmine wrapped in artisanal foil.

Nationwide shipping versus Beverly Hills pickup

Customers can elect white-glove pickup at the Beverly Hills atelier, where the brothers stage the hand-off like a gallery opening, or opt for refrigerated overnight delivery that lands the bar still smelling of Sonoma blood-orange blossoms.

The dual-channel approach lets locals flaunt insider access while granting distant collectors equal crack at the edition numbers.

Shipping crates are engineered to double as display plinths, so the journey from warehouse to mantel never breaks the art-object spell.

Positioning culinary craftsmanship as visual art

Pricing the bar at museum-catalog levels forces buyers to view it as sculpture first, sustenance second. andSons reinforces the shift by issuing no nutrition facts—only edition numbers and provenance notes, the same language used for lithographs.

Social feeds tease the mold’s Sierra contours under gallery-grade lighting, never once showing a bite taken. The message is clear: this chocolate is meant to be acquired, contemplated, and, if absolutely necessary, tasted—one topography-etched square at a time.

Conclusion: The Future of Art-Inspired Regional Confections

How California chocolatiers lead the art-food crossover trend

California’s food artisans have long blurred the line between pantry and pedestal, yet the Ruscha bar marks a watershed moment where terroir, typography and topography converge in a single consumable object. By embedding a lithograph’s cultural capital into a regionally-sourced dark chocolate canvas, andSons positions the state’s agricultural abundance as a legitimate medium for conceptual art, proving that West Coast creativity can be both tasted and collected.

The collaboration also signals a shift in how luxury food brands court cultural relevance: instead of licensing a logo, they invite the artist’s entire visual language to inhabit flavor, texture and form. Expect more chocolatiers from Napa to Ojai to mine the archives of Ruscha’s contemporaries—Baldessari, Turrell, Hammons—translating their desert palettes and urban ironies into limited-run confections that double as bite-size biennials.

Equally significant is the speed at which this model can travel: one mold, three local ingredients and a museum-grade box now constitute a turnkey formula for turning seasonal produce into collectible art. As climate-forward consumers demand transparency, the marriage of gallery-level storytelling and farm-level sourcing gives California a defensible edge over European houses still trading on heritage alone.

Collectible confections as investment-grade gifts

Scarcity alone no longer guarantees value; the Ruscha bar succeeds because its 300 units arrive with built-in provenance—Gagosian authentication, Hammer Museum context and a verifiable ingredient ledger that links McEvoy Ranch olive oil to a specific harvest. Buyers aren’t simply purchasing 73% Peruvian dark chocolate—they’re acquiring a time-stamped artifact whose cultural weight appreciates each time the artist’s market climbs.

Secondary-market chatter has already emerged in Beverly Hills living rooms where emptied cloth-bound boxes trade hands at a premium, mirroring the trajectory of artist-designed champagne bottles or Basquiat-labelled Bordeaux. The edible component may vanish, but the box—signed, numbered and cross-referenced against museum archives—remains a pocket-sized certificate of authenticity, easily insured alongside prints or photographs.

For gift-givers, this reframes a $295 stocking stuffer as a fractional art investment that can be shared, savored and then displayed, collapsing the experiential and financial into one gesture. Wealth managers attentive to client portfolios of contemporary works now recommend such releases as low-entry hedges against blue-chip volatility, especially when produced in editions small enough to become folklore.

What the success of this bar signals for 2026 collaborations

Early wait-list metrics—reportedly ten-fold oversubscribed—prove that consumers will pay gallery prices for gallery-caliber narrative, provided the sensory payoff matches the intellectual one. Expect andSons to scale the model by rotating artists annually, each time anchoring flavor to a micro-region: Owens Valley sage, Big Sur redwood essence, or Salton Sea grapefruit zest, cast in molds that echo fault lines or tide charts.

Competitors will inevitably chase the formula, yet California’s tight network of artist estates, specialty farms and museum boards creates a moat difficult to replicate in other states. The next frontier lies in dynamic editions: AR-enabled packaging that unveils hidden sketches when scanned, or blockchain-verified ownership that transfers with the last square, turning each break along the score marks into a micro-auction.

More broadly, the Ruscha bar legitimizes edible art as a bona fide collecting category, inviting auction houses to create dedicated sales where provenance is tracked by wrapper, not canvas. If 2025’s 300 bars sell out within hours, 2026 could see simultaneous drops timed to Art Basel Miami, Frieze Los Angeles and SFMOMA galas, transforming the holiday season into a coast-wide chocolate circuit courted by curators, critics and investors alike.