How two chocolate enthusiasts turned their passion into a Hong Kong small business

Walk down Gough Street in Hong Kong’s Central district of a morning and you may notice the alluring scent of hot chocolate. Follow your nose and you’ll soon spot its source: at the far end of the street, tucked into a triangle of elbow-room-only space is bean-to-bar chocolate maker Hakawa Chocolate.

The fact the shop occupies just seven square metres hasn’t stopped proprietors Sally Kwok Pik-shan and Mandy Wong Ngai-man from churning out an array of decadent treats, from chocolate-covered orange sticks to chocolate bars laced with Sichuan pepper – all made on-site from raw cacao beans.

“We both love cooking and always knew we wanted to be in the food business some day,” says Wong, a former marketer for a yacht company.

After observing the burgeoning global demand for craft chocolates – particularly the bean-to-bar variety – she and Kwok, a long-time friend, spent two years researching their business idea before launching Hakawa on the eve of Lunar New Year this year.

Bean-to-bar chocolatiers oversee the entire production process, from sourcing raw cacao beans from farmers, to sorting, roasting, winnowing and grinding them, and temper­ing and moulding the chocolate to produce the bars.

Hakawa’s chocolates are 72 per cent cacao, with the raw beans sourced from farmers in Sri Lanka. Wong spent two weeks travelling around the country’s central Matale province, where she visited cooperatives run by foreign non-governmental organisations that help farmers to reach global standards for organic certification.