Fossa Chocolate

Home: Singapore
Founders: Jay, Yilina & Charis
Chocolate Model: Bean to bar
Production: Small batch
Specialities: Single-origin, tea and locally inspired chocolate
Known for: Asian flavours and Singapore food-inspired bars
Visit Fossa Chocolate

Exploring Cacao, Culture and Flavour in Singapore

At Fossa Chocolate, making a chocolate bar begins with raw cacao beans.

Inside its Singapore workshop, the team roasts, cracks and winnows cacao before refining and conching it into chocolate. Bars are produced in small batches and individually packaged by hand, allowing the chocolate makers to adjust their approach according to the character of each cacao.

But cacao origin tells only part of the Fossa story.

The company has developed an unusually creative approach to bean-to-bar chocolate, combining carefully sourced cacao with tea, spices, fruit and flavours inspired by Singapore and the wider Asian food culture.

Three Founders, One Experimental Approach

Fossa is led by co-founders Jay, Yilina and Charis.

Jay and Charis focus on chocolate making, while Yilina leads business development and partnerships. Their different skills have helped shape a company where technical chocolate production and creative experimentation sit comfortably beside one another.

The team works from cacao beans rather than purchased couverture. Beans are roasted before their shells are removed, then refined and conched into chocolate.

Fossa says it selects high-quality cacao that has been carefully cultivated and fermented, paying a premium for beans with the flavour complexity needed for craft chocolate. That foundation allows the company to produce straightforward single-origin bars as well as far more adventurous creations.

Single-Origin Chocolate Reveals the Cacao

Fossa’s single-origin collection demonstrates the more traditional side of its bean-to-bar work. Current chocolates include cacao from Tanzania’s Kilombero Valley, Ecuador, Uganda, Malaysia and the Philippines, among other origins.

With its Tanzania Kokoa Kamili 72% bar, for example, Fossa highlights naturally occurring notes it describes as biscuit, green apple and cream. The bar contains only cacao and cane sugar, allowing the origin to remain the focus.

Yet Fossa rarely stops at traditional origin chocolate. For the Singapore maker, cacao also becomes a canvas for exploring other flavours.

Tea Becomes Part of the Chocolate

Tea is particularly important to Fossa’s identity. Its collection has included chocolates made with Da Hong Pao, Rou Gui, jasmine green tea, Earl Grey, chrysanthemum, Uji hojicha, Tie Guan Yin, Liu Bao and Masala Chai.

Rather than using tea simply as a novelty flavour, Fossa pairs different teas with cacao selected to complement their aromatic profiles.

A Masala Chai dark milk chocolate, for instance, combines cacao from Malaysia’s Semai community with Darjeeling and Assam tea and seven spices. Another creation brings together Peruvian cacao, Ethiopian coffee and jasmine green tea. The result places chocolate within a much wider Asian tasting tradition.

Turning Singapore’s Food Culture into Chocolate

Some of Fossa’s most memorable bars look even closer to home. Teh Tarik, Singapore’s familiar pulled milk tea, has been reimagined as dark milk chocolate using Ecuadorian cacao and pine-smoked Darjeeling tea.

Other creations have drawn inspiration from Nanyang kopi, kueh salat, pulut hitam, salted egg cereal, rojak, soy milk and youtiao, satay sauce and min jiang kueh.

Fossa has even interpreted Bak Kut Teh, the peppery Singaporean pork-rib soup, through chocolate. Its version combines Bolivian cacao with white and black pepper, star anise, cinnamon and garlic.

Not every combination will appeal to every chocolate lover — and that may be precisely the point. These bars demonstrate how bean-to-bar chocolate can communicate place and culture through more than cacao origin alone.

A Singapore Perspective on Craft Chocolate

Fossa represents a younger generation of chocolate makers expanding the definition of fine chocolate. Its single-origin bars respect the flavour inherent in cacao. Its flavoured collections then move beyond traditional European combinations, drawing instead on teas, ingredients, desserts and everyday foods familiar across Singapore and Asia.

That combination gives the company a particularly strong identity. Fossa isn’t simply making craft chocolate in Singapore. Increasingly, it is making chocolate that tastes unmistakably connected to Singapore.

Featured in the latest edition of Chocolate Affairs Magazine.