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Indianapolis-based chocolate maker SoChatti is closing its doors due to rising cacao prices as well as a business shift focusing on its parent company’s food industrial licensing and technology arm.
Founder and CEO Matt Rubin told IBJ that he decided to instead focus efforts on the chocolate business’ parent company, True Essence Foods Inc., which specializes in developing food-making technologies. In August 2023, the food-tech firm raised $27.6 million in funding intended to expand the company.
“We were at a fork in the road, and we had to fully jump in with two feet into being an industrial technology company,” Rubin said. “I’ve spent years of my life learning how to make and perfect and work in chocolate, and it really, really saddens me that this was a choice that we needed to make, but it was what is necessary to grow the business.”
Opening in 2013 as an artisanal liquid chocolate business, SoChatti was True Essence’s original product and what Rubin said was the launching pad for the company.
SoChatti opened a production and research facility at Circle City Industrial Complex, 1125 Brookside Ave., in 2019 and added a retail counter and tasting room in 2020. Rubin said the 20,000-square-foot-plus facility will continue to house True Essence’s industrial operation.
Continuing to operate the public-facing retail business was difficult from a cost perspective, Rubin said, since it was a break-even operation. That is ultimately why the company did not sell off the business, Rubin said.
The chocolate company has been ramping down operations this month, Rubin said. The tasting room will be open Wednesday and Thursday (Sept. 4-5) from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. In-store purchases will be at a 25% discount; online sales are no longer available.
It’s unclear how many workers will be affected by the closure. Rubin said the company is focused on retooling its efforts toward large industrial opportunities as it manages personnel.
The company, which operates under Trade Secret Chocolate LLC, struck a deal with the Indiana Economic Development Corp. in 2019 for a $500,000 performance-based tax credit. The incentive was dependent on hiring 71 workers for the operation by 2023, but only $66,974 of the tax credit was dispersed, according to the IEDC transparency portal. True Essence had 37 employees as of April this year.
The city of Indianapolis also provided a five-year personal property tax abatement based on the company’s plan to spend almost $2.4 million on equipment and another $1 million to lease and renovate its facility. Rubin said at the time that tax incentives were critical for the company to continue doing business in the state.
As of August 2023, True Essence had secured more than 15 patents for its technologies, with another 70 patent applications in process. Among those technologies is Flavor Symmetry, a proprietary dehydration process that dries fresh foods without the use of heat—producing, for instance, a dried strawberry with the same flavor, smell, color and nutrition as fresh.
Another process, which the company calls Flavor Balancing, uses a pressurized chamber to remove undesirable flavor molecules. The process can, for instance, enhance a coffee’s flavor notes and aroma or remove the bitter taste from beer.
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Sad to see the fun of the tasting room go away, but proud to have innovative entrepreneurs staying here in Indy. When we visited last year hearing about their pioneering research was just as enjoyable as the chocolate tasting.