hamani Chocolate, Tauranga

A dairy free daughter, a crazy idea, naivety and some courage is the recipe that created hamani. We had the old 'light bulb' moment one evening when talking about where to get some Easter treats for our daughter who is dairy intolerant. Each year we struggled to find anything so we usually ended up making our own. We were throwing around some ideas about creating more allergy friendly chocolate range, when Darren turned to me and said: “This would be fun, I could be Willy Wonka and you could be an umpa-lumpa” I won't add what was said after that...After year or so that idea became our dream. We wanted to make real chocolates that more people could enjoy.

Our handcrafted chocolates had to be a little bit different and have a sense of fun about them. They had to be fresh, dairy-free and taste really good to help change a common perception that dairy free = not that nice tasting. To do this, we source some of the best New Zealand ingredients - we grow some fantastic produce in NZ! We love being able to support other kiwi businesses and in doing so it leaves a smaller environmental footprint (win:win). Our chocolates have no artificial flavours or preservatives so they perfectly showcase the amazing ingredients we use.

During the creation of our chocolates we tended to change our minds many times and change them back again, until we were both happy with the flavours and textures of our first range of chocolates (there will be plenty more flavours to follow in the near future). It was challenging to try and meet all our allergy friendly ideals and to keep things as natural as possible, there were no recipes out there we could turn to so everything had to be made through a very long process of trial and error. We believe all this hard work has paid off with our starting chocolate range being everything we had hoped for.

We wanted to bring New Zealand something new and special. A different type of single source chocolate made from bean to bar in Tauranga.