So we all know that chocolate is good for you right? Well Forbes recently wrote an article linking Nobel Peace winners and chocolate consumption. The article contains sayings like "Chocolate consumption has been documented to improve cognitive function" and "geniuses are more likley to eat chocolate". Gee geniuses, you really you think so :).
The article has some great facts and research supporting it. See it here: Link between Nobel Peace Winners and Chocolate Consumption
Below you will find a recent study published by Forbes showing the affects of dark and mild chocolate. This 10 year study revealed that men who ate at least a choclate bar a week were 17% less likely to have a stroke. These changes can mainly be attributed to the benficial affects of flavenoids.
Check out this great chocolate article here.
Our Chocomize team member Philip is currently traveling around Europe spreading the word of Chocomize through goodwill. With a car and a dream, Philip and his team will travel over 10,000 miles through Europe and into Asia. The initial descent across Europe starts off in Great Britain. From Britain, the team will travel across Europe in nothing but a customized car until they reach Mongolia. Of course, the customized car will be decked out with its sponsorships from Chocomize. That’s right, Chocomize is now applying our customization skills to cars, well sort of J.
Along their Journey into the unknown, the team plans to raise money for the Lotus Childrens Centere Charitable Trust (a charity that is dedicated to improving education for children in Mongolia by providing schools). Through tales of adventure the team hopes to stir up enough commotion to raise over 15,000 towards the charity. Here is one of their quit humorous tales from Bukhara, the capital of Uzbekistan:
“Driving along happily due to the good condition of the asphalt (this road would still be illegally dangerous in European countries), we got stopped by the police. And Michel made a huge mistake: he actually stopped. Apparently speeding in Usbekistan is like speeding in Austria. The cops randomly choose a speed limit, the speed they think you were going, and the fine. In our case,100 dollars. It actually took all of Michel’s negotiation skills to adjust the fine to one pack of Turkish candy and one pack of Azerbaijani cookies.”
Chocomize wishes Philip’s team the best and hope they achieve all they set out to do. To check out the charity the donations are going to click here: http://www.lotuschild.org/
Are you freaking out about not getting your dose of customizable chocolate this summer? Worried that you will have to resort back to plain old supermarket stuff? Don’t sweat. This summer, Chocomize offers worry-free shipping. For starters, we ship ALL of our bars with lots of ice packs to keep them nice and cool for the ride. If for some reason your bars do hit the heat and melt before you get to savor their flavor, we will replace your order at absolutely no cost.
As for larger orders, the shipping is now on us! Hooray! All orders that are over $40 will be treated to completely free shipping.
Hey Chocomize Fans,
We currently have a new addition to our creation station. Chocolate label plaques! Our new labels are made of decadent white chocolate with a neat inscription. We currently have a few in stock, including a Congratulations plaque and Class of 2012 (for all your graduating family members and friends). There is currently a poll on our Facebook page asking customers and fans what new plaque they'd like to see added to the creation station.
Cruise on over to our Facebook page and vote for your favorite! Current options include "Get Well!" "I'm sorry," "Happy Father's Day!" and, of course, Other. We would love to hear any suggestions you may have. Post it on our page! While you're at it, check out our Favorites page and the newest additions from our Facebook "Create Your Own Bar" chocolatier competition: Up and at 'Em, Peanut Butter Jelly Time, Captain America bar, and the Sweet and Salty Utopia.
-The Chocomize Team
We're proud to say we have very creative customers. Since our launch, we have received millions of imaginative chocolate bar combination orders. We're still pleasantly surprised to witness new combinations, and sometimes we get so excited that we give the combination a try for ourselves.
It's your turn to shine, you chocolatier.
Anyone that's ordered from our site knows that the combination possibilities seem almost infinite. However, we already know your creations are so carefully crafted - toppings complimenting toppings, sweet and salty converging, mouthwatering combinations - we believe it's innovative art. And we'd like to see your best.
Part 1)
Until Friday, April 13th, visit our Facebook page and write your perfect combination on our wall. Give it a witty and fun name, too. Once your ingenious creation is published on our wall, encourage your friends to visit our Facebook page, like us, and like your chocolate bar on our wall. The more "likes" your bar gets, the closer it will get to the top 10. You can post more than one bar and ask your friends to like it but we will only pick one bar per person (the one with the most likes) for the top 10.
Part 2)
On April 13th 10am EST, we will choose the 10 creations with the most likes and they will be photographed and posted on our favorites page by the following Monday, where they will battle it out. You can use the 'FB share', 'Twitter', and 'Google+' functions on the product details page to create buzz for your chocolate bar, get your friends to find your bar, and LIKE it.
The contest will end on Monday, April 23rd, 10am EST. The most liked bar will be deemed "Choctastic" and earn a permanent spot on our "Favorites" page. The clever chocolatier will win perks that include free chocolate!
Prices:
1st price: $100 Chocomize gift certificate + 3 of your suggested favorite bars
2nd price: $50 Chocomize gift certificate + 3 of your suggested favorite bars
3rd price: $25 Chocomize gift certificate + 3 of your suggested favorite bars
With Easter right around the corner, we chocolate enthusiasts have put together three special Easter bars!
Easter Egg Hunt is an egg hunt in a bar. The bar is dark chocolate with an edible Happy Easter plaque, peanut butter chocolate, colorful jelly beans, and a chocolate Easter egg. A rich bar with a burst of fruity flavor and spring themed color.
Our second bar is Peep My Bunny! This is a delectable milk chocolate bar with an edible Happy Easter Plaque, sprinkles, mini marshmallows, and sugar Easter bunnies.
Our third bar is an Easter Delight. This is a creamy white chocolate bar with an edibly Happy Easter Plaque, a chocolate Easter egg, yogurt pretzels, and sugar Easter bunnies.
Besides our popular Easter bars, you can make your own! Head over to the creation station. Choose your base: milk, dark, or white. Then get creative with your toppings. Under "Decorations" you will find the Happy Easter plaque, sugar Easter bunny, and the chocolate Easter egg. Satisfy your sweet tooth with candy for a very Easter themed bar, including jelly beans, Nerds, Sour Patch Kids, or Pop Rocks for an extra fun bar. The possibilities are endless! Our Easter themed bars will only be around until Easter day, so stock up! They're ideal for all ages, and kids will especially love them.
Wishing you all a very Happy Easter.
-The Chocomize Crew
Spring is a time of renewal and new beginnings. Believe it or not, spring is also the most popular wedding season. As couples take to wedding magazines to pick themes, decorations, color schemes, food, and flowers, why not add something creative to your reception - say, a custom chocolate bar?
With Chocomize, you can order a bar that fits your taste and suits your wedding theme. Perhaps you've chosen a black and white theme, and calla lilies are your flowers of choice. Your guests can indulge in a white chocolate bar with dark chocolate chips, blueberries, and lavender. Or perhaps - in the spirit of spring - your wedding is colorful. Your guests can enjoy a milk chocolate bar with jelly beans, cantaloupe melon dices, and crystallized rose petals.
Pick your favorite toppings:
Some couples have compromised on one bar, while others have divided the bars between the two and designed two different bars that suite the different tastes of each.
Design your box:
Not only are the bars all you, but so is the presentation. You can customize our traditional Chocomize
box with photos, the date of your wedding, or even a love poem.
Final touches:
Personalize your bar even further by adding our labels made of edible icing sheet and edible ink. Choose words of love, the date of your wedding, or anything else. The label goes right on the bar and is completely edible.
Making your dream chocolate bar for your dream wedding is our mission.
If you would like to get a quote, please shoot us an email at weddings@chocomize.com. The price of each order largely depends on your toppings and the size of your order. If you're overwhelmed by the endless selection, check out our creation station to virtually see what your bar would look like, or get some inspiration from our Facebook page where you will see suggestions other Chocomize enthusiasts have tried and loved.
-The Chocomize Team
We are happy to announce that our Facebook page has recently hit 30,000 likes! That's huge! And it's thanks to all of you. As promised, we are offering our 30% of coupon code (Thanks30kFans), which expires on February, 25 2012 at 11:59pm PT.
Use this promotion to splurge on your favorite bars, explore new combinations and toppings, get your friend that bar you've promised but always ended up eating yourself, or create a special bar for someone special, just because.
We'd like to thank all of you thoughtful and loyal customers for your continued support. Keep spreading the word! Now, go forth andcreate.
The Chocomize Team
Hey Chocomize Enthusiasts!
As you may have noticed, our presence in the blogosphere has been somewhat (very) sparse since the summer. You were probably all wondering where we went. In reality, we really didn't go anywhere… except New York!
The past few months have been an adventure. Our latest and most exciting news is our change in location. We recently embarked on a mission to expand our production and send out more mouth-watering, rich chocolates to more customers - more quickly. We are now producing our fine custom chocolates in Long Island City, New York. Our office space is new and impressive, and renovations and design are still under way. The past few months have been a blur of expansion, moving equipment, and making our new nest here in New York. We are incredibly happy to be here and have received many warm welcomes from the New York Daily News, and were featured on ABC7. Kemberly Richardson really digs our chocolate.
NBC also recently set out to ask New Yorkers what their dream chocolate bar would be, and they seem excited to have us! Check out this video and you'll also get a glimpse at our production.
Our new location is an impressive 5,500 square feet, almost four times as large as our previous location in New Jersey. More space means more delectable chocolate. Thanks to our new location and our expanding staff, we successfully fulfilled thousands of orders over the winter holidays and Valentine's Day. We are coming along really well and enjoying our new location, and we're excited to move forward and continue letting your chocolate imaginations run wild.
A lot of people have been asking us, “What makes your handcrafted Belgian chocolate so smooth and creamy?” Well, we’re finally going to let you in on some of our secrets…
The Belgian Chocolate recipe differs from other chocolate in that it contains no vegetable shortening. The absence of vegetable shortening helps create that pure cocoa flavor that Chocomize customers have grown to love in their customizable chocolate bars. Our mouth-watering milk chocolate is made using cocoa paste, sugar, milk, and cocoa butter. To master the recipe like us, you need the perfect proportion of each ingredient, which can take years for chocolatiers.
Dark Belgian chocolate contains a larger percentage of cocoa. Our white chocolate differs from milk and dark by extracting only butter from the cocoa. This removes the bars brown color while still containing that rich chocolate consistency and flair.
Since Chocomize chocolate bars usually ship within 1-3 days, each hand made order avoids sitting on a grocery shelf for weeks waiting to be eaten. The chocolate is preserved and delivered fresh to each customer as soon as possible.
With prices of cocoa, sugar, and other commodities rising, some chocolate companies have gone to great new lengths to assure large annual profits. In an effort to reduce costs, companies are now adding “air” to the recipe. You heard me right, AIR!!! Chocolate makers lower the amount of chocolate in each bar and bulk up the sweet treat with carbon dioxide while adding little to no additional cost.
Chocomize cares more about the quality of our personalized chocolate bars and pleasing our customers. It’s safe to say that we will never pump air into any of our chocolate bars in an attempt to reduce costs!
Thanks to everyone for your ongoing support as we continue to grow.
Our Time was created to bring together young Americans with an important theme, “Alone we are weak, but together we can accomplish anything!” A non-profit organization, Our Time focuses on motivating the country’s youth to stick together and influence change. In an effort to reach out to young entrepreneurs, Our Time has partnered up with Chocomize as a media of support and promotion.
Integrated in Our Time’s campaign, “Buy Young” Chocomize offers a discount off select bars over a weeklong period.“Buy Young” presents discounts on products while supporting young businesses.
Want to voice your opinion about our nation’s health care system? Check out their “Save Money, Stay Healthy” campaign. Our Time also offers a source for the unemployed to search through available openings on their “AfterCollege” page. With so many great channels of information open to everyone, Our Time will be an important foundation for Americans under 30 to turn to in the future.
For more information, feel free to visit Our Time.
As you know by now Chocomize bars make for a delicious snack, are the perfect gift for any occasion, and are also widely popular for wedding favors. In addition to that we have also had the pleasure to work with dozens of great companies that used our bars for corporate gifts. The folks from Google, for example, can't seem to get enough of our bars. Yahoo!, People Magazine, Cheerios, Melitta, and Nordstrom have been a couple of other companies that we have worked with in the past in addition to dozens of lawyers, doctors, real estate agents, and schools that used our custom chocolate bars for promotional gifts.
This time we wanted to introduce you to a really creative promotional campaign we recently conducted with top notch portrait photographer Dave Moser. Dave took the the pictures for the Chocomize feature in the Costco Connection Magazine. As a creative professional he was looking for an out of the box campaign to leave a long lasting impression with his clients.
Here is what we did:
Dave sent out a very creative letter to everyone on his mailing list which contained some information about his work and most importantly a "golden ticket". The golden ticket invited his clients to create their own one of a kind chocolate bar on Chocomize.com.
The coupon codes that we set up for the promotion covered the chocolate and shipping and allowed up to separate Dave's orders from our regular orders. To strengthen the connection between the chocolate gift and Dave Moser photography every bar got one of Dave's signature stamps on it in the form of an edible image. In addition to this logo, each bar had a custom label on the back of the packaging that read:
"Just what THE ADMIRAL ordered! Your own custom-blended chocolate bar. Enjoy something you don't taste every day, from a guy who specializes in images you don't see every day. Thanks for your chocolate-loving guidance and for visiting www.davemoser.com"
It got even better: After having taken a couple of bites from the chocolate bar his clients would discover three sample pictures between the chocolate and the packaging. What a great way to get people interested and actually make them think about what they are seeing!
Needless to say the campaign was a huge success. One of his clients, a major entrepreneurship magazine, called it the best promotional campaign they have seen in 15 years! We are happy to have been a part of this idea and would love to explore similar opportunities in the future. If you think this is exactly what you have been looking for shoot us an email and let us know what you have in mind.
For more information on 'The Admiral', check out Dave Moser Photography.
Does your dad love mouth watering chocolate? If so, we've got two great new favorite bars made specially in mind for Dads everywhere.
• Dark Chocolate with Almonds, Raisins, and Caramel Pieces
• Milk Chocolate with Banana Chips, Butter Toasted Peanuts, and Kit Kat Bars
Both bars feature our, "Happy Father's Day" plaque, but if you'd prefer to make your own, the plaque is still available as a limited time topping in our creation station.
In addition, remember to check out our new Hot Chocolate on a Spoon available in three great flavors, which can be found in the Favorites Page.
From the Chocomize Headquarters, we wish everyone a Happy and safe Father's Day!
Calling all Chocoholics,
Chocomize Dark Chocolate Bars will now feature 73% cocoa content! Although some might assume this increase will add an extra bitter taste, its safe to say that our new dark chocolate will still keep the same great balance between smooth taste and strong flavor. Wow, I'm salivating just thinking about the new recipe now.
A bar of dark chocolate a day keeps the doctor away?
Not exactly, but cocoa beans do contain flavonoids, which act as antioxidants. Antioxidants protect the body from aging along with decreasing the likelihood of heart disease. Dark chocolate actually contains nearly 8 times the number of antioxidants found in strawberries! Flavonoids can also help relax blood pressure and reduce bad cholesterol by up to 10%.
With a rich full body blend filled with distinctive flavor, we know you'll enjoy every last minute of our new dark chocolate base.
Love Hot Chocolate? Love Chocomize? Wish the two were together? Well now they are! We’re pleased to announce the arrival of our newest product…Hot Chocolate On a Spoon!
Here at the Chocomize Headquarters, we’ve been working hard to bring you the latest and greatest in chocolate innovation. After many long nights up tasting chocolate (so much chocolate) and experimenting with flavors, we’re proud to bring you our newest addition that we know you’ll love. All you have to do is put your Hot Chocolate On a Spoon in a mug filled with milk, heat the milk and chocolate till hot, stir until the chocolate has completely dissolved, and finally the best part…enjoy the delicious hot chocolate!
Initially, we have 3 flavors to enhance your hot chocolate experience, but you can expect that number to greatly increase as we continue to perform tests here at the factory.
• Milk Chocolate with Creamy Hazelnut
• Dark Chocolate with Nutty Amaretto
• White Chocolate with Vanilla
Look for them on our Favorites Page!
Let us know what you think about our Hot Chocolate On a Spoon. What flavors would you like in your Hot Chocolate?
Remember back in August of last year when Chocomize had broke the $2,000 mark on our charity count? Well now the charity count is close to approaching the $10,000 mark!
As many of you know by now, Chocomize donates 1% of the proceeds from each order to one of our selected charities chosen by you. Our newest charity, A Drink For Tomorrow (ADFT) has already raised over $2,300!
Founded several years ago by Stephanie Weaver, ADFT is a non-profit organization raising awareness of the lack of access to clean water sanitation in impoverished communities around the world. All of the money donated is used to help implement water projects and teach sanitary habits. In 2009, ADFT was able to complete its first project, a dug well in West Bengal, India that now brings 140 people arsenic-free water. Through a significant amount of growth after two years, they were able to fund 5 similar projects in Haiti, Botswana, Lesotho, Sierra Leone, and Guatemala.
We chose ADFT as one of our feature charities because we love supporting fellow local entrepreneurs like Stephanie. We’re excited to work with ADFT and look forward to a great partnership. For more information on A Drink For Tomorrow or any other of the charities Chocomize supports, visit our Charity Conscious page.
Hey Chocomize Chocolate Fans,
Known for having one of the best ranked mini bars in the hotel industry, Trump International Hotel in Chicago is about to get even better with its newest addition…Chocomize custom chocolate bars! Our personalized chocolate bars are now available at the Trump Chicago Hotel. Future guests of the hotel can look forward to four mouth-watering varieties.
• Dark Chocolate with Pineapple, Cranberries, and Coconut Flakes
• Dark Chocolate with 23 Karat Gold Flakes
• Milk Chocolate with Almonds, Gold Flakes, and Dried Cherries
• White Chocolate with Cranberries and Crunchy Almond Croquant
With Chocomize chocolate stocked in each room, Trump Chicago will continue its success providing the finest mini bar. We hope all of Trump Chicago Hotel’s guests have as much fun eating them as we had making them!
Chocomize would like to welcome the newest summer intern to the hardest-working team in customizable candy websites. I’m a senior at Pace University majoring in Finance, and a veteran chocolate-eater. In my free time, I like playing sports outside, traveling, and eating. On my first day I already tried the milk, dark, and white chocolate bars, but can’t wait to taste all of the 300 million combinations. I’m excited for a great summer with Chocomize and look forward to contributing to Chocomize’s growing success.
