How did you two meet?Amit Oz: We met here in Hong Kong and dated casually. After the second time we got together, our shared passion for food, cooking and flavour became obvious and then things got serious pretty quickly. We cooked a lot together, going down a rabbit hole of every food we loved, and chocolate was one of them. Celine Herren: Cooking is a central part of our relationship—we would spend our weekends making pasta from scratch. I am from Switzerland and I could only ever find Lindt chocolate at the local supermarkets and I found the choice of chocolate limited. We wanted to see how flavours—mainly savoury—would taste with chocolate. The first flavours we tried were rosemary, paprika and cumin. We also attempted to make a chocolate with port but that one was not a success—we didn’t understand anything about chocolate then.
What inspired you to start Conspiracy Chocolate together?Oz: Our friends pushed us to “just try” to sell some of the chocolate we’d been making and it became an easy leap. Initially, we stood outside our building in Sai Ying Pun with a tray of chocolates to let strangers try some. Our creative approaches are opposite to each other. I am a technical and structured cook, and Celine is an intuitive one. These two approaches combined well. I was a headhunter, as well as a bartender and cook, and Celine was a programme manager in a start-up accelerator before this. Between the two of us we had a good network and the ability to bring the project to life.Herren: This was a passion that got out of hand. We initially thought about starting a soap collection with masculine scents. We didn’t really want to start a business together, but we have a lot of creativity, and we were looking for outlets to express it. Amit is always thinking about new flavours and creative ways of doing things while I like my project plans and organisation.
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Amit Oz and Celine Herren of Conspiracy Chocolate (Photo: Zed Leets/ Tatler Hong Kong)
You blend Swiss chocolate-making traditions with Mediterranean spices and herbs. How do your heritages influence the flavours and products you create? Oz: My family cooks food with an abundance of spices. My grandfather ran a restaurant in Tel Aviv for 60 years and I was inspired by the fresh and strong flavours. My grandmother cooked a lot of North African, Jewish and Arabic food using another set of spices—lots of heat and earthy, fruity flavours. Celine’s family’s [who are Swiss] cooking is very much driven by nature with health at the centre. Today, our chocolate takes inspiration from Mediterranean and Asian cuisine. Our oolong, Sichuan peppercorn, genmaicha [Japanese brown rice green tea], miso ganache, dashi ganache and salted egg ganache are our best sellers. Living in Hong Kong has us using tropical flavours where possible. A big reason for this has been our R&D chef, Zarah Tang, joining in 2021—a Hongkonger with a sharp palate. Zarah is a chef and sake sommelier and has been a powerful force behind Conspiracy’s Asian direction.Herren: As time went on and as we became more curious about Asian flavours, we started to cook Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese food at home. Our style evolved to bring these kinds of flavours to our chocolate. Hongkongers are curious and love to eat; discovering new food trends and styles is like a sport here, so when people see oolong tea or Sichuan chocolate, they have to know what it tastes like.
Have you learnt any useful lessons from chocolate experiments that didn’t go as planned?Oz: We once ate a delicious octopus dish in [Middle Eastern restaurant] Bedu made with a beetroot and cumin sauce. The next six months were spent developing a beetroot and cumin chocolate. While it is a delicious combination, it didn’t pair well with the natural tasting notes in our Dak Lak Vietnam terroir of cacao. It was like matching trousers and a shirt in two shades of the same colour.Herren: Not one bar was sold, but thankfully we only made 20 bars to test the market with, and we ended up eating them all. It was also quite early on so we didn’t have a following that would try our weird flavours. Who knows, maybe it would work today.
Amit Oz (Photo: Zed Leets/ Tatler Hong Kong)
Conspiracy Chocolate has some very high-profile fans—from hotels to shops and restaurants. Was it easy to attract such customers?Oz: The first chef that took a chance on us was Daniel Guevara Quintero [former executive chef at The Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong]. Richard Ekkebus once posted on his Instagram that ours was his favourite chocolate. It’s all been very organic. Today, we work with and look up to chefs like Ekkebus, Umberto Bombana, Marc Mantovani and Joris Rousseau amongst others. Big chefs have big visions and we've learned and improved every time we’ve work with one. Almost every chef has left a mark on our products and challenged us to improve things. Before working with Richard Ekkebus, our chocolate was ground for three days—but he actually prefers a smoother texture to his chocolate and we began grinding it for four days, sometimes even five, and now we do this to all our chocolate. We learned a lot through this!
But it’s not all been smooth sailing. Two years into double-timing our real jobs with running Conspiracy, a multimillion-dollar contract with one of the world’s highest ranked luxury hotels started materialising. It made us just enough money to quit our jobs to run Conspiracy full-time. Then Covid-19 hit in 2020 and it dawned on us how much the hospitality industry was about to change gears, and the contract was pulled. This was painful. We also almost lost the company by crashing hard financially, twice—once in 2022 and once in 2023. The cause was a mix of our lack of experience and market forces. We’ve had a lot of bad luck, but when we do get good luck, we really work with it. So many chefs have come to our factory and bought from us—and so many of them have not. We don’t give up, because we want to spend our time making chocolate. If we get paid a lot or little, it doesn’t matter as long as we can keep going.
You have a guidebook on how to be an “Oompa Loompa”. Tell us more about this.Oz: For the first two years of Conspiracy, while we still had full-time jobs, we couldn’t afford our own licensed factory, but we quickly grew too big to make things at home. We rented a space from established food factories during their off time. We spent all week at home roasting and peeling cacao beans and grinding chocolate, and took this chocolate to the kitchen on nights and weekends to produce [the bars]. In 2019, Celine’s job took her to Bangkok for three months. So, we made this little guide with basic instructions on how to mould chocolate and asked friends to help me mould chocolate on weekends, while she was away. They would come over and spend 10 intense hours moulding chocolate with me. Once Celine got back to Hong Kong, word had spread, and friends of friends started signing up. Herren: The deal was they help us, and we cook them lunch and they can eat the broken bars of chocolate. Pretty fair deal if you ask me! But it was not easy work. We only had one full weekend day and one evening to make all of our chocolates.
Celine Herren (Photo: Zed Leets/ Tatler Hong Kong)
How do you ensure that your chocolate production remains sustainable?Oz: We won’t source cacao from a farm until we visit it in person and are able to interview the staff on the farm and audit their set-up. We are convinced that healthy organic soil and a well-paid workforce will make the best cacao. Another key rule is to make everything we can from scratch, never buying a processed ingredient unless we are deeply familiar with it and its process.Herren: As a small business, it is easier to be sustainably minded from the offset because of our size. Thankfully for us, the nature of our business means we work closely with farmers.. We are also purists in the way that we want to control any ingredients that go into our chocolate. We want to roast our own nuts based on how they taste raw and define the grinding level ourselve.. Fresh ingredients will always be tastier and fresher; we can [adjust] them to taste exactly the way we want. We also want to be zero waste—we work closely with the Landmark Mandarin Oriental on this. We give them the leftover syrup that we use to steep our oolong tea [for the Taiwan Oolong bar] and they use it in their welcome cocktails.
How do you hope to contribute to education about Asian cacao?Oz: Superb cacao terroirs should be as famous as superb wine terroirs. A wine master needs to learn how his plant comes to life and how [wine] develops via fermentation, and a cacao farmer is the same. We were the first to export from the farm we work with in Vietnam, and today, what we don’t buy out of their annual production is sold globally. We put their name on our packaging and celebrate their identity, encouraging them to increase prices on good crop years and introduce them to makers outside of Hong Kong. As a result, they’ve grown their business in a healthy way. Asian cacao farms are relatively new and aren’t known by many in the chocolate world, let alone in restaurant kitchens. By celebrating Asian cacao, we change hearts and minds about this crop that’s [historically] been known for being from South America and Africa.Herren: Like a [superior] French wine, we hope that Asian cacao farms will become famous for their terroir and quality. This already exists in Latin America farms. Each Asian country has a local bean-to-bar maker that uses local beans. We hope to bring some different Asia cacao origins to Hong Kong and beyond.
Are there any chocolate myths you’d like to debunk?Oz: Chocolate isn’t supposed to be bitter! The unpleasant, face-twitching bitter flavour common in dark chocolate is almost always the result of over-roasting or burning poorly fermented cacao to erase its mouldy or sour notes. Chocolate should be intense and complex, similar to coffee or whisky.Secondly, chocolate is not necessarily unhealthy. Cacao on its own is a superfood. Ours has around 14 per cent protein and is made up of all 20 amino acids and 54 per cent cacao butter, which has a very positive fatty acid profile that should lower bad cholesterol. To top it off, it is also euphoric thanks to the presence of theobromine and can actually make you feel happy.Herren: Five thousand years ago, chocolate was a bitter, spicy, savoury drink used by the Mayan warriors. It was coarsely ground— the polar opposite to the sweet, milky, smooth chocolate bar we know today.
You were recently in Bali working with Conservana Spices, a company restoring biodiversity in the rainforests. Tell us more about this.Oz: Conservana is an incredible project. They divided the rainforest in Bali into 221 patches and each patch has been given to a family to grow cacao, vanilla, nutmeg and coffee, to bring wildlife back to the forest. The project has been ongoing for four years and has seen measurable increase in its wildlife. After four years, they had the first cacao harvest. The plant is healthy and delicious. The next step is working out a fermentation recipe, and this is where we come in. I am a huge fermentation nerd and I am providing recipes and designs to test in order to take the existing cacao flavour to its highest complexity, ultimately increasing the value of the crop, which will help the village families who grow the cacao.
What positive changes can bean-to-bar chocolate make in the world?Oz: As we’ve seen in Bali, when planted among other plants in the right ecosystem the cacao tree is a powerful catalyst for creating livelihood and [bringing life back to a forest]. Quality chocolate made from healthy cacao can make a very positive impact on people’s lives.Herren: In the same vein as sourdough bread, craft beer and natural wine, bean-to-bar chocolate tells the story of an ancient craft where natural ingredients are processed slowly to deliver all the flavours naturally found in the plant. I think bean-to-bar is gaining in popularity because consumers now want transparency. They want to know where the ingredients come from, what is inside the product and how it is made. Chocolate making is not new—it’s 5,000 years old. But after being so transformed with the industrial revolution into something sweet and oily with minimal amounts of cacao, it has been reversed to return to what it initially was—a crazy, tasty and nutritionally rich plant.
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