The Willy Wonka Experience
A few years ago, up-and-coming business owner Matt Rubin was at a cocktail party overseeing a tasting table for his new chocolate business, SoChatti. After starting the company in 2016, Rubin had found fast success within 6 months of selling his vegan, Kosher and Halal chocolate bars.
But Rubin’s golden ticket idea came as an afterthought when, along with the chocolate bars, he nonchalantly started serving guests shots of melted chocolate he’d brought in a thermos. He watched as well-dressed party-goers came back to his table again and again for more of the liquid chocolate, ignoring the bars completely, and licking the sides of their shot glasses to get every last drop.
“We noticed this social component to experiencing melted chocolate that was completely unlike solid chocolate,” says Rubin.
It was this night that kickstarted two key revelations for Rubin.
Number one: liquid chocolate retains exponentially more flavor than solid, most likely the reason why otherwise classy adults were slurping it down like little kids.
And number two: chocolate-makers get to experience the best parts of chocolate because they’re the ones who create with it, play with it and taste it at its most natural and flavorful form.
Realizing that liquid was the best vehicle for delivering the chocolate experience to his customers, he put the business on pause and went back to the drawing board to get the recipe exactly right. After much experimentation, he and his team developed a product that customers could drink straight from the tube, add on to desserts, or let harden into a solid.
“We said, why should the chocolate maker have the best experience?” says Rubin. “It’s a very emotional connection. It’s the difference between eating fresh fruit and eating something that’s been preserved or dried.”
Since their thermos and shot glass days, the chocolate company has put out an entire range of chocolate products made by responsibly sourced beans sourced from Tanzania, Honduras, Trinidad and Peru. While mainly available on their website, they can also be found in restaurants, some retail locations and soon, a tasting room in Indianapolis.
The tasting room, opening sometime later this year, will connect chocolate lovers with the production of their favorite treat, says Rubin. There, people will be able to try samples, learn about the raw ingredients SoChatti uses and see firsthand how their chocolate is made.
“We wanted to break down the barrier between the chocolate maker and the consumer,” says Rubin. “They can actually see the product being made right in front of them.”
People visiting the tasting room will also be able to learn more about the technology SoChatti pioneered. Inventing new machinery was essential for Rubin’s vision of packaging liquid chocolate because he needed a way of filtering out water without diminishing the taste. He partnered with several technology companies to build a tool that can do this on an atomic level, allowing them to preserve and enhance flavor in a way that’s never been done before. It doesn’t just work on chocolate, either; SoChatti is currently exploring ways their technology can restore the flavor in other foods, at one point making a dried tomato taste like it had been picked the day before.
Though the process of perfecting his recipe could be grueling, Rubin saw it more as a series of “fun failures.” Even at times when the trial and error method didn’t bring the results they were looking for, everyone on his team was just happy to be there.
“When it failed, we got to each chocolate, and when it worked perfectly, we got to eat chocolate,” says Rubin. “It’s a beautiful mess of an experience. Everyone walked away for years smiling.”
His team’s optimism is just one component of Rubin’s goal for SoChatti to be a happy company. He wants all of his employees to feel taken care of, and that doesn’t just mean the ones in the United States. To make sure they’re sourcing their beans ethically and sustainably, SoChatti pays the workers who farm their cacao beans two to four times more than the industry standard.
In reinforcing ethical sourcing practices, SoChatti joins a growing community of similar companies who hope to implement change within the industry.
“If it’s two and a half times more expensive to do things properly, to make sure that the families aren’t taking an economic hit, I wanted to make sure we were hitting that goal,” says Rubin.
As SoChatti leads by example in the chocolate industry with their commitment to ethical sourcing, all while changing the game with their innovation in chocolate products and technology, it’s hard to believe that the company started in Rubin’s kitchen with cocoa beans and an $11 coffee grinder. But it’s true--when an allergy panel revealed that his chocolate-loving wife was allergic to dairy, he went to work figuring out how to make some that was lactose-free.
He never imagined that his act of love would turn into such a successful enterprise, but then again, love has always been at the core of everything SoChatti does. From taking care of employees to making their customers’ taste buds happy, the business thrives on the principle of caring for others.
“What started as this gesture for my wife to make sure she always had dairy-free chocolate in the cabinet, opened us up to a whole world of flavors,” says Rubin. “And if you can deliver an emotional experience every time someone has a piece of chocolate, you place it in a different ballpark.”
Get a taste of SoChatti’s innovative, ethically-sourced chocolate by visiting SoChatti.com.
