I know that you like to get some insider information here on this blog, and I thought I'd introduce you to the two visionary chocri founders, Micha(el) and Franz, who invented the concept of customized chocolate bars. You can read my interviews with them here (Micha) and here (Franz), but here's my quick roundup about them.

Micha and Franz actually met in High School, and discovered soon that they shared something: the entrepreneurial bug. They both grew up not far from Berlin, Germany, and were young kids when the wall fell. Many others in their generation actually left that region of Germany - but not the two of them. Even before graduating from high school, they started their first venture together, and soon they were in the business of chocolate. Well, chocolate fountains and chocolate supplies for those fountains. One day Franz was desperately trying to come up for a great birthday gift for his girlfriend, and faced with lack of alternatives and time, he melted some of the chocolate fountain chocolate and decorated it with his girlfriends favorite toppings - the first chocri bar was born.

Word got around of this gift, and soon Franz's first buddy asked if he could have such a customized chocolate bar for his mom. Franz and Micha, gifted with lots of entrepreneurial spirit, saw a business opportunity. Personalized chocolate bars might sound like a wonderful, obviously great idea to us now, but keep in mind that back then, in 2008, nothing like this existed! Without any market research on a big scale, Micha and Franz bet on their idea to catch on - and boy, did they hit the nerve of time.

Franz and Micha are currently still in university, but that doesn't keep them from pressing on with chocri - as you all well know, chocri recently expanded to the US, and the UK is next. Germans are known for being quite risk averse, but the two chocri founders have a refreshingly healthy mix of daring new things, but also the amazing ability of constantly coming up with things that people might not have thought about yet themselves, but are enthusiastic about once they exist. Thanks to them, you can always expect chocri to keep innovating, to constantly improve, and to grow.

If you'd like to see Franz and Micha, check out our Youtube Channel for a video with the two.

*What would you like to know about the chocri founders? Comment, and I'll forward the question!

Happy Friday Chocriholics!

As always, we had some great ideas for chocolate bar names this week, and here are my five favorite chocolate bar names:

• Mine (Dark Chocolate with Blueberries, Coriander, Jalapeños, Goji Berries and Black Sesame)
  
• Cherry Blossom (Milk Chocolate with Sour Cherries, Coriander and Mini Flower Decoration)
  
• hazelalmoricecapcrunch (White Chocolate with Roasted Almonds, Hazelnut Brittle, Cappuccino Chocolate Drops, Rice Crispies in Chocolate Coating and Toffee)
  
• Good Night (Sleep Well) (Dark Chocolate with Organic Chamomile and Bourbon Vanilla)
• Eva's Scrumdiddlyuptious Chocolate Bar (Dark Chocolate with Marzipan Rose, Coconut Shavings, Marshmallow, Bourbon Vanilla and Orange)
  

Make your chocolate bar your own! Put your name on it!

The men are coming back! Still behind, but bars are being designed and bloggers are being tagged.

Recent additions to the male roster: The Candy Gurus, a blog full of unusually manly candy reviews, made two yummy bars:

You gotta love the names, too!

Did you know that you can buy all the bars the bloggers make directly from our website? Get your inspiration from the advanced foodies and gourmets, and benefit from their creativity. All the bars are nicely listed here.

Who do you think will win the blog race?

We here at chocri love giving you power that others just cannot give you. Besides the fact that with us, you can create your own chocolate bar and give it your own name, we love asking you for your opinion in big decisions such as our name (decided by a survey) and now... the inside of our packaging!

The past week or so we received great submissions from you and are now excited to put them up for a vote. You can vote from now until Friday.

We got a lot (a looot!) of great phrases, but only the 10 best ones (per your vote) will be printed in the inside of our packaging.

Take the survey (takes 3 minutes max): Vote now for your favorite packaging phrase!

Because there's so many of them, we allowed for multiple answers - just click on all the ones you like a lot, and we'll print the ones with the most votes. Thank you for your input! Remember: the submission with the best votes gets a $50 gift certificate, the runner up receives a $20 gift certificate, and the third place is rewarded with a $10 gift certificate.

Oh, and by the way - how was Valentine's Day? Got any cute or fun stories to share? The comment box is your playground...

p.s. We took the liberty to exclude or alter submissions that were grammatically incorrect or simply too long to fit in. Sorry!

Happy Friday everyone!

I hope you had a great week. We sure did, - I have many great names from you for you again! You love your personalized chocolate bars! Here we go, in no particular order, the nicest names of this week:

• Spice Rack (Dark Chocolate with Cinnamon, Ground Chili, Bourbon Vanilla and Black Sesame)

• doodoofutfut bark(Dark Chocolate with Cranberries, Caramel Chocolate Drops, Sea Salt and Nougat)

• Valentine Cocoa Elixir (Dark Chocolate with Roasted Almonds, Sea Salt, Real Gold Flakes, Coconut Shavings and Bourbon Vanilla)

• Pesto (Dark Chocolate with Multicolored Pepper, Basil and Pine Nuts)

• Sweet Dee's Sweets (Dark Chocolate with Ground Chili and Cayenne Pepper)

Aren't those fun?

Two more things:

Speaking of all this creativity, you can still send us your submissions for the phrases to be printed on the inside of your packaging! The picture on the left of this text shows the ideas flowing on our Facebook post - but really we take submissions any way you like... as a comment on this blog post, on our tumblr site. We'll then compile them all for you to vote on, and the 10 most popular ones- are printed! Imagine getting a chocolate bar in a packaging that you helped design!

Also, we're having a wine & spirit & chocolate tasting in New York coming up! On March 13th, we're pairing up with the amazing Bottlerocket in New York for an exquisite tasting. Personalized chocolate bar and wine combinations! Save the date! Saturday March 13, from 3-6pm More info.

Valentine's Day is on Sunday! Give the power to create.

I intended this blog post to be only about our recent coverage on TV, but we've gotten such great mentions lately, I thought I'd sum a few more up:

chocri on TV!

In a short amount of time, two ladies (Melissa Meyers and Taryn Scher) decided to recommend us on public television.

Last weekend, chocri was part of NBC Weekend Today AM Best Kept Secrets: Valentine's Day Gift Picks with Ask Melissa - now we are not a secret anymore! :)
As Melissa said: "These are customized chocolate bars by chocri, and you make your own personalized chocolate bar...and they are SO yummy, I mean..."

Then on Monday Taryn Scher brought some chocri bars with her to "Your Carolina", a show on CBS 7. She introduced chocri with the words "This is my new favorite website!" - which made us very very proud. Check out the video!

chocri Elsewhere

Then, we're very proud, we were suggested as a Valentine's Day gift for him by Glamour (see picture on the left) as one of 12 creative ways to say "I love you".

Besides those, we're always happy when bloggers point us out to their readers. Just yesterday, "Food Gal" reviewed the chocri bars she had made. Her suggestion: Use chamomile flowers on your chocolate bar! "They’re so lovely to look at — almost as if the blooms had been preserved in the bar as in the pages of a scrapbook. Their floral nature gives the milk chocolate a really memorable twist."

Are you from the press/ media or do you write a blog? Hit us up - on our press section or by email - we'd love to hear from you!

Chocri is a co-creator. We provide the modules, but you do the magic and combine those modules to the chocolate bar of your dreams.

That makes it very, very important for us to be in touch with you. We want to hear from and about you in every way we can - what "module" you are missing, what you would like to be different, but also what you like and what you don't. And - no need keep this a secret- we also hope that you will tell people that are equally creative as you about us so they can co-create as well.

That's why were are thrilled about every Facebook Fan and Twitter Follower, and today, we are proud to announce that we reached the 400 Follower mark on twitter:

You're not one of them yet? Please follow us! We'd love to talk to you, too!

See you there

Too bad gift certificate names don't show up in our system, because I bet you have a lot of cool names going on there as well..

But for now, here come the top 5 bar names of this week:

• A Bite of Brilliance (Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt, Pineapples and Bacon in Valentine's Day packaging)
  
• Orangeasian (Dark Chocolate with Ginger, Wasabi Peanuts, Jalapeños and Orange)
  
• Heart Attack! Real man's chocolate bar (Milk Chocolate with Roasted Almonds, Honey Wheat Flakes, Cinnamon Cornflakes, Toffee and Imitation Bacon)
  
• Ed's Hot Date (with Kate) (Dark Chocolate with Ground Chili and Date Bits)
• Hawaiian Colada (Milk Chocolate with Flower Mix, Macadamia Nuts, Coconut Shavings, Pineapples and Bourbon Vanilla)
  

Love it!

What would you name your customized chocolate bar?

Welcome back - we had a short break in our blog race, which we used to build a nifty blograce-page that lists all the bars that have been made.

The Blog Relay Race

As reported before, we started this race between female and male bloggers. Female bloggers are one team, and male bloggers are the other. Once a blogger is tagged by a team member, (s)he tags two more bloggers. "Tagging" means designing a bar for someone - and the best part is - when the race is over, the bloggers get those bars that were created for them! The end of the race is when a team has reached 100 bars first. So far, the ladies are in the lead - can the gents catch up?

The Chocolate Bars

Amazing bars have been created in the process of this race - and it isn't even over yet. Some of the finest food bloggers and connoisseurs have been creating chocolate bars with chocri. That's why we decided to take them out of the comments and emails, and list them neatly on our blograce-page page. Now you can be inspired by their creations, maybe get some ideas on what to gift a man vs. woman, and what toppings complement each other well.

We are looking forward to all the other amazing bars that will be created in this race. Who do you think will win the race?

Dear chocris,

We all know you're super creative. I mean, you create your own personalized chocolate bars!
Today, we'd like your help and creativity for something else: The text in the inside of our packaging!

As we're developing our English packaging (yes,... a little late... sorry) we want to keep up something we've been doing in Germany: Our packages have 10 different slogans or comments in the inside. They are witty, sometimes rhyme and mostly make you laugh. We want to do the same in the U.S. And while we have a few, we want to incorporate YOUR ideas!

Give us your ideas in a comment to this post, as a Twitter mention to @chocridotcom or as a Facebook post on our wall. Or even as an email to carmen@chocri.com. We'll collect them all, and in the end, you can all vote on the Top 10. Deadline is February 15th.

Feel free to submit every idea you have, we don't want to limit your creativity. Please note that it has to be English, and short and sweet so it fits in the packaging above our URL. And we'll have to keep any offensive comments out, I'm sure you agree. Also keep in mind that you can't see the slogan/comment until after you ate some of the chocolate - or even, heaven help, after the chocolate's been eaten.

Of course we'll reward your creativity! The person whose idea gets the most votes receives a $50 chocri gift certificate. The runner up receives a $20 gift certificate, and the third place is rewarded with a $10 gift certificate.

What are you waiting for? Sharpen those pencils and start throwing those poetic concoctions.

For inspirations, see the list below:

• Empty already? That was quick! Get more on www.createmychocolate.com
  
• If there’s no chocri in heaven I’m not going! www.createmychocolate.com
  
• Whether chili or gold decor - chocolate like this, you won’t find in a store. www.createmychocolate.com
  
• 10 billion? I’ll take a challenge! www.createmychocolate.com
  
• This creation is a sensation. www.createmychocolate.com
  
• Life is a box of chocolates... you never know what you’re gonna get. WRONG. www.createmychocolate.com
  
• Design. Mine! Design mine: www.createmychocolate.com
  
• Looks like someone ate all your chocolate again, hm? www.createmychocolate.com
  

p.s. If you like one of those but think you could improve it, feel free to submit that improvement as a suggestion, too.

So, unfortunately the deadline for Valentine's day chocri orders has passed, but don't despair, we have something sweet and beautiful for you to replace it: Gift Certificates.

Instead of agonizing over whether you sweetheart prefers roasted peanuts or maybe rather roasted almonds - let her or him decide! Designing the bars is half the fun, so it's not only a gift of chocolate, but also a gift of entertainment!

A $40 gift certificate should allow your Valentine to go quite wild on our site, and you get it delivered to your inbox instantly, any time of the day or night. You can also print your own, beautiful certificate with our templates right off this website.

Here's how this works:
1. Buy the gift certificate - just add it to your shopping cart and check out like you regularly would
2. Rejoice as you receive your code in an e-mail a few minutes after your purchase
3. Visit the Gift Certificate Template page
4. Enter all the information and your personal message
5. Get the completed certificate as a pdf and print it with our own pinter
6. Give the gift certificate to the happy recipient and rejoice together :)

Spread the fun of designing your own chocolate bar!

We've been cooking (figuratively) and have something new for you in the world of personalized chocolate bars!

As you know, with more than 100 topping choices and three base chocolates, you have more than 10 billion combinations at your fingertips, which leaves you plenty of room for your creativity.

Or maybe not?

We get many suggestions from you for new toppings, and we are grateful for each and everyone one of them, thank you and please keep them coming!

We really do our best to implement these great ideas. That's why we thought up the following:

The Topping Of The Month!

Since we know that chocriholics are curious and keen on everything that is new, unknown and maybe also a little bit extraordinary, the next few months we want to take you on a journey to the never ending fields of culinary extravaganzas, bizarre delicacies and tongue-tingling aromas.

Every month, we introduce you to a novel, unusual topping, which (while stocks last) you can use for your chocri creation.

As always, we want your input and suggestions! Feel free to suggest really weird toppings, the only criteria is: it must be edible ;-) Just send us an email with the subject "Topping of the month" to hello@chocri.com or post your topping wish on our Facebook Page. We are looking forward to your suggestions!

Like this, we hope to enable each and everyone of you to create that chocolate bar of your wildest dreams. And who knows, if a topping is especially popular, it might end up with its buddies in the permanent assortment ;-)

Today, on the first of February, we start with the following topping:

Grains Of Paradise

No kidding, that's what they are called! And from today on, they are in the category "Spices", eagerly awaiting you and your chocolate creation.
Grains Of Paradise, also called Guinea Grains, are from Africa and are typically used in the Northern African cuisine. They are spicy with lots of aroma, and a fruity-warm taste. The combination with chocolate is, well, heavenly. This is a great topping for everyone who likes it spicy, but not too spicy. And let's be honest: ... who ever ate a chocolate bar with "grains of paradise"? This is really something extraordinary!

Let's go, you the adventurous and global gourmets! You won't regret. Enjoy!

Also:
Don't forget today is the last day to order for Valentine's Day