We started the same business three times, in three countries — and the third one, in a small town on the Bay of Fundy, is where it feels like it was always headed.

Hello Chocolate began in Singapore in 2015. Dmytro had left Ukraine years earlier — an MBA, then a one-way ticket to Singapore and a job helping a large confectionery company build its business across Asia. He'd grown up in Soviet Ukraine more or less indifferent to chocolate; the brown, over-sweet, interchangeable kind was all any of us knew back then. Then, over a single-origin bar made from Vietnamese cacao, the whole idea arrived at once — origin, complexity, flavour you could trace to one farm. Real chocolate. He wanted everyone to taste the difference.

We built the first version fast: a rough website in three days, a first ad budget of fifty dollars, and a first order of a hundred that Dmytro was so thrilled by he delivered it himself, by train. It grew into something we hadn't planned — a curated home for the world's best craft chocolate, run as a family. Dmytro sourced and built; Nina, who grew up in Odesa when it was the culinary capital of Ukraine, shaped how all of it looked and felt — down to the Japanese furoshiki cloth we still wrap our gifts in. Vogue and Esquire noticed. Then COVID hit, orders multiplied overnight, and we packed boxes around the clock.

We could have stayed. Instead, we set out to prove the business could be rebuilt anywhere — first in the United States, and then, in late 2021, we went home to Ukraine to be with family before the next chapter. Three months later, we woke in Kyiv to air-raid sirens. For most of a year, everything stopped.

When we were ready to begin again, we did it about as far from that as we could imagine. We'd heard a small Canadian city described on a radio programme — busy enough to work, quiet enough to breathe, close to the ocean, with a name that sounded half-romantic and half-pirate. (We very nearly moved to the wrong one.) In June 2023 we landed in Rothesay, New Brunswick, and stayed.

It turns out you don't need New York or Singapore to sell the world's best chocolate — an internet connection and a post office will do. One of the finest bars we've ever tasted was made half an hour from our door, in Saint Andrews. One of the worst was made in Belgium. So much for the map everyone hands you.

That's the idea behind Hello Chocolate. The best chocolate no longer comes from where you'd expect — and neither, as it happens, do we. A Ukrainian family that tastes everything, keeps only what's genuinely extraordinary, and sends it to people who'd rather have one remarkable bar than a shelf of forgettable ones.

Goodbye sweet, brown, tasteless blocks of yesterday. Hello, chocolate.

— Nina & Dmytro Minkov, co-founders