What started as a date-night experiment for two young Israelis is now a full-fledged vegan chocolate company with a recent $3 million US investment.
Although Daniel Bareket grew up in Harduf, a kibbutz known for its excellent vegetarian restaurant, he only stopped eating animal products after he moved to Tel Aviv at the end of his army service.
That he and his future wife would one day develop award-winning dairy-free milk chocolates, produced and sold all over Israel and in the United States, was far beyond his imagination.
It all started after he met Elya Adi, a vegan since the age of 16. On their first official date, Bareket suggested they get into the kitchen to try and make a dairy-free milk chocolate together.
“I knew she was a chocoholic and vegan and this drove me to ask her if we could come up with something,” he recalls.
It was far more challenging than they expected. “The problem is that liquids don’t blend well with oils in the cocoa butter so that ruled out adding a plant-based milk. We tried dehydrated milk and even vegan baby formula, which was disgusting,” says Bareket, who was working in high-tech at the time.
The couple realized they needed to educate themselves and spent hours accessing online resources in order to understand all the variables. At this point, Bareket tells ISRAEL21c, making vegan chocolate was still a hobby, with no business plan even remotely in mind.
It took a year of experimenting to obtain a creamy texture and a delicious flavor. What made all the difference was combining dehydrated soy milk (ordered from Canada) with coconut and feeding it into their new ultra-fine grinding machine.