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.

Since then it has been quite a rollercoaster around here. 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, most recently, 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.

Today our world-class chocolates are available to be shipped anywhere in the world. We are committed to offering incomparable customer service and we offer an unconditional guarantee that you will be 110% satisfied. We continue to work with local and family farms to get our fresh ingredients, and to support community projects, such as an urban school garden program in West Philadelphia. We are so excited to continue to grow and promote our ideals at the same time: making good food, good fun, and a great community.

John and Kira

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 time Kira had been working 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 the kids into the new product line, and what better ingredient for the students to grow than mint!

Over the past few years we have built a great relationship with the kids at Drew Elementary and UC High School and they have been a true key to our success. We found, however that our company was growing faster than the kids could produce mint. So this year we reached out to see if we could find another source, and possibly help establish another urban city garden. Well the kids and teachers at Global Visions Academy on the Southeast side of Chicago were looking to start a new garden, and they approached us to help. The timing could not have been better.

After listening to their plans for the program, we decided to raise money to assist in the establishment of a mint patch and to help purchase dirt and supplies. Over the Easter holiday 2005, a portion of the sales of our Spring Box went to helping get the garden off the ground.

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.