A $249 chocolate bar brand says it moved $40M in a year, one cocoa-butter shock nearly broke it

Pasha, which sells chocolate bars priced at $249 each, claims to have hit $40M in annual revenue. To put that figure in physical terms: the founder notes it requires roughly 60 bars consumed every minute, every day, for a full year to reach that number. The brand attributes the sales volume to organic creator growth, pointing to one affiliated creator who went from 11,000 to 450,000 followers in six weeks by posting only Pasha content.

We lost like 27% of our gross margin overnight. We were killing it and chocolate we were paying $4,000 a kilo for cocoa butter went up to 32,000. Pasha

The growth story hit a hard wall when cocoa butter prices surged from $4,000 per kilo to $32,000 per kilo, erasing 27 percent of gross margin in a single move. That kind of commodity exposure is a structural risk for any brand whose premium positioning depends on ingredient quality rather than substitution.

On the demand side, Pasha’s bet is that chefs, not celebrities, are the real taste-makers worth cultivating. “We’re not looking for the direct connection to celebrities,” the founder said. “We’ve made it a point over the last decade to become friends with chefs.” The underlying thesis is that chefs shape what celebrities and consumers want, not the other way around. The brand also claims its sixth-month customer retention exceeds that of DoorDash and HelloFresh, though those figures are self-reported and unverified by a third party.