Lots of people ask us how and why we started John & Kira's. We wanted to create a company that would: support and encourage community activism, make a product that tasted great, and was something that we could make people happy with. After John took a road trip around the Northeastern United States, he concluded chocolate was the answer. Chocolate was fun, tasty, and could be mixed with local ingredients, such as mint (read more below), to support our community. We got right to work researching chocolate, and at the end of two years we were self-made experts. We held our first "Community Chocolate Tasting" in 2001 and invited family and friends to taste our creations and give us feedback. They approved, wildly.

From that point, things took off pretty quickly. In December 2002 we learned we would be on the cover of Gourmet Magazine, and we went from a two person company (we were both at other jobs simultaneously up until that Fall) to one that had 15 on staff in order to produce enough chocolates. The chocolates then sparked interest from other publications, including the New York Times, Business week, Wine Spectator, Money, Oprah, Food & Wine, and Consumer Reports. Meanwhile, we got married in 2003, Kira started a doctoral program in education, and we welcomed a baby boy to our family in March 2005. In 2008 we launched some fun and innovative new products, including our Salted Honey Caramel Bees and Magical Ladybug Gems, and in 2009 we are expanding our social programs and reach into the community.

We continue to work with local and family farms to get our fresh ingredients and to support community projects. Our Project Mintpatch has expanded to include several new urban school garden programs, including the Urban Nutrition Initiative in West Philadelphia. We are so excited to continue to grow and promote our ideals at the same time: making good chocolate, good fun, and a great community.

When we were first experimenting with flavors for our chocolates, we both agreed that to make extraordinary confections, we needed to source our flavors from extraordinary people.

At that moment Kira was volunteering with a group at the University of Pennsylvania that was spending time in public schools setting up nutrition programs. One of their new efforts was a student run garden at Drew Elementary and UC High School in Philadelphia. Both of us agreed that we needed to incorporate these extraordinary kids into our new line of chocolates, and what better ingredient for the students to grow than mint!

This initial idea lead to the creation of Project Mintpatch. We would contract with the kids at University City High School to grow a specific amount of mint for us per week. Once harvested, the mint would be couriered to our chocolate workshop and we'd then incorporate the just-picked bounty into our confections.

The idea worked perfectly.

Over the years we have expanded the Project to include several other urban garden programs, including Teens 4 Good and The Village of Arts and Humanities, both in Philadelphia. Each year we invite the students to tour the chocolate workshop and bring them out to farmer's markets and chocolate tastings in order to let them tell their stories and gain a bit of business experience.

It is our hope that as John & Kira's grows, we will be able to assist in the launching of additional urban school gardens. Please send us an email (support@johnandkiras.com) or give us a call at 800-747-4808 if you or your organization would be interested in helping develop more urban school gardens.