OM Chocolate is born!

We live by the basics - water, food, shelter, good company, chocolate!  But if you throw dozens of delectable chocolate bars daily at an inquisitive group of young professionals who study the intimate life of everything they eat, someone eventually looks at the latest 100gram chocolate wonder-bar asks in a serious voice: "Where do you think this thing came from?"

Cue the pandemonium! Not interested in the simple origins of our chocolate, we craved the intimate and untold life story of everything cocoa.  We 'fell through the rabbit hole' of self doubt as we quickly learned about cocoa's (nearly) 500-year history since the Spanish brought the first humble beans to Europe.  We read reports and saw videos regarding the clear-cutting of fragile tropical forests to make way for plantations, disheartening child labour and carcinogenic pesticides used at monumental levels.  We sought the advice of professionals working on the ground in tropical cocoa plantations and chocolate production in European countries.

Cocoa, a tropical-forest product was our daily symbol of everything healthy, nurturing, natural and pleasurable.  Chocolate suddenly seemed more despicable than delicious.  Reality set in and we realized that chocolate had a not-too-sweet story to tell.

The results were, frankly, depressing.  By Valentine's Day of 2007 chocolate was pushed into Brand Stand's cultural underground, shunned but direly missed and definitely not forgotten.

Life began for Organic Meltdown chocolate when everyone in the office here at Brand Stand began to feel very depressed about eating our favourite early/mid/late/all-day snack: chocolate.

By March of that same year the activist inside of each and every one of us cried "enough!" A proposal had been floating around the office to identify a new brand that could fight deforestation, save trees and ultimately educate ourselves and others about the dangers of climate change.

Organic Meltdown chocolate was born.

We drastically changed gears and moved into a new tree-saving project based on a simple idea: can we make chocolate better?  We sorted through potential NGO partners who were flexible enough to institute a new type of program never before attempted - to save an entire, living and breathing tree for every chocolate bar we sold!

We attacked on two fronts - focusing on saving trees the primary goal and developing the physical brand came second.  Frankly we continued to eat chocolate under the guise of 'market research' because we wanted our organic chocolate to not only save trees, but to have the perfect taste. Bars were imported from around the globe, cocoa samples and other materials were collected.  Interviews and studies conducted.  The development of the brand's physical appearance was a "no-brainer" and the tree-ring, or "cut tree chic" motif as it's called in the office was elected by a popular vote.

After some major mis-starts with other large international charities dealing with cocoa and deforestation we met the wonderful, ubiquitous and daring World Land Trust who immediately threw their own 20 years of enthusiastic experience in helping save the world's most threatened habitats behind our project. 

With the support of the World Land Trust and local partner Ecominga conservation programs to save trees in the pristine tropical cloud forests of Ecuador, we launched Organic Meltdown chocolate bars during the SIAL trade fair in Paris, France in October of 2008.  We won our first major award at that show for innovation.  Our hope is to now save 5 million trees by 2012 and with your help our journey is just beginning...