SoChatti’s Matt Rubin Is A Sweet Talker

SoChatti’s Matt RubinPhoto by Tony Valainis

“WE WANTED TO create everything you dream about in the first 5 minutes of Willy Wonka,” says Matt Rubin, founder of the wildly popular Indy chocolate brand SoChatti. He recently opened a downtown tasting room, an attractively stark boutique inside the Circle City Industrial Complex, where customers can experience firsthand the treat that is sold in convenient ketchup-packet form instead of pressed into chocolate bars.

The chocolate is made quickly under pressure and deposited inside these squeezable pouches that capture and protect the flavor. This renders the goo easy to shoot straight from the package or incorporate into recipes. But it’s not exactly a novel idea. “For most of human history, chocolate was a liquid,” Rubin says. “When it first came to Spain, people would go to cafes and have the equivalent of churros and chocolate, where they would dip bread into pure melted chocolate.”

Rubin created SoChatti in 2013 after his wife was diagnosed with a dairy allergy. The couple quickly realized that there were few all-natural, nondairy chocolate products on the market. Their quest ended with the recipe for SoChatti, which contains only three ingredients—cacao nibs, organic cane sugar, and cacao butter.

The tasting room opened in early 2021 with a handful of classes on chocolate appreciation and wine pairings, and is adding more events every month. “We want this to be a place where people can experience and interact with food, not just consume it,” says Rubin. “It’s a place where you can taste, make, and learn.”