When people think of craft chocolate, they think Belgium. Maybe Switzerland. Maybe a small batch producer in Vermont or East London. Singapore doesn't typically come up.
It should.
Why Singapore?
Singapore has no cacao farms. It's a city-state with no agricultural sector to speak of. And yet Fossa Chocolate — founded in Singapore in 2016 — has accumulated a run of awards from the Academy of Chocolate and the International Chocolate Awards that most European chocolatiers with century-old traditions haven't matched.
The reason isn't geography. It's position.
Singapore sits at the crossroads of some of the world's finest cacao-growing regions: the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Papua New Guinea are all within the same immediate hemisphere. Fossa's founders didn't need to grow cacao — they needed to build relationships with the farmers and cooperatives who were growing it. And being based in Asia made that access direct, frequent, and grounded in genuine partnership rather than transatlantic procurement.
The sourcing model
Fossa sources from some of the most respected names in fine-flavour cacao. Kokoa Kamili in Tanzania's Kilombero Valley is among the most celebrated cacao cooperatives in the world — they work closely with thousands of smallholder farmers and have developed post-harvest processing methods that produce exceptional bean quality. Fossa uses their cacao for bars that consistently show bright red-fruit character and exceptional clarity of flavour.
The Semuliki Forest cacao from Uganda comes from a remote cooperative operating in one of Africa's most biodiverse regions. Semai Community cacao from Indonesia draws on a growing tradition of fine-flavour cultivation that's only recently been recognised by the broader craft chocolate world.
That sourcing reach — combined with Singapore's position as a sophisticated food city with access to East and Southeast Asian culinary ingredients — is what explains the flavour direction of Fossa's bars. The Lychee Rose, Yuzu Sea Salt, Chrysanthemum Tea, and Black Sesame Hojicha bars aren't gimmicks. They're a chocolatier thinking in two culinary vocabularies simultaneously: the European craft chocolate tradition, and the flavour landscape of the region they're based in. The results are bars that taste like nothing else on the market.
How it gets to Australia
S&L Imports operates as Australia's distributor of Fossa Chocolate — which means every bar available at snlimports.com is the genuine article: the same product winning awards internationally, shipped directly to Australian customers.
That matters for a couple of reasons. Craft chocolate is a product where cold chain and freshness matter. A bar that's been sitting in a multi-country wholesale chain for six months is a different product than one that moved through a direct distribution relationship. S&L Imports' focus on Fossa means the bars you're ordering are fresh, properly stored, and exactly what the chocolatier intended.
Why this matters for Australian chocolate buyers
The Australian craft chocolate scene is growing — local makers like Zokoko and Gabriel Chocolate are doing excellent work. But access to internationally awarded Asian-origin craft chocolate at this calibre, through a dedicated domestic distributor, is genuinely unusual. You're not getting a small curio section in a deli. You're getting the full range, with context, from people who can tell you what each bar is meant to taste like and where every ingredient came from.
If you've been buying craft chocolate from European producers because that's what's available at your local specialty store, Fossa is worth a serious look. The quality is at least equivalent. The flavour direction is entirely its own. And it ships to your door.
Explore the full Fossa range at snlimports.com/collections/all.
