Minimalist Chocolate - Maximum Taste

Minimalist Chocolate is a new local product launched by David Donde, founder of Truth Coffee, Cape Town’s renowned roastery and coffee shop. The chocolate is made with just two premium ingredients.

- Ashleigh Roman

‘Chocolate is a health food without tasting like it, and there's no reason healthy food shouldn’t taste great,’ says speciality coffee pioneer David Donde. At the beginning of 2020, with lockdown looming and a team of 60 staff members to consider, David was faced with the challenge of identifying a gap in the market that would allow him to continue trading and to support his staff.

‘I sat down trying to figure out how we could apply what we’re really good at when it suddenly struck me. I started looking into chocolate and realised that it was being treated exactly like coffee was in the 1980s: it really wasn’t being taken seriously,’ David says.

To create an indulgent, additive-free chocolate, he and his team set out to find quality ingredients with the goal of producing something pure and uncomplicated yet bursting with flavour.

‘We started reaching out within our network and found some really great cacao [Fair Trade cacao from São Tomé and Príncipe]. We ended up experimenting with and roasting between 50 and 60 kinds of cacao, and realised that it would work – we could apply the same principles of developing flavour that we had with coffee.’