I get asked this question a lot. “Why dairy-free chocolate?”
Well, as most of you will likely know if you’ve met me, I can’t have dairy. But it wasn’t always that way.
In my 20s, life was good, and I was happily drinking lattes and chomping through milk chocolate. Then my stomach decided it wanted a word. “I’m going to cause you outrageous amounts of pain and discomfort.” Thanks.
But dairy? No way. I blamed it on everything else—coffee, stress, even the oats in my porridge. For years I brushed it off, convinced that my gut trouble was just some stress-induced IBS or maybe my caffeine habit catching up with me.
Fast-forward through years of pain and self-denial, and I finally took an allergy test. And there it was, plain as day and off the Richter scale: cow’s milk protein. Turns out, I’d basically been poisoning myself for a long time. So finally, I caved. Cold turkey. No more dairy. And you know what? As much as I hated to admit it, everything changed. My stomach settled. I felt better, less tired. I had more energy again.
But there was one problem: chocolate.
So I did what everyone does, I sought out a replacement. Only, that’s when I realised the sad truth: most dairy-free chocolates out there were terrible. They promised “creamy” and “milk-like” but delivered chalky, grainy, weird-flavoured nonsense. And the worst part? I love chocolate. So after years of trying every bar out there (and I mean hundreds), I got to the point where I was throwing most of them in the bin after a single bite. I even thought…If they’d just be honest about it: ‘Enjoy this lovely oat-flavoured chocolate’ or ‘Here’s a coconut bar pretending to be milk chocolate.’ But no. Lie after lie. It was a total disaster.
So, I decided to take matters into my own hands. If no one could get it right, I’d make the chocolate myself. I spent my evenings and weekend working on a recipe. And I’ll be the first to admit, having spent 15+ years in tech, I was basically learning as I went. But one thing kept me going: I knew the taste I wanted, and I was determined to get it. After ages of trial and error, I cracked it. I was so happy with it. And in the drawer it went. I had a good job in tech after all. So I kept it to myself. My own little indulgence.
It was my wife, Laura, (our Co-founder and the real brains), gave me that look and said, “This is good. We should sell this.” So, off we went to York Chocolate Festival, where we pitched up next to master chocolatiers who could all use dairy to their hearts’ content. And guess what? We sold out. The only dairy-free company there, competing with the best—and we sold out.
That was it. We knew we were onto something real. Laura and I decided to take the leap. We sold our house, quit our jobs, and built our own factory from scratch to make chocolate the way I’d always wanted.
And that’s how The Undairy Co. was born.
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