5 Made-in-Vietnam Artisan Chocolate Brands

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Jul 11

From Left to Right: Maison Marou, Legendary Chocolatier, Alluvia Chocolate — ***From Left to Right:*** *Maison Marou, Legendary Chocolatier, Alluvia Chocolate*

Unsurprisingly, 2020 saw a surge in chocolate buying as pandemic-stricken Gen Z and millennials sought comfort in the silky decadent goodness of chocolate. To put words into numbers, 2020 saw an increase of 74% in chocolate-buying in Southeast Asia. As discerning chocolate lovers in Southeast Asia become increasingly smitten with local artisanal brands, Vietnamese chocolate brands are seeing their piece of the (chocolate) pie slowly but steadily increase.

Here, I highlight brands behind some of Vietnam’s most exciting and creative chocolates - from the bars to the bonbons that evoke the flavours of the place they are made and go beyond being a delicious treat and pay homage to the country they’re born in.

The Cocoa Project

“We’re on a mission to create a chocolate culture in Vietnam and this is what I believe makes us unique,” says Khanh-Linh, ex-consultant turned chocolate entrepreneur and founder of The Cocoa Project. Instead of championing Vietnamese chocolate around the world, The Cocoa Project is focused on creating chocolate products, flavours and tastes that Vietnamese locals will love. Think Longan dark chocolate, Spicy peanut white chocolate and Lime basil white chocolate Mousse cake.

The goal is to catalyse a culture of chocolate appreciation in Vietnam and pay tribute to Vietnamese farmers as well as the varied terroir-driven cocoa beans of the country. This is to cast a spotlight on sustainable cocoa practices and evoke a sense of appreciation (and pride!). This is evident in The Cocoa Project’s tagline - Sô-cô-la cho mọi người.

Marou Chocolate

Photo courtesy of Maison Marou — *Photo courtesy of* *Maison Marou*

One of earliest bean-to-bar artisanal chocolate makers to come out of Asia, Marou was founded by Vincent Mourou and Sam Maruta in 2011 with a focus on making chocolate using only Vietnamese cacao sourced from six provinces in the nation's south (Vietnam is one of the few countries in the world that grows cacao beans). Its beautifully packaged bars highlight the nation's varied terroir across the Mekong Delta. As well as its chocolate products, Marou operates Maison Marou, a cafe-patisserie-chocolate factory concept with outposts in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi and hopes to expand these venues internationally to keep up with its products, which can currently be purchased across the globe.

Belvie

A portmanteau of ‘Belgium’ and ‘Vietnam’, Belvie is a homemade artisan chocolate founded by Belgian Marc Vanborren and his partner Jannie Ha Tran in 2015. Based in Vietnam, Belvie Chocolate is famed for its ‘tree-to-bar- approach, which entails using fine trinitario cacao beans, which are purchased directly from planters in different regions of Vietnam to enhance the local economy for our farmers, stone grinding and conching them for days and producing them in small batches.

Their global award-winning chocolate accorded by The Academy of Chocolate Awards also goes beyond making delicious chocolate of the highest quality but also contributes to the preservation of cacao trees in Vietnam by using the husks of the cacao as fertilizer for the trees and also supporting farmers by offering them a fair price for the beans they source. Signature flavours that can be purchased from Belvie’s online store (or one of their distributor’s ten international gourmet partners) include Tien Giang 70% Cacao (Bronze Award 2017) which uses cacao beans from a region in the Mekong Delta and Cà-phê sữa đá Milk Chocolate, inspired by the famous Vietnamese beverage.

Alluvia Chocolate

Founded by father-and-daughter duo Xuan Ron and Diep, Alluvia is fuelled by a diehard desire to showcase Vietnamese cacao beans and chocolate handcrafted on the terroir of the Mekong Delta. According to Xuan Ron, the chocolate mastermind and main man on the fields, the Mekong Delta is rich in alluvium, which gives rise to Alluvia’s fruity flavour.

Besides chocolate bars, Alluvia’s products run the gamut from chocolate bars to cacao nibs, cacao butter and roasted cacao beans; the former infuse fruits and spices unique to different provinces, farms and villages in Vietnam where they’re from - a tip of the hat to terroir - with bars including the likes of chilli, guava and orange peel (my personal favourite). Each bar boasts a vastly different taste profile. And then there are Alluvia’s chocolate-coated dried fruit, which combines its signature chocolate with a range of dried local fruits, such as pineapple, ginger, guava and mango.

Stone Hill

One of the pioneer tree-to-bar chocolatiers in Vietnam, Stone Hill has continued to ply its trade quietly in a quaint little store at the end of Le Thanh Thom in District 1. Tree-To-Bar is a special type of chocolate which the chocolate maker grows the beans themselves and uses said beans in their own products. This allows for a greater level of control over quality and flavor. Stone Hill owns its own farm in Dong Nai, Vietnam where they cultivate their own cacao trees with clean, eco-friendly farming practices and work with a network of small farmers that we hold to a high standard and compensate accordingly for their hard work.

With over 50 cacao varieties, Stone Hill Farm currently holds the largest private collection of cacao varieties in Vietnam. Some of these possess unique flavour profiles but due to low survivability and high technical demands, they are not available for public circulation. With a strong technical background in agriculture and cacao farming, Stone Hill manages to cultivate some of the most uncommon Trinitario and Forastero varieties, creating a blend with a signature composition not found anywhere else in the world. Additionally, Stone Hill uses utilizes bio-control as the primary method of pest prevention. How they do this is by raising ant colonies on their cacao trees by providing food and shelter for the ants. In turn, whenever the trees are harmed by pests (mainly Helopeltis), the ants will swarm out, attack the pests and protect the cacao trees.

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Legendary Chocolatier

A self-described bean-to-bar chocolatier, Legendary Chocolatier sources its cacao beans directly from the different provinces and farms in Vietnam. The beans are then processed along either other ingredients such as truffle, fruits and flowers to produce one of the many collections: the fruit and nut chocolate bars; Flower and nut chocolate, which uses flowers such as Rose Butterfly Pea and Chrysanthemum; chocolate Dragees and creative chocolate truffle varieties that use Asian ingredients such as ginger, kumquat, passion fruit, white fungus and lemongrass.

Wishing to support the work of the farmers of Vietnam, Legendary Chocolatier is also a member of Cacao Trace, a program that was founded in 2016 and aims to support the Next Generation Cacao Foundation, an organisation that supports cacao farmers in Vietnam.