How Charlotte Truffles Creates Meaning with Flavors

Charlotte Walter

Charlotte Walter sees her chocolates as a way for people to stay connected to their heritages. After moving to the United States from Indonesia at the age of eight, Walter found food as a way to stay connected to her Chinese and Indonesian heritage. Opening her Santa Clara shop Chocolate Truffles in Santa Clara in 2016 allowed her to bring her family history, her culture, and her engineering background into one enterprise.

An Entrepreneur at Heart

Entrepreneurship and food ran in Walter’s family. While both her parents were pharmacists, her mom decided to stay home to care for the children. But she couldn’t stay still so her mother decided to start a bakery. “I think the exposure was not just only to food and having to produce food for somebody else,” Walter said, but also having your own business so “the idea of entrepreneurship was not completely scary or new to me.”

In addition to her mother, other family members scattered across the globes like her aunts and uncles also ran their own businesses. While Walter noted that she didn’t see all the aspects of maintaining a business when she was young, she saw the joy that the products brought to her mother’s customers. When the family moved to the US from Indonesia, her mom resumed her work as a pharmacist.

It still took another career and a trip back to Indonesia to plant the seed for Walter to start her own business. After she graduated college with an engineering degree, she decided she needed a break and took some classes at a local community college. It was so soothing for me. I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll go into culinary school’” Walter recalled, but when she suggested this to her parents, they weren’t particularly pleased. After some time, Walter returned to the engineering field and worked at medical device startups.

The lure of chocolate still lingered. In 2008, her family decided to return to Indonesia for the first time since they had left 17-years ago. Walter said that in her family, it’s traditional to bring home gifts to family back home. She remembered that when she was a child, she felt super special when her uncle from Germany brought her chocolate.

Truffles from Charlotte Truffles

Creating New Flavor Profiles

She decided to return the favor to relatives in Indonesia, focusing on tropical flavors that they would really like. But she couldn’t find chocolates that fit the bill. Most chocolates catered to a very European/American profile. That’s when she realized there was a gap in the market.

Engineering, however, remained her priority until the last company she worked for got acquired twice in two years. With the acquisition, Walter found herself working in a giant company that was not the right environment for her to thrive in. When she decided to take a step back and think about next steps, her then-boyfriend, now husband said, “You’ve been talking about the food business thing for a while. Isn’t this the perfect time to test it?”

Charlotte Truffles made its soft launch in 2016 and opened as a business in 2017. She found her engineering background was an asset for the business. Medical devices are highly regulated, which means there are very systematic approaches to developing and making products. It’s critical that the production is constant and consistent day in and day out. Chocolate requires a similar attention to detail to create a consistent product. The material is also very sensitive to humidity and temperature so everything has to be systematized throughout the process of making, storing, shipping, and consuming the chocolate.

Walter said that the checks and balances of the system naturally goes in her head. “A lot of people compare baking to science. So it’s the same idea. I’m just not a baker. I prefer chocolates,” she explained.

Finding Connections with Food

Charlotte Walter Pouring Chocolate

Charlotte Truffles uses a variety of flavors from around the world, including mango and sesame seeds from Indonesia, Vietnamese coffee, and Rose Water Saffron from India. Her diverse selections of flavors came from her desires for the past.

While her chocolate company’s story is rooted in that experience of bringing home chocolate to her family in Indonesia, she realized that because she feels multi-cultural, she felt disconnected to her own heritage, culture, and even language. Sometimes there’s so much focus on success in the US that “we sometimes forget that our story, heritage and culture is just as important and that it makes an effort for us to retain it.”

Walter noted that she had gotten married and had kids, which made that need for a connection even more salient. Her husband has a different background from Walter and she wanted to share her culture with him (and their children).

For Charlotte Walter, that connection is retained with food. She wants to “cook the flavors I grew up with.” She noted that her story is not unique to her own family; it’s something common to everybody between two or more cultures.

“I want to be able to do that for others. That’s why our flavors are not just Indonesian, or Chinese or German, it’s really multicultural,” Walter said. They want to “marry culture, heritage and chocolates together in the goal of being able to continue this discussion, and reconnect, strengthen” cultural connections for people who are in the middle of two or more cultures. Walter pointed out that every flavor on the website has a story behind it to help rekindle those memories.

A Taste of the World

The top seller for Charlotte Truffles is the Rose Water Saffron truffle. Not only is it a bestseller, but it’s also won several awards including 2023 Good Food Awards. She made it for her friends who wanted something chocolate to give to their family for Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights. While Walter was not familiar with it growing up, she worked with her friend to create the truffle to ensure the nuances in the flavor profile.

The second bestseller is Vietnamese Coffee. When she first moved to the US, she made friends with a lot of different backgrounds. In high school, she connected with a lot of friends who had a Vietnamese background who introduced her to the cuisine, which was amazing.

“Though we haven’t had a chance to visit Vietnam, it’s a flavor profile that really resonates with me, because there’s quite a bit of an overlap with the Indonesian themes, especially in the baked goods,” Walter said.

So when she made her signature flavors for the launch, she realized that she did not have any coffee chocolate offerings. She drew upon her love of Vietnamese coffee. In this case, she’s using the coffee that has condensed milk, offering a nice juxtaposition of flavor of bitterness from the coffee and sweetness at the end of the milk. It paired best with dark chocolate from Guittard, which helped bring out the flavors.

Two Rivers chocolate bar from Charlotte Truffles

Charlotte Walter also mentioned that the chocolate bar Two Rivers is very popular. It’s 72% dark chocolate with figs, dates, and walnuts. She decided to name the bar after the origin of dates and civilization: the two famous rivers of Mesopotamia, the Tigris and the Euphrates.

For Walter, the mission of her chocolate company is “to really be able to communicate for those who are multicultural and for those who sometimes feel that they don’t have a sense of belonging because they are living at the intersection of all those cultures.” She wants people to know that they are fine the way they are; there’s no rule about what it means to be “Indonesian enough” or “Chinese enough.” There’s a community out there for people who are exactly like them and chocolate is one way to help reconnect back and strengthen relationships to their heritage.