Five square meters. Eight thousand hryvnias. Kharkiv.

December 21, 2019.

That is where YANDMI production began.

There was no beautiful factory.

No large team.

No physical store.

And definitely no website.

Our first production space was a balcony measuring around five square meters.

The starting budget was about UAH 8,000.

The most important resource was curiosity.

Could we make chocolate differently?

It began as something personal

My name is Daria.

Part of the reason YANDMI exists at all is my own experience with industrial chocolate products.

I wanted to understand ingredients, understand cacao and learn how to make a product where we controlled the raw material and the process ourselves.

That eventually brought us to bean-to-bar.

Not finished Belgian chocolate that we could melt into our own mold.

Cacao beans.

Roast them.

Clean them.

Grind them.

Get the first batches wrong.

Try again.

Change the recipe.

And slowly discover how enormous the world inside the word “cacao” actually is.

Five square meters became twenty-three

Eventually, the balcony was no longer enough.

We moved into a shared 23 m² production space.

There was more equipment, more chocolate and more orders.

At some point, the next step felt obvious: our own workshop in Kharkiv, around 70 m².

Renovation began.

Equipment started arriving.

We made plans.

Then the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.

Starting again in Zhytomyr

The Kharkiv workshop never became the production space we had imagined.

We relocated to Zhytomyr.

And rebuilt YANDMI in a new city and under completely different circumstances.

Some plans were postponed.

Some things were lost.

Others had to be reconsidered entirely.

But one decision remained unchanged:

our chocolate would still begin with cacao beans.

The things we did not achieve

We still have not opened the large physical store we dreamed about.

We did not build the Kharkiv factory.

Our chocolates and bonbons never became as popular as our bars.

We have not entered every major retail chain.

And we have not yet created the one flavor that people around the world immediately recognize as a Ukrainian chocolate signature.

But one item can finally be removed from the list.

We launched the website.

Why we do not want to grow at any cost

Scaling always raises the same questions.

What can become faster?

Cheaper?

Easier?

Sometimes there is an obvious answer.

Sometimes the shortcut changes the product itself.

Our production costs are high. Bean-to-bar takes time. High-quality cacao does not compete on the same economics as commodity raw material. Small batches cannot achieve the efficiencies of a massive production line.

That is one reason we have approached mass retail carefully.

Not because we want YANDMI to stay small forever.

Because we want to grow without losing the reason it existed in the first place.

What YANDMI looks like today

We still begin with cacao.

But much more has grown around it.

We make nut pastes. Cook caramel. Bake cookies. Develop fillings, textures, dragees and oversized chocolate formats.

We experiment.

We travel for cacao.

We spend almost two years developing a website because “good enough” does not feel good enough.

And sometimes we rebuild a product that already looked finished.

What comes next

We want Ukrainian chocolate to become recognizable far beyond Ukraine.

Not simply because there is a Ukrainian flag on the packaging.

Because the flavor itself is memorable.

We do not yet know which bar will become that one.

That may be the most exciting part.

In 2019, YANDMI fitted onto five square meters.

Today it is much larger.

But the journey still begins in exactly the same place.

With one cacao bean.

And continues through Gallery of Flavours and Chocolate Journal.