A collaboration with Hong Kong specialty coffee roastery Urban Coffee Roasters

Hong Kong has always been nostalgic to me. Perhaps it's due to the countless HK dramas I grew up watching; maybe it's from the memories of revisiting my parents' honeymoon spots on family trips when I was a child; or it could just be my overwhelming love for dimsum and milk tea that created this special bond. Travelling to Hong Kong always felt like going home away from home - in so many ways the city was same same but different from Singapore.

With Hong Kong being a place that’s close to my heart, you can imagine how thrilled I was when we managed to land a trip there to expand our footprint! Everything happened pretty quickly, the trip was decided in April and we were to fly by early June.

By the time our air tickets were booked, my list of places to check out was already massive. But excitement aside, there was an important task ahead. Securing a trip was just tip of the iceberg, the real challenge was ensuring that a fruitful schedule was planned out and substantial outcomes were achieved from this time-off from Singapore. After many sleepless nights spent putting the plans together and through a series of hits and misses, we finally had a good itinerary ahead of us.

Among the many admirable entrepreneurs and inspirational business partners we met on the trip, a particular one struck a chord with me because of how similar their story was to ours. Urban Coffee Roasters is a specialty coffee roastery founded by Horry and Gary. The duo started out as friends and over time, bonded over their common interests - food, of course being one of those. In 2014, they turned that hobby into a business, starting off by serving coffee at pop-up markets before going full fledged into owning their own space. Check out their quaint little cafe at Tsim Sha Tsui!

While our trip lasted less than a week, conversations with the team continued and then THIS was born.

Image by Urban Coffee Roasters

This limited release Banko Gotiti coffee chocolate bar we created in collaboration with Urban Coffee Roasters is made with a micro-lot coffee selected by Gary from Ethiopia Yirgacheffe in 2019 harvest season paired with our cacao beans from Rehoboth Estate in the Philippines. With this combination of coffee and cacao, you can expect floral notes with immense blueberry sweetness and a delicate tangerine finish. This bar will be sold exclusively at Urban Coffee Roasters (though we kept a bar for our own secret stash ha!) and since we’ve made a micro-lot, it is available in limited quantities only.

While we won’t be back in Hong Kong for a while, we’re happy to have found new friends and caught up with old ones during this trip. And to those who believe in us, thank you for your support and we really look forward to growing together in the coming years.

Till we meet again, Hong Kong!

Debut: Chocolate Tasting Club

As chocolate makers, we consume lots of chocolate everyday. In our pursuit of creating fine flavours, we go through numerous rounds of R&D for each new product that we launch, making tweaks to the roast profile and recipe. We then conduct blind taste tests and continually refine the flavours till they are on point.

When it's finally down to actual production, we taste the chocolate after a few days of conching to ensure that the texture is satisfactory before harvesting for the next step. When we mould the bars, we taste to ensure that the final product is consistent with the tasting notes we present.

Beyond our own range, we also enjoy tasting chocolates by makers from around the world as a benchmark and source of inspiration for our palettes. Over time, we've accumulated a treasure trove of chocolates from our adventures around the world - many of which can’t be found in Singapore or even Asia.

With the launch of our Chocolate Tasting Club, we aim to educate, engage and enrich our community with knowledge about cacao and chocolate. Through a series of tasting and discussion sessions, we will be unveiling our stash of chocolates thematically and experiencing how the techniques adopted by different chocolate makers impact the final flavour and texture of the bars.

This April, we are so thrilled to debut our first meet up with some new bars on hand! In this upcoming session, we will be tasting through a variety of dark chocolates made with Bolivian cacao as well as a series of very special breakfast-inspired chocolate flavours.

Check out our event page here for more details!

Heading to USA

We thought that the months leading up to Christmas were busy enough but January was crazy. We began the new year fulfilling the long list of December back orders (phew!). And then there was Carrie’s Keepers event in early Jan, which was a blast with the flavour war raging between die-hard Salted Egg Cereal fans vs Pistachio Rose Cranberry lovers.

Amidst the flurry of conversations and slurps of coffee right after the event, we found ourselves headed for the US on a flight longer than the amount of sleep each of us had that week. It should have been a long restful flight but HOW CAN I SAY NO TO AMAZING THRILLERS AIRING IN-FLIGHT?? For those of you who like some adrenaline-pumping drama, check out this and this which I thought were pretty good.

And then after many meals and naps onboard, we finally arrived in San Francisco all ready to meet our friends and retailers at the Winter Fancy Food Show.

It was a busy but fulfilling event and it was good that we could finally put faces to the names we’ve been talking to for months online. Thanks to everyone’s support, we’re happy to share that we are now in 28 states (69 cities) in the US! But of course we won’t stop growing from here.

To our friends and readers in the States, don’t worry if we’re currently not present where you are. Please please reach out to us at hello@fossachocolate.com or via Instagram or Facebook if you have any retailers you’d like us to approach for stocking and we’ll do our best to find our way to you!

In the meantime, here are some travel photos to enjoy. :)