Beautiful Design + Chocolate = Askinosie

I spotted Askinosie Chocolate in a magazine I was browsing lazily last Saturday. It was one of those days where you go through the motion of flipping the pages because everything in the magazine seem dull. What a lousy issue you say to yourself but you continue because you are secretly hoping there will be some hidden gems in the pages to come. So you turn one more page….and then you spot it! Your eyes widen and your heart beat a faster. Ooooh! I This was exactly what happened. I zoomed in to read the text and it was only then that I found out it’s chocolates and it’s called “Askinosie”. It may well have been any other product and I would still have been captured by it. Yes, it’s the packaging. How can I resist? I’m exaggerating? Take a look and judge for yourself. By the way, I hereby shamelessly declare that I make decisions/choices based on aesthetics.

Obviously, I had to go online to learn more about this wonderful find and I realized there’s a lot more to these bean-to-bar chocolates. Unlike large industrial chocolate manufacturers, Shawn Askinosie (yes, that’s the founder’s last name) supports poor farmers in Mexico and Ecuador by hiring them to grow small batches of beans. The packaging was designed to honour these farmers. The distressed brown parchment paper wrapper is printed with a photo of the lead farmer, his name, the bean’s origin, the variety of bean. Also clearly indicated are the cocoa content, the process used, a “choc-o-lot” number and the Web address (askinosie.com). Enter the choc-o-lot number online and you can retrace the journey. Askinosie chocolates contain just 3 ingredients: cacao beans, cocoa butter and pure cane sugar.

I would be overjoyed to receive these as gifts. They’re too cute! Chalk-kate Box (left) which comes with a chalkboard top for my sender to scribble messages on and Month's Supply of Dark Chocolate (right) so that I don’t over-indulge.

They carry other chocolate-related products as well. Check out their website for more.

I also enjoyed reading about Shawn Askinosie’s story. He was actually a criminal defense lawyer for close to 20 years before finding his passion in chocolates. You HAVE to visit their cool website to read more about his story and to feast your eyes further.

[images from Askinosie]