From kitchen experiments to gold medals

About a decade ago, Foundry Chocolate owner, David Herrick did not set out to build a global brand. He was a stay at home dad, having swapped roles with his wife Janelle so one parent could be there full-time. However, one day while his child was napping, a magazine article about a small chocolate maker in London caught his attention, and with it came a quiet but disruptive idea – perhaps chocolate did not need to be made in a factory.

“I thought you could make chocolate without some huge factory so I went and brought some craft chocolate from a shop in Auckland, and I ate it, but I didn’t like it. But I don’t know why, I couldn’t shake this idea of being able to make chocolate. I parked it for a while.

Returning to it once his child was at kindy, that curiosity quickly turned into research. The first attempts were crude and messy. Cacao beans were roasted in the oven, cracked with a wine bottle inside a snaplock bag, and the husk blasted away using a hairdryer. Several ruined domestic appliances later, Herrick was left with a hot, gritty paste that burned his tongue. It tasted terrible, but he had made chocolate. After confessing to Janelle that he had blown up their appliances, they ran some basic numbers. “We thought, this could be something. So we bought a basic stone grinder, which we didn’t know was broken, and basic coffee roasters and I started sourcing single origin cacao as we had worked out that the single origin route, where you don’t add any flavour to the chocolate, was the way we wanted to go.”

It also aligned with practical realities. As Janelle follows a dairy and gluten free diet, making chocolate without additives was both a personal and commercial decision.

Cacao grows within a narrow belt either side of the Equator, much like coffee, and Herrick discovered that beans from different regions produced distinct flavour profiles, much like wine or whisky.

“Then we worked out that if you roast them differently and you age them differently, you start making all this chocolate that tastes really different.”

By 2018, the project moved from experiment to intention. Herrick tested 51 single origins and narrowed them to a top six. Friends and family liked them, but he wanted independent validation, so he handed the bars to a visiting chocolate judge in Auckland.

“They went very quiet,” he says. “Then they swore at me. Apparently what they were eating was that good.”

Still working from home, the business had one major advantage. Overheads were minimal. The model was low volume, high margin, and that was not an accident.

Herrick says they had a ridiculous five-year stretch goal to win a global award.

“Nine months in, I got a phone call asking ‘Can you come to London on Tuesday?’ as we had won the Global Brand experience award from the Academy of Chocolate.

Now Foundry has won a Gold medal and a total of seven medals at the global Academy of Chocolate Awards 2025, announced last month.

The competition attracts more than 1400 entries, which are blind judged by  judges across the world.

The secret, David says, is in the way they roast it, and the care they take testing and experimenting to create the chocolate and the flavours that worked.

“We’ve worked out we can bring all this flavour through as industrial chocolate is made from industrial cacao beans, which are a commodity product that grow on yield and disease resistance and how big they can get, so there is a trade off on that with flavour, so you have to burn it out which is why it often tastes bitter.

We’re working with exquisite craft cacao that is grown and tended for flavour notes that you want to keep, so I’m roasting to maintain flavour or develop it more, not roast it out and make it taste bitter.”

The business survived Covid and eventually outgrew the family home. Two years ago, it moved into a dedicated site in Silverdale, a deliberate step taken only once demand and numbers justified it, Herrick says. Today, the team includes four part-timers and Foundry chocolate is sold online across New Zealand, through premium retailers, and increasingly overseas, including North America, the UK and mainland China.

Ironically, success has created new constraints. Global cacao prices have tripled, supply must be secured annually, and demand now exceeds production. Growth is possible, but only if it does not compromise quality, he says.

“Our original stretch goal was ridiculous,” Herrick says. “We wanted to make the best chocolate in the world. Now we are being told we are among the top dark chocolate makers globally. The question is how we stay there and remain profitable.”

For Herrick, the lesson is clear. Start small. Learn everything yourself. Keep overheads low. Let quality lead, and let growth follow, carefully.

“I’ve no regrets,” he says. “I just wish I had started earlier.”