Lucia Austria and Sydney Oland have pretty sweet jobs.

Austria (MET’13) is the production manager and Oland (MET’09) the product developer at Somerville’s Taza Chocolate, maker of stone-ground organic treats. The women, both grads of Metropolitan College’s Gastronomy program, have the enviable task of spending much of their day on “quality control” (exaggerated air quotes intended)—they taste chocolate. They’re lucky and they know it, even if their jobs mean they often have to wear hairnets, as they did to give Bostonia a tour of Taza’s 17,000-square-foot factory and store just outside Union Square.

“I love what we make,” says Austria, who studied marketing at Boston College and worked in publishing before signing up for the MET program. “At Taza, I started off as a chocolate wrapper, and then a chocolate maker, and then there was a need for a production manager. In almost four years here, I’ve been part of every part of the process.” Oland, who is charged with dreaming up new flavors and recipes, says that “the job is never boring.”

Taza was founded in 2006 by Boston native Alex Whitmore, who, after tasting his first bite of stone-ground chocolate in Oaxaca, Mexico, decided to start his own factory closer to home. Today the company makes more than 300,000 pounds of chocolate a year in the form of discs, bars, and chocolate-covered treats, which are sold in shops around the world. The company also sells its chocolate to tea blenders, restaurants, ice cream makers, and others, all of whom are willing to pay a premium price for the intensely flavored chocolate. For the sake of comparison: a three-ounce bar of Taza’s Dominican 70 percent chocolate costs $7.50; a slightly smaller-sized Hersey bar runs about a dollar.

Taza uses a centuries-old method to create its chocolate, and Austria is involved in the process right from the beginning. The company’s cacao beans are grown on farms across the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, and Belize. Working closely with Whitmore, Austria is charged with making sure Taza meets its certifications—organic, vegan-friendly, kosher, and gluten-free. It was the first US chocolate maker to set up a third-party-verified Direct Trade Certified Cacao program, Austria says, meaning Taza maintains direct relationships with farmers and pays them a premium for their cacao. These practices and relationships with global farmers are what she likes most about her job, as she believes she can make a positive change through fair manufacturing processes, as well as make people more aware “of our world’s food sources and how we obtain them,” she says.

Austria believes it is important to make people aware “of our world’s food sources and how we obtain them.”

After the cacao beans arrive in the factory, they are roasted and shelled to leave just a cacao nib. The nibs are then ground between two handmade stone mills (called molinos) that allow small flecks of cacao and sugar to remain in the finished chocolate. It’s also what gives Taza chocolate its signature “gritty” taste, which is markedly different from the sweet, creamy European chocolate most people are familiar with.

This ground paste is combined with sugar, then undergoes a process called tempering, which raises and lowers the temperature of the chocolate to control its texture. The chocolate is then poured into molds and will eventually be wrapped and shipped.

As production manager, Austria, who first got a taste for the food industry when she attended Le Cordon Bleu and later worked as a line cook at the South End gastro pub the Gallows, is also responsible for keeping Taza’s more than 20 product lines on schedule, determining what gets made when. “I know which certain flavors we make once a month in larger batches of 2,700 pounds,” she says. “Those are flavors like salted almond, vanilla, and cinnamon.” She monitors sales predictions to help figure out how much of a product to make and when, as well. She also needs to make sure the machines are working, and she trains Taza’s team of about 30 chocolate makers.

The development of new flavors and recipes falls to Oland, who, prior to coming to Taza in 2012, interned at America’s Test Kitchen and worked at Nestlé as a product development chef (a fancy way of saying she created recipes). Oland says that ideas for new recipes come from group meetings and brainstorming sessions, and sometimes from simple trial-and-error.

Taza sells its trademark handmade Chocolate Mexicano Discs at specialty stores around the world.

She sometimes takes her cues from market research, “looking at what we think is missing from our line and what the consumer wants,” she says, citing the new line of Amaze Bars, which combine chocolate with ingredients like raspberry and coconut. “Taza can be a lot for people who aren’t into dark chocolate, so the Amaze Bars are more accessible,” she says.

The second part of Oland’s job is random tasting of the chocolate to make sure the quality is consistent as it comes off the production line. One way she does this is to snap a bar in half—a clean snap means it’s the right texture. If the chocolate bends, it indicates that something went wrong in the tempering process.

Taza’s chocolate has developed a cult following among local restaurants and breweries, which use it in their food and beverage recipes. Oland insists that chocolate has a place in richly flavored barbecue, mole, and pesto sauces, braised meat, and beer. She writes the section on the company’s website that showcases innovative ways Taza chocolate can be used, like for a beer-brined turkey. In her latest post, Oland created a recipe for a chocolate porter cake, which combines three ounces of Taza Dominican 60 percent Dark Stone Ground Chocolate with Slumbrew Brewery’s Porter Square Porter (which is brewed with Taza chocolate) and ingredients like Greek yogurt, heavy cream, and confectioners sugar to create a decadent dark chocolate cake.

Taza’s chocolate beans also have a use that’s a little off the beaten track for a confectionery company. Gardeners have been known to request the cacao bean shells, which make a rich, eco-friendly mulch. “But the biggest benefit,” Oland says, “is that your whole yard smells like chocolate.”