🍫 From Japan to Fort Greene: How an Interior Designer Started Making Vegan Chocolate with Her Daughter
“I’ve always liked combining things that one wouldn’t think would belong together.”
The Deligram shines a spotlight on the many incredible food artisans in New York. In our last feature, we checked out the pastries and cakes of baker Lucie Franc de Ferriere of From Lucie. Now, in the spirit of continuing to indulge our sweet tooth, this week we’re diving into the delightful world of independent, Fort Greene-based chocolatier Yukiko Hayakawa and her health-conscious brand chocolate Noé no Omise.
The Product: Raw vegan chocolate bars using natural ingredients, designed with minimalism in mind, and decorated with dried flowers, fruits and nuts.
The Deli Pick: Dark chocolate with orange.
How to Buy: Shop on the Noé no Omise website.
Price: $16 for a bar, $9 for a square, and $50-$92 for a 6-bar sample pack.
What inspired you to launch?
I'm from a small town in Japan called Nagoya, between Tokyo and Osaka. Initially, I wanted to be an interpreter and so I went to a school that had an exchange program, and that’s how I came to the U.S. around 1996. I quickly realized that just learning English was not what I wanted to do because I had always been very creative. So, I changed my trajectory and decided to study design. I went to FIT and Hunter College, where I studied art history and design; I wanted to do both. And then I started working for an interior decorator. I was going to come here only for one year to study English but now, here I am, 20-something years later.
I was working as a decorator, but then the pandemic happened. I was home more and, since I’ve always loved cooking, I spent a lot of time on that. I also felt my sweet tooth coming on so I started to experiment more with baking, specifically Japanese sponge cake, with my daughter Noé. When I started to eat too much refined sugar because of the baking, I looked to making them healthier. I remembered meeting someone at a party a long time ago who brought raw vegan chocolate that she’d made at home and I was so surprised at how it tasted. I searched my emails to find a recipe she’d sent me and that’s really how I started making raw vegan chocolate.
It started as a project between me and my daughter Noé, who’s now 7. I always like to do things with her, she's very crafty. And so we were making everything with ingredients like cacao butter (the base of all of our chocolates, and what makes them special), maple syrup, and aroma oil, our signature in the baking process. We used cardamom, quinoa and orange. I’ve always liked combining things that, at first glance, one wouldn’t think would belong together. For Mother’s Day in 2021, my friend Kiyomi, founder of miso brand Brooklyn Misomaru, told me that they were going to join a local pop-up shop called Mika in Bushwick and I volunteered to go and help. We set up a small table for my daughter to hang out and draw–she was drawing cards that said things like ‘thank you’ and ‘I love you’ and people who came to my friend’s stand started to pay my daughter for her little cards, like $1 or $3. Even before I got pregnant I always thought about teaching her lessons around business and being an entrepreneur, so I ended up applying for our own spot at the pop-up the following month to sell our chocolates to continue this lesson after she made the cards, plus some bath bombs and face spray we also made using the aroma oils. That was the beginning of everything and the chocolates started to sell after we launched our Instagram handle. I asked my daughter Noé what she wanted to name the shop and she said, ‘Noé no Omise’, which means “Noé’s Shop” in Japanese. We’ve now expanded, as of a few months ago, and now make everything in a nearby commercial kitchen, instead of at home.
What are your dreams for the brand?
We just launched our