How white became black

We began developing a white chocolate with malt and crunchy cocoa nibs. The recipe was ready, the packaging was ready. We were all set for launching it and then something happened. Something unexpected. It was one of those moments that you only dream of.

A new ingredient was introduced and the whole project was scrapped. Some friends from Ölvisholt were visiting and they left us one of their ingredients: a toasted barley, almost burnt.

We added it to our malted white recipe and something magical happened. Within minutes of tasting, we knew we had stumbled on something new. It was wonderfully toasted, grainy, almost coffee-like; the flavour reminded us of burned toast.

In the test lab, you really strive for one of those Eureka moments and we just had ours. We experimented more and weeks became months. A whole year passed and our bar had gone from being white to black. Several layers of ingredients had been introduced before finally finding this intensely delicious flavour.

We went from a simple idea of a white chocolate to having the Omnom black chocolate bar.

-Kjartan Gíslason
Chocolate maker and Omnom Chocolate founder