AKRON, Ohio – In specialty boutiques in San Francisco, it’s not unusual to see customers tasting, examining labels and discussing the fruity undertones or the vintage year.

But it’s not the latest California wines that have captured their attention: it’s chocolate.

If chocolate is your consuming passion, look for that passion to be ignited this year and beyond as the trend for high-end chocolate begins blanketing the country.

Last year, the branding of chocolate – from Nestle’s new Chocolatier line of baking morsels to the most expensive gourmet bars – began including the percentage of cacao. The terms milk, semisweet and bittersweet have been replaced by numbers such as 34 percent, 53 percent, and 70 percent.

An even bigger trend taking hold is single-source chocolate – made from cacao beans grown in a single region of the world, or even on a single plantation or estate.

While single-origin chocolate, and the tasting boutiques where it is sampled and sold, may not have caught on yet in Ohio, those in the chocolate industry predict it won’t be long before it does.

Until now, single-source chocolate has been mainly the domain of connoisseurs. Those who sought it out could find it locally. West Point Market in Akron, Ohio, devotes an entire aisle to high-end chocolate, and Trader Joe’s, the specialty food retailer, also sells single-origin bars.

But when Hershey’s gets in the game, be assured the trend is heading for the mainstream.

The Lancaster, Pa., company recently released its Cacao Reserve by Hershey’s Single Origin Collection, which includes bars, truffles and hot chocolate drink mix.

Instead of grabbing a traditional 60-cent Hershey’s bar, consumers soon may be reaching for one of Hershey’s new bars of 70 percent cacao, made solely from beans grown on the African island nation of Sao Tome.

For $3.29, Hershey’s promises a bar with “a strong and well-balanced bitter and sweet chocolate profile. Underlying aromatic coffee tones and warm spice notes at the front of the palate carry through the well-rounded long chocolate finish. Bold and satisfying, smooth and rich.”

The Hershey line also offers bars made of cacao grown in Indonesia, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic.

It’s a product revolution similar to the one experienced by coffee drinkers in the 1990s. The same consumers who used to be content brewing up a pot of Maxwell House in the morning now routinely pay upwards of $4 for a specialty drink.

Chocolate makers are hoping for a similar conversion. Some specialty chocolate is selling for $6 or $7 for a 3-ounce bar.

Alexander Morozoff, publisher of Cocoaroma, a San Francisco magazine devoted to chocolate, said the move by Hershey’s to put single-origin bars on store shelves will only help to spur the trend.

Customers who try the Hershey products are likely to want more and better – seeking out bars from all corners of the globe, he said.

Morozoff said that while the marketing strategy may resemble what happened with coffee, enjoying fine chocolate is more like learning about fine wine.

“Chocolate is so much more complex than coffee. It is considered by some to be the most complex food in getting it from bean to bar,” he said.

Several varieties of cacao plants produce the beans that are turned into cocoa, and each is affected by differing climates and weather conditions where the plants are grown.

Like wine from grapes grown in California or France, cacao from the Ivory Coast and Venezuela will produce distinctly different-tasting chocolates.

The chocolate maker Valrhona has even started including a vintage year on some of its single-source bars, Morozoff said.

He cautions consumers against using percentage of cacao numbers as some kind of ranking. They describe only the ratio of cacao to sugar in the bar, which will determine how dark or sweet it will be.

“People like to read about rankings and numbers. They figure, well, 70 percent is better than 60 percent. But that has nothing to do with the quality of the chocolate,” he said.

He said the move to include cacao percentages on labels came out of Europe, where government agencies started requiring more detailed food labeling.

The labels piqued consumers’ interest, causing them to want to know more about the chocolate they were eating, which also is helping to propel single-origin sales, Morozoff said.

“It triggered people’s imaginations, and they started to wonder where cacao was grown,” he said.

While chocolate boutiques and tastings are common in areas such as New York or San Francisco, Morozoff expects it won’t be long before they are as common in other areas as wine tastings.

Aside from being a fun way to educate chocolate lovers, they also offer consumers the chance to try products from exotic lands.