About

Mörk Chocolate is a small business. We have one foot in the world of fine chocolate and one in the world of specialty coffee, with over ten years of professional experience. “Mörk” is Swedish for dark, and the name speaks both to our shared history and our devotion to dark, pure chocolate.

Why have we dedicated ourselves to chocolate?

Our founders have always loved chocolate: one since the age of three when she would sneak downstairs many a winter night to steal the foil-wrapped chocolate Santas from off the Christmas tree. Making sure to carefully hide the wrappers where no one would find them. The other ever since his very first meeting with that same girl, then an experienced chocolatier, while she was demonstrating chocolate tempering at a coffee roastery in Sweden.

Our dedication to chocolate flows from a tremendous amount of respect for the product. We work with the purest form of chocolate, cacao liquor, and the finest cocoa powder to create our chocolate blends. All of which are made in small batches to ensure consistency and freshness.

Mörk Chocolate is a unique Melbourne business that craft chocolate from cacao beans and carefully sourced ingredients, creating drinking chocolate blends for one of the strongest cafe markets in the world. The brand started in Melbourne in 2012 by Swedish/Australian couple Josefin and Kiril. As a boutique drinking chocolate maker we began by supplying the best cafes across the city. Our point of difference, offering dark chocolate of the highest quality, made an impression on the specialty coffee industry here and we grew organically with an excellent reputation for our quality and passion for our craft. We gained a strong following that lead to the opening of a concept store and cafe in the heart of North Melbourne. It became a hub for experimenting with cacao and offering non-traditional drinking chocolates. We were, and still are, importing ingredients for our blends, cacao powder, coconut blossom sugar, and 100% cacao liquor from an Italian producer. The origin in our cacao liquor, still in use in UK/Europe, is Venezuela, from Sur del Lago. Leaving sourcing and production of this liquor to another company was for us a temporary deal, with plans to start our bean to bar already back in 2015. But as a small family business with a busy store and wholesale operation to run, as well as a growing family, this project was put on hold. The biggest change to the business model finally came two years ago when taking over a run down warehouse in North Melbourne and turning it into a small batch cacao roastery and bean to bar chocolate foundry. Sourcing our own cacao beans, and roasting and refining chocolate from scratch, meant as chocolate makers we were able to further ensure ethically produced and traded ingredients, and making a further step towards our sustainability goals. We get to control and fine-tune the flavour profiles on the beans we source, and we take great pride in the hard work that goes into making fine chocolate and the positive change we get to contribute with for our industry. We are currently in the process to change both powder and liquor in both our productions, with plans for transition in UK in January 2023.

So what does chocolate making at Mörk look like?

We are chocolate makers at heart, and while the business has seen us spend our time in each part of this growing business, this little chocolate foundry is where we both truly come to life and thrive. After years of hard work building the business, we are at our happiest behind the machines, exploring and learning our way thorough the chocolate work.On chocolate production days, we start our weeks hand sorting and roasting small (15 kg) batches of cacao, a process that takes skill and patience, then winnowing the beans carefully to separate husk from nib. Next we turn nibs into a crumb feeding it through a stone grinder over several passes. It is starting to look like actual chocolate at this stage. We then finally load our cacao mill with 50 kg batches at a time. We mill the particles down to smooth cacao liquor, or add further ingredients to turn it into chocolate. The last stage in refining is called conching, a process that can take up to 2 days, depending on origin and desired flavour and texture in the chocolate. We then strain it carefully to remove any unwanted particles, and set it into blocks.

Making drinking chocolate

To produce drinking chocolate we grind the cacao liquor or chocolate to fine particles and blend with pure cacao powder and organic coconut blossom sugar. This highly sustainable and unrefined sweetener is the caramelised sap from the coconut palm tree, ours is sourced from West Java. We import our pallets direct from Java into both UK and Australia.The intensity and incredible quality of our chocolate, due to the care in selecting and refining these ingredients, is what makes Mörk drinking chocolate so different in flavour experience.

Where do we source our cacao from?

Our cacao is mainly sourced from small farms in some of the most sought after cacao producing countries. By paying well above market value, more than twice the price of organisations such as Fair Trade, Mörk are not only supporting a sustainable trade and accessing the highest quality cacao, but are also building strong relationships with producers of the finest cacao in the world, with transparency right through the supply chain.We work with a small amount of Madagascan cacao for our milk chocolate, Dark Milk & River Salt 65%. This Madagascan cacao is sourced from Åkesson who run their plantation in Sambirano valley, north West of Madagascar. The cacao from here is well renowned for its unique flavour profile and its pure genetics of Trinitario and Criollo.The main source for our cacao, in both liquor and our new powder, is Nicaragua. This producer Ingemann works closely with hundreds of small farmers, buying wet beans (unprocessed) at farm gate, handling all the post harvest processing of the beans. While cacao is of exceptionally high quality in Nicaragua, it is often overlooked for other more easily farmed and higher yield produce, and finding labour for this crop is one of the biggest challenges for cacao farmers. So having one producer for all post harvest processing ensures very high quality with consistent fermentation and drying of the beans, which makes the cacao of incredibly consistent quality for us to work with. It also allows cacao farmers quick access to income, not having to wait for auction, and helps to invest straight back into their crops. CHUNO CACAO FOR LIQUOR The regions where the cacao for our liquor is grown are called San Jose de Bocay, el Cuá, el Tuma – la Dalia and Chinandega. There are 231 producers in total and around 500 hectares in total. Approx 680,000 cacao trees grow here.The area has a cool tropical climate, with temperatures ranging between 24º and 25ºC and abundant rainfall between 1,600 and 2,000 mm per year. The wet season lasts approximately eight months and the remainder of the year is the dry season. About 10% of the farmers are women, it is predominantly a male industry here. The cacao is of a single variety called Trinitario, certified by the Heirloom Cacao Preservation in Nicaragua as #12 heirloom variety.TUMA CACAO POWDERWe are in the process of transitioning from a high quality but generic blend for our powder. In our blends currently are beans from Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana and Ivory Coast. We have used this powder during recent years, in the lead up to a full change over to our very own custom cacao powder, produced with beans from small farms and full traceability in the process. It has been a long process, made harder through Covid with logistics and staffing shortages across the world.The cacao used for our new cacao powder is from Nicaragua and certified organic. We sourced this cacao especially for our cacao powder, which is produced for us in big batches (larger than we could fit in our chocolate foundry) by an Organic certified powder producer. The cooperative is called ACAWAS, which consists of smallholder farmers with 2-3 hectares per farm. There are approximately 283 farmers at the moment that are certified organic but the list is growing as there are many in transition. The region is called Waslala and is in northern Nicaragua in the northern Atlantic autonomous region. The area extends approximately in a 60 km radius around the town. There are around 480 hectares and around 480,000 trees for our farmers. The cacao genetics is Trinitario. There could be around 5% Criollo influence as they can sometimes see white beans amongst the bean mass.We hope you enjoy our chocolate and learning more about Mörk and our ingredients!

Josefin & Kiril