Our story
Hi! We are “The Chocomists” and this is our story.
We are six people with different background and aspirations; George Anna Niki Eugenia Voula Maria. Despite out differences, we have one common love and passion and that is chocolate. During an international dinner of ESN that we went we had the opportunity to taste chocolates based on pure Latin cocoa and we were thrilled by its flavor. So we decided to make our dream and passion reality and we created our team : “The Chocomists : the alchemists of chocolate” and our brand name “El Mejor”, a startup chocolate company. Our fundamental idea is to make chocolate a healthy and delicious snack for all kind of consumers, based on raw cocoa. We want to take down the myth that chocolate is unhealthy.
We knew that this whole process wasn’t going to be easy so we took it step by step. Each week we had to take our startup on step ahead. We had to start from scratch, so the first think that we did, was to do to a very good research as a team about our competitors on the raw cocoa chocolate production industry and study their innovations. This process helped us a lot, because we understood that it offered us a lot and it was the key to the making of our very first prototype.
During the making of our prototype, we had plenty of ideas about the clients that we wanted to approach. Basically, we wanted to approach with our products three categories; diabetics and people with other heath issues, vegans and healthy eaters. We had various ideas, but we had to take it further. So, the next step was to empathize with our possible consumers and see what they think about our ideas. We decided to make our first interviews with people of those three categories and have interaction with them, because we wanted to verify our hypothesis. The first hypothesis was verified, because we noticed that we covered the needs of the consumers. This fact made us very delightful and help us move to the next station of our journey; the design process.
So, we tried to make a clear approach of what we did so far. The design process consisted of the empathizing, that we had already done, the problem statement, the possible solutions, the thinking out of the box and our very first prototype. The problem statement was very difficult, but we made our best. Also, by thinking outside the box, we came up with the innovative ideas of “El Mejor cafe”, the fortune chocolate and black sapote drinks, that we wanted to make reality.
In order to make the final steps, we asked 64 people from different backgrounds about our startup, so far. Some of our thoughts were verified and others weren’t. This led us to change some of our first ideas and find out what was missing from our startup. And there it was. We had to pick a more specific target group. We focused on the health issues, like people that had diabetes-related problems. Usually, raw cocoa chocolate bars are sweetened with products that are not suitable for people with diabetes or contain oils that are not allowed to people with other health issues. But we are doing the exact opposite. At this stage we were ready to make some taste test and create our chocolate. We searched a lot of recipes because we had to pick ideas and of course to be sure about the technical part of the process. And we can reassure you that at the beginning we had some failures with the mix, the texture, temperature but after a lot of efforts we created our product chocolate prototype.
During all this time, the team had a lot of feedback sessions in class which allowed us to see the progress of our team. We had the opportunity to take and provide a lot of feedback. One of the most interesting feedback sessions that all the teams had was the speed dating and World café methodology. At this session we actually revealed our chocolate prototype to our fellow students and most of them were impressed by taste. The final stage of our project was to create an online, a social media representation and a communication strategy for our startup. In order to present our startup to our future consumers-clients, we chose to “build” a digital platform of our “El Mejor”.
As we are writing this final article, we look back. And we realize that it was a long journey, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step…
Thank you for joining us to our choco-trip!
George Mitsoulas Anna Bear Niki koutoulouli Voula A Kat Eugenia Kolovou Maria Kaloudi
