Chocomize: Creating Your Own Candy Bar is the Next Big Thing in Customization

Customization is everywhere {CrunchGear}, and, in particular, it is all over the Internet and streaming through scores of gadgets. Services like Netflix and OnDemand allow a choice in which movies to watch, and Web sites like Zazzle, Lulu and StickerGiant offer personalized gifts, while YouTube and Pandora produce tailor-made TV and radio broadcasts with no predetermined programming. It is all enough to make you wonder if there will be an end to mass-produced products one day.

For now, the hottest new personalized product trend is creating your own chocolate. Chocomize, a New York-based Web company, offers custom-made candy bars, designed by the consumer and shipped right to their door. You get a choice of up to five out of 90 ingredients to add to your choice of chocolate bark for over 30 million combinations to create “chocolate exactly the way you want it.” You can also design your own packaging and engrave personalized messages into the chocolate.

Ingredients include nuts, fruit, seeds, herbs, spices and decorations in addition to some peculiar choices, with some of the most outrageous including Pop Rocks, vegetarian bacon, Edamame, corn nuts and Beef Jerky. {DesignCrave}

Chocolate bars start at $3.85. That’s pricey for a piece of candy, but perhaps worth it for the custom-obsessed or socially conscious, as a portion of the proceeds for each candy bar sold go to a charity of the customer’s choice. Chocolate with a personalized message is also a cute party or wedding favor idea.

Chocomize is not alone in the customized chocolate-verse. Createmychocolate.com (Chocri) offers a similar service with over 100 toppings and a charity donation upon checkout. Chocri was founded in Germany and launched in the United States this past January.

The coolest thing about Chocomize, however, is its back story. Eric Heinbockel, Fabian Kaempfer and Nick LaCava, three young entrepreneurs who met at Columbia University, founded the company after realizing the economic downturn meant poor job prospects for all of them upon graduation. They decided to create their own career path and chose to start a customized candy bar business after their own research showed chocolate to be one luxury good still in demand despite the recession.{CrunchGear}

Talk about inspiring!

From left to right, the Chocomize Smores Bar, Tighty Whiteys chocolate bar, and Fresh Face Forward chocolate bar