TBROS began in 2017 with a mission to build a sustainable supply chain from tree to bar of fine-flavor cacao in Vietnam. When Truong Minh Thang, a food science and industrial engineering master’s student, learned fine flavor cacao wasn’t being made into fine flavor chocolate by any Vietnamese companies, he and an old friend from high school decided to start their chocolate company.
TBROS runs a farm in the Dak Lak province where they ferment their cacao using a uniquely developed method with other wet cacao beans they buy directly from neighbor farms in the region.
A company of 41 people in Da Nang, a central coastal city, TBROS takes great pride in its product being a reflection of the many working Vietnamese hands that produced it, from the farmers to the chocolatiers to the artists and designers. The handmade paper of their 86g bars is a beautiful expression of this notion. Made from the fiber of water coconuts ubiquitous in the Mekong Delta and hand-rendered drawings of the Vietnamese countryside, designer Chinh Ba worked closely with Thang for years to bring the packaging to life. He describes it like this:
“A packaging that just needs to be picked up, so you can see the roughness of the farmer's hands, rustic, but full of love, passion, and pride in the value of Vietnamese agricultural products.”
