artisan chocolate & its packaging design

“If you are not feeling well, if you have not slept, chocolate will revive you. But you have no chocolate! I think of that again and again! My dear, how will you ever manage?”

Marquise de Sévigné

(French writer and lady of fashion) February 11, 1677 

Chocolate is not quite as simple as it once was in its most basic offering of milk or dark.. or more creatively so, milk or dark blended with almonds. Chocolate is now seen by connoisseurs in the similar perspective owned by the likes of wine & cheese. As chocolate has acquired this complexity through time & experimentation, there is no better way to make it than by an artisan, who deploys creative dexterity by hand to produce some of the finest & most detailed of taste in chocolate. 

Artisan chocolate is typically eccentric in its fusion of flavors, ranging from chili or curry dark chocolate truffles, mint & rosemary bars or hemp, pumpkin & sunflower nibs. Or better yet, how about chocolate covered bacon? A sweet & salty creation made by Roni-Sue, a chocolate shoppe in Essex Street Market in NYC. To further complicate your senses, this shoppe also sells chocolate covered pickles – something that I personally suggest saving for pregnancy, as I hear that’s appropriate. Nevertheless, gastronomical chances are now taken with chocolate that result in layers of rewarding goodness.

To compliment chocolate’s evolution of taste, the packaging design of artisan chocolate has become almost as tasty as the product itself. 

For perfect examples of the blend between a quality product & its design, visit Vere Chocolates, 100% Chocolate Cafe, & Nomu. 

mandula

I studied Fashion Marketing & Management five years ago & part of the curriculum was to saturate myself into Vancouver’s fashion scene.. for as modest as it was & still is. This involvement included interviews, articles & hidden digital cameras snuck in not so strategically into changing rooms to “secretly” take photos of garments. I was escorted out twice for forgetting to turn the flash off. Always subtle.. yep – that’s me. 

There were a multitude of clothing designers at the time who were ambitiously evolving within the industry, but one of the first who had motivated me into my own direction of creativity was Hungarian-born designer, Hajnalka Mandula. Since starting out designing garments in Vancouver over ten years ago, Mandula has always been puritanical on working with organic textiles & recycled materials – & all this long before the “green” cycle spun into play.

The majority of her color palette is black, with an occasional jolt of something surprising, like fuschia. Instead, she prefers to focus on working with the texture of a textile, rather than using color as a means for meaning. 

Mandula has recently opened her own boutique at 214 Abbott Street in Gastown, & has plans to soon open a sister store in LA.