Canada’s chocolate appetite is huge. But a lot of what we eat (and what chefs cook with) is still produced elsewhere. So, Toronto chef and chocolatier Brandon Olsen and entrepreneur Michael Held are stepping into that gap with a new venture: As We Do Chocolate Company, a chef-led brand that serves both premium retail shoppers and the foodservice and hospitality industry at a national scale!
Expect bean-to-chocolate production made in formats that work for both home kitchens and professional ones (think retail bars, as well as chocolate pellets and chips for baking programs, restaurants and hotels). And unlike many small-batch chocolate startups, As We Do is a business built by chefs, for chefs.
If the owners’ names ring a bell, it’s likely because they’ve been part of Toronto’s conversation for years. Chef Olsen (a.k.a. Instagram’s King of Ginger) is the chocolatier behind CXBO Chocolates and a former chef at Bar Isabel and The Black Hoof. But Torontonians will most likely recognize him as a co-founder of Toronto’s French brasserie La Banane on Ossington. The menu at the Michelin-recommended restaurant changes at whim, but depending on the night you go, Salt Spring Island mussels meet crème fraîche and Normandy cider; omelettes get caviar treatment; and seared foie gras is gussied up with roasted pineapple and sweet spice!
Held comes from a very different lane: business-building at scale. He founded LifeSpeak in 2004 and helped grow it from a startup to a publicly traded company.
And ‘As We Do’ couldn’t come at a better time: even though Canada’s chocolate market could reach $7.2B by 2030, every cocoa bean used in Canadian chocolate must be imported, according to Statistics Canada, showing how global the supply chain is, even when the finished product is made here.
The company is launching via a Kickstarter pre-sale campaign (and the full digital platform/e-commerce site is scheduled to go live on Feb 24, so keep an eye out!)
