COVER STORY


encountered a familiar problem. “I was buying couverture from France


through Cacao Barry and Valrhona, and the price you had to pay as a local maker in Canada – whether in Toronto or anywhere else in Canada – it just really spikes your COGS [cost of goods sold],” he explains. That experience prompted a question that would eventually become the foundation of the new business. “Why isn’t there a Canadian


manufacturer of chocolate for chefs, restaurants, hotels, bakeries, pastry chefs or other chocolatiers?” For Brandon, the answer was


increasingly obvious. Canada had a growing and diverse consumer-facing


14 • KENNEDY’S CONFECTION • AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2026


chocolate scene, but the B2B market presented a different picture. “We have so many B2C makers,” he says. “So much Hummingbird, Soul Chocolate, but they’ve concentrated on the B2C market. Whereas no one’s doing the B2B.” The company has since positioned


itself as a Canadian-made option for both hospitality and retail, with professional products intended for chefs and bakeries alongside consumer-facing chocolate and gifting. But Brandon is keen to stress that the ambition is not simply to reproduce an existing model. “I wouldn’t say equivalent,” he says of comparisons with the established European suppliers. “I would say the Canadian option that has better quality, better flavours, traceability,


and still works in the realm where chefs can still make their food cost work.” That last point is crucial. As anyone


working in foodservice understands, the best ingredient is only useful if it can make sense commercially. “At the end of the day, as much as they want to use the best of the best, we all know that the margins are so small in the restaurant world,” Brandon says. “They’re just kind of like, ‘This is what we’ve got to use, because it fits in our financial model.’” As We Do’s proposition is therefore


built around the possibility of changing that equation.


A partnership built around a gap Michael had known of Brandon’s


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