Soul Chocolate: Chocolate Lovers and Chocolate Makers

Kyle and Katie Wilson are the founders of Soul Chocolate, a Toronto-based craft chocolate company driven by a passion for incredible flavor and ethical sourcing. Since 2015, they’ve been committed to making great-tasting chocolate with real, traceable ingredients—ensuring every step of the process, from farm to bar, honors the people and places behind each bite. DeliveryRank features Soul Chocolate in an exclusive interview.

Can you share the story behind the founding of Soul Chocolate and how your journey as chocolate makers began in your tiny Toronto apartment?

Our journey with Soul Chocolate began long before we ever settled in Toronto. My partner, Katie, and I started dating while traveling through Australia. At the time, I knew nothing about good chocolate—just as I knew nothing about good coffee, which is actually where my journey began.

Katie had always had an interest in chocolate, though we hadn’t yet considered it as a possible career path. After Australia, we traveled to New Zealand to wrap up our trip, spending about a month and a half living out of a van, exploring both the North and South Islands.

One particularly cold day, we stumbled upon this amazing little shop—a cozy combination of chocolate and coffee. We stepped inside to warm up and discovered they had 15 or 20 different kinds of chocolate on display. Until that moment, I had only thought of chocolate as white, milk, or dark. But here, we were tasting different origins, percentages, and flavor profiles. It was a revelation for both of us. We also began to see the potential for connecting the worlds of chocolate and coffee—how they could complement and elevate each other.

When we returned to our hometown in the Niagara region, we decided to move to Toronto to pursue our new passions. Katie dove into chocolate, and I into coffee. We each sought out the best possible places to learn and grow in our respective fields. Katie worked at SOMA Chocolate, one of the most respected chocolate makers in the city, while I joined Te Aro Coffee Roasters—now known as Pilot Coffee Roasters, a leader in specialty coffee.

During that time, I gained a deep understanding of sourcing and ethical practices in coffee, while Katie immersed herself in the craft of chocolate making and retail. Eventually, we left those roles and began traveling again, this time with a focus on origin: understanding where our ingredients came from. We visited cacao farms in Costa Rica, Kenya, and Tanzania, learning how raw ingredients are grown and processed. Those experiences laid the foundation for what Soul Chocolate would become—centered on transparency, ethical sourcing, and direct relationships with farmers.

A few years later, back in Toronto, I was working in a café and Katie in a bakery. We both reached a point where we wanted to build something of our own, to stop creating for others and start building our own vision. That’s when Soul Chocolate was born—right out of the second bedroom in our apartment.

How does the concept of "transparent trade" influence your sourcing practices, and why is it important for you to ensure that farmers are paid fairly for their cacao?

Transparent trade is something many small chocolate makers like us are working hard to champion. Terms like "bean-to-bar" or "craft chocolate" often get co-opted by large corporations and turned into marketing tools—without any real change to how they operate. With transparent trade, however, if a big company wants to use the term, they would have to fundamentally rethink their business practices and supply chains.

For us, transparent trade is at the heart of what we do. It’s why our chocolate may cost more—because the people growing our cacao are being paid fairly and respectfully for their work. We’re committed to sourcing ethically, even if there are cheaper options available. Choosing the lowest price at the expense of others simply isn’t who we are. To do so would feel like cheating someone out of what they deserve.

What challenges have you faced in transitioning from traditional chocolate production to your current model of small batch, single origin, and bean-to-bar chocolate making?

We’ve never operated like a traditional chocolate company—and honestly, that’s intentional. We remain a small-batch, single-origin, bean-to-bar chocolate maker, and that’s something we’re deeply committed to. We’re not aiming to become the next Nestlé or one of the major players in the industry. That kind of scale just isn’t in our DNA.

Of course, there are challenges to staying small. Larger companies benefit from economies of scale, sourcing in bulk, and driving down costs—but that often comes at the expense of character and creativity. For us, there's real joy in choosing the exact beans we want, in the quantity we want, and roasting them by hand to highlight their unique profiles. It’s an intimate, hands-on process, and it’s hard to imagine giving that up.

Scaling up in a conventional way would strip the soul out of what we do. It would turn our work into just another business—where for us, it’s always been something more alive than that.

Can you describe your process for creating new flavors and how you ensure that each ingredient used in your chocolate meets your high standards of quality and sustainability?

Discovering new flavours has always been a seasonal journey for us. When we first began, we offered just three chocolate bars—all single origin and all dark chocolate, with no added flavours or textures. But as we’ve grown, we’ve also evolved—guided by both our curiosity and the interests of our customers, both current and potential.

Our approach remains rooted in seasonality. We focus on ingredients that are local and in season, prioritizing what we can source from farmers here in Ontario—or at least within Canada. Having grown up in the Niagara region and spent my high school years working on a fruit farm, I now have a deep appreciation for the labour and dedication behind local agriculture. Supporting those farms and farmers is something that’s very close to my heart.

In terms of maintaining our standards of quality and sustainability, it all comes down to relationships. We believe in truly getting to know the people who grow our ingredients. It's about communication and creating a feedback loop—something that’s often missing in more transactional models. When you’re working directly with growers, you have the opportunity to share what works and what doesn’t. That mutual feedback helps shape a more thoughtful and positive outcome for everyone involved.

What are your future goals for Soul Chocolate, including your plans to move back to the Niagara region and create a self-sustaining chocolate lab, and how do you envision this next phase of your business?

In the short term, my focus is really on deepening connections with other small businesses that are interested in carrying our chocolate. We're committed to growing our presence within our core region of Ontario—essentially just getting more good chocolate into the hands of people who genuinely appreciate it. That’s the near-term goal for us.

Our team is still very small—just four of us—so I split my time between hands-on chocolate production and sharing what we create with others. It’s a delicate balance, but I know I need to dedicate more energy toward outreach, building relationships, and expanding awareness of Soul Chocolate. That’s where I see the greatest potential for growth in the short to mid-term.

Longer term, Katie and I both deeply love chocolate—but it’s not the only thing we’re passionate about. We’ve also developed a real desire to become more self-sustaining in how we live day to day. We have two chickens in our backyard here in Toronto and have been learning how to grow more of our own food. It's about returning to the roots—literally—and appreciating the process of cultivating what we consume.

Soul Chocolate will always be at the heart of what we do, but we also envision a broader, more grounded lifestyle. At some point, we’d love to explore a second, smaller satellite location—perhaps in the Niagara region, where both our families are from. It would be a beautiful fit. I imagine it as a place where we could feature unique micro-lots of chocolate or coffee, something with a hyper-focused curation that complements our main operations here in Toronto.

For now, though, Toronto remains our home base. We have a strong customer community here and our production setup is finely tuned to support our growth. So, while we dream of what’s next, we’re fully grounded in the present—building, learning, and sharing as we go.

If you would like to find out more about Soul Chocolate, please visit https://www.soulchocolate.com