Latest news with #AwfullyChocolate
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Gift Singapore's Original Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes & Chocolate Brownie Mooncakes. Invented in Singapore, recognised everywhere
SINGAPORE, Aug. 14, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Awfully Chocolate's Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes and Brownie Mooncakes are made from Whole Bean Chocolate with only natural cocoa butter, which gives them the perfect taste and texture for premium gifting. Celebrate this Mid-Autumn with Awfully Chocolate luxury mooncake gifts that nurture both the palate and the planet. Limited Edition Chocolate Truffle Mooncake Gift Set Savour our two best-selling flavours of Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes, made by hand and presented in an exclusive gift box. Dark Chocolate Mochi Mooncakes with Awfully Chocolate's popular dark chocolate and chewy soft mochi. Pistachio 60% Cacao Mooncakes with crunchy pistachio and 60% dark chocolate ganache. Limited Edition Original Chocolate Brownie Mooncake Gift Set Awfully Chocolate's other signature mooncake, the Original Chocolate Brownie Mooncake is now available as a set of two, in a limited-edition gift box. Original Chocolate Brownie Mooncakes with Awfully Chocolate's chocolate lotus paste, dark chocolate pastry skin and a decadent brownie core. Single Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes In Gold Caviar Tins Awfully Chocolate is proud to introduce 10 Chocolate Truffle Mooncake flavours this festive season. Elevate your mooncake gifting experience with modern mooncakes that come in gold caviar-style reusable tins, each with its own individual thermal gift bag. They make beautiful, elegant gifts and Awfully Chocolate is the only confectionery offering chocolate mooncakes in individual gold caviar tins. Almond Crunch Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes Tiramisu Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes Osmanthus Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes Matcha Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes Salted Caramel Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes Lychee Rose Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes Yuzu Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes Champagne Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes Biscoff Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes Praline Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes Early Bird Specials for Awfully Chocolate's Mid-Autumn Collection Our best discounts are now open for Awfully Chocolate's Mid-Autumn Collection. Awfully Chocolate members get 15% off all mooncake items, while the public gets 10% off all mooncake items with no minimum purchase required during this Early Bird season. Awfully Chocolate is offering tiered special rates this gifting season for corporate and large purchases of individual Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes, with discounts of up to 25%. Early bird pricing is only valid for a limited time and while stocks last. Awfully Chocolate's limited edition chocolate mooncake gift sets are now available online at and in stores, along with Chocolate Truffle Mooncakes in 10 flavours in individual gold caviar tins. For the complete Awfully Chocolate experience, head down to our newest Awfully Chocolate Experience Cafe at Wisma Atria. Find your nearest Awfully Chocolate store here: Awfully Chocolate is Singapore's Favourite Chocolate, 27 years old this year and the ultimate chocolate destination experience for Singaporeans and visitors! The homegrown brand in Singapore comprises gifting boutiques, cafes with flowing chocolate taps, our flagship Awfully Chocolate Bakery & Cafe with its Amazing Weekend Buffet Brunch and the newest Awfully Chocolate Experience Cafe at Wisma Atria with the World's First Chocolate Raclette Wheel. From handcrafted cakes and truffles to café experiences and seasonal collections like our beautiful and delicious mooncakes, every product reflects our dedication to quality, craft, and sustainability. With 10 stores islandwide and a growing global presence, Awfully Chocolate continues to make chocolate an everyday luxury—and always Singapore's Favourite Chocolate. Media Contact Name Bhakti Choudhary Media Contact Email bhakti@ Media Contact Phone Number +65 8299 4876 View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Awfully Chocolate
CNA
19-07-2025
- Business
- CNA
‘We were gutsy, a little foolish': Co-founder Lyn Lee on how Awfully Chocolate became a cult cake brand early in the game
Local F&B entrepreneurs would unanimously agree that two decades is a lifetime to remain in business. Soaring labour and ingredient costs aside, surely the eye-watering rents would be enough to drive an honest proprietor to rack and ruin — not to mention the occasional black swan event such as financial crises and a full-blown pandemic. Despite rolling with those punches to establish Awfully Chocolate as an enduring, 27-year-old local brand, its co-founder Lyn Lee is adamant about not downplaying the towering odds stacked against her and her counterparts. She has even declined interviews on the hot-button issue of rising rents. 'I don't want to be used to say, 'See, Awfully Chocolate can survive because they did this and that. You didn't pivot.' I will not be drawn into that,' she said. A tendency to couch her words in careful disclaimers hints at Lee's former career in law. But on one point, she's unequivocal: 'In any one of those cases of a business shutting down reported in the news, it was 100 per cent because of the rent,' she added emphatically. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Awfully Chocolate Singapore (@awfullychocolatesg) Yet, amid growing calls for government intervention to rein in rent hikes and safeguard local businesses, Lee stops short of echoing those demands and leans instead toward forging stronger support networks among fellow tenants. 'If we all started looking at how we could band together and support one another, that should be an improvement. Otherwise, the market may correct itself.' While the laws of capitalism may stand in the way of rent control, she does however, argue that a vibrant F&B sector doesn't develop by happenstance. 'Everyone says, Singapore is so boring and everything is the same. But if you don't have different markers for how to have different types of businesses, it will be very dull.' CHASING THE PERFECT CHOCOLATE CAKE Fitting into a ubiquitous mould was far from Lee and her co-founders' minds when they launched Awfully Chocolate in 1998, in the upheaval of the Asian Financial Crisis. There, in a quiet nook of pre-gentrified Katong, the friends opened a flagship store offering just one item: A simple chocolate cake they'd spent months refining. Focusing single-mindedly on just one product — with no fallback plan and zero market research to hitch their wagon to — was nothing short of audacious. Family and friends dismissed the venture as a non-starter and gave it two months to survive. 'To them, we were making very weird decisions,' she recalled. ''How can you open in Katong, where it's all about laksa and Peranakan food? Who's going to go there to buy a whole cake?'' But Lee and her co-founders, then in their 20s, weren't swayed. In her words, they were 'contrarian' — more inclined to go against the grain than follow it. 'My partners were 'Katong-ites'. They said we had to be where the best food is, and that if you could make it in Katong, you could make it anywhere else,' recounted Lee. While none of them possessed F&B experience, the huddle of dreamers had long flirted with the idea of embarking on 'some cool adventure.' Lee, a former lawyer who worked at leading law firm Allen & Gledhill, had left the profession to work in a media company. She convinced her young and restless crew to join her in her pursuit for the 'perfect chocolate cake.' It took months of folding batter into submission, and plying loved ones with chocolate cake, before they sank funds into leasing their Katong store. Its stark, pared down aesthetic had less to do with design intent than with the reality of a skint budget. They could scarcely afford a refrigerator, let alone a display counter. 'Our friend who helped to design the logo asked, 'Why do you need a display counter when you're only selling one cake? It would look so silly to display 12 dark brown circles',' she recalled. Defying convention, she said, helped them to stand out in a space saturated with Ultraman cakes dripping in chromatic excess. 'I believe the early articles called us the cake shop that doesn't look like a cake shop. It was quite cutting-edge.' Their first big break came from a feature in lifestyle magazine 8 Days, after being discovered by playwright Michael Chiang, who was formerly the editorial director of Mediacorp Publishing. 'When he chose to feature this funky little cake shop, it drew attention, because back then they wrote about music and entertainment, not food,' shared Lee. The publicity pole-vaulted the business into the public consciousness, and the phone didn't stop ringing after that. 'We could only bake around 50 cakes a day, so we would sell out and go home,' she recalled. Awfully Chocolate became a cult chocolate cake brand early in the game — thanks, in no small part, to a quality some would have written off as foolhardiness. 'We were gutsy, a little foolish, but we believed there might be enough room for us to do trial and error,' said Lee. She now tries to pass on some of that scrappy, self-starting spirit to her team, whom she encourages to produce their publicity videos in-house. 'I'm always pushing the younger generation to not worry that they may not have a formal qualification in something that the job scope requires,' shared the 52-year-old. A RECIPE FOR RESILIENCE Growing a hole-in-the-wall setup into an international brand — with franchises once spanning Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong — has, however necessitated no small measure of agility. Rather than framing her entrepreneurial journey as a dichotomy of missteps and masterstrokes, Lee views it as a series of moves, 'one step at a time.' When Awfully Chocolate first ventured into urban malls, the co-founders realised that shoppers weren't inclined to lug an entire cake from store to store. In response, they began opening cafes that offered cake by the slice, along with a medley of bite-sized indulgences including chocolate truffles and ice cream. Over time, they uncovered new revenue streams — from corporate gifting to, more recently, a product line curated for hotels. That's not to say they haven't made big swings, either. At the end of 2024, they launched their own roastery in China, where they've been experimenting with innovations such as tea brewed from caffeine-free cacao husks. The latter is served at The Awfully Chocolate Experience Cafe that opened in Wisma Atria that same year. 'We've had exchanges with leading agricultural scientists from Wilmar International, and learnt how to use some of their healthy plant-based innovations,' shared Lee. Years of investing heavily in research and development for their B2B arm have paid off. 'We have this whole in-house setup where corporates can give us a vague idea of what they want and our R&D, design and marketing teams will just bring it to life,' she said. These capabilities, she noted, have to an extent girded them against the vagaries of an increasingly volatile rental market. Other external pressures brought to bear upon the business include the COVID-19 pandemic that hit like a sledgehammer to their China operations. 'From over 60 stores, we were whittled down to just a handful in two cities,' she revealed, adding that conditions in the mainland remain challenging amid a sluggish economy. While the pandemic took its toll on business in Singapore, Lee says they pulled through by biting the bullet and forgoing their salaries, for the most part, during those trying months. 'One of my business partners who did a lot of work restructuring companies during the Asian Financial Crisis shared that those that made it had teams that came together and believed that they would come out stronger if they made the sacrifices,' she related. 'When everyone starts thinking about themselves, that's when you see the whole thing fall apart.' Working with her friends for close to three decades, she insists, has been a blast, with no major conflict to grouse of. 'I'm very much a frontline person — I always think like a customer. Some of my partners, on the other hand, aren't that way,' she laughed. 'But that's the wonderful diversity and synergy between different personalities.' While the close-knit group may wax facetious about the 'cliche' of building a business on Lee's love of chocolate, it's proven to be a richly layered endeavour. For one, delving into the nuances of the Singaporean palate has deepened her appreciation for her country itself. Locals, she observes, tend to favour dark chocolate that's neither overly rich nor cloying, with a warm, toasty finish. 'I almost liken this to how amazing Singapore's food is. Like how there must be wok hei (smokiness),' enthused Lee. She volunteered that she eats chocolate cake for breakfast — a habit her kids 'find weird.' 'I love that we have our own Singaporean identity when it comes to chocolate preference, and I hope that we can share that more with the world.'
