
“Why are all the pieces of your chocolate bar a different size?” We often hear this question and it has many answers depending on the mood we’re in and whether we are inclined to sympathize with the noble equalitarian aspirations of those who want all their chocolate pieces to be the same or with the liberalism of those who think that no matter how small or big a piece of chocolate is, it can still contribute to our well-being when it melts in the mouth.
A source of admiration for some, of frustration for others, the design of our custom chocolate bar mold has intrigued many who have tasted our chocolate. For those who are simply curious, here’s the story…
When we started making chocolate we naturally didn’t own a chocolate mold. So we used baking tins and our first chocolate ‘bars’ were rather thick slabs of untempered chocolate that we would cut on a chopping board with a kitchen knife, like this:

On occasion we would even go a bit crazy and create massive lumps of chocolate and a hammer would be required to try and break them…

By the time last year when we were about to show our first bars to the world we had decided to invest in… a new baking tin, with an elegant lozenge-pattern textured bottom that graced the first ‘bars’ we wrapped; these bars were really square sections of the big slab molded in the tin that we wrapped in fancy paper with a hand-written label. Each was weighed individually, and none was really the same shape or size as the others.


That was quite a start… We took these bars to Hong Kong Fine Food Expo (HOFEX) and introduced the world (or at least people we were lucky to meet there like Willie Harcourt-Cooze!) to Marou Chocolate.
In Hong Kong we also had a chance to buy a couple of real molds made by Chocolate World of Belgium, so we soon retired the baking tins and started trying our hand at molding chocolate.

We knew however that Marou chocolate could not just come out of a generic mold. We needed an original design. Seeking inspiration everywhere we could we were bombarding our designers from Rice with requests to create an original mold. But creating the specs of a 3D object in negative was rather daunting and initial ideas (such as a wedge-shaped bar) proved to be creative dead ends.
And this is when we got lucky…
One of our neighbors was also a designer, 3D mold design happened to be just up his alley, and he loved our chocolate… Sasha Vassay of EIGHT Design who had been doing molds for high tech molded parts in athletic shoes and mountaineering backpacks could not only design a chocolate mold, he could conceptualize what it would be like to eat chocolate that came from such a mold; crucially he could also introduce us to local companies that could turn the design into a steel master and churn out the high quality food grade poli-carbonate molds that we would eventually use for molding our chocolate bars.
At that time, slanted lines were very much the flavor of the day for us and our design team.

And so Sasha took the initiative to take this design cue one step further to propose the design of slanted, slightly asymmetrical lines with our monogram in the center spot that became our signature mold. When we saw this, it was love at first sight: we had a bar of perfectly classical proportion but with a totally unique design!

Sasha Vassay of Eight Design pictured left
With the design created, things moved quickly and we soon had a prototype that we were happy with and the molds went into production quickly.

Happy with the mold prototype we were good to go into production
Almost a year on from those heady days of inventing everything for the first time, not everyone may be convinced by our mold but we definitely love it and think of it as a future classic.