The Small Business Project: Chocolatier on the realities of going viral

Monday, 1 September 2025

The Small Business Project is a weekly series that shines the spotlight on Kiwi small businesses doing interesting and unusual things in their industries.

Chocolatier Byron McLean, the owner of Auckland chocolate producer Cocoa Wilds, has experienced his hot chocolate going viral. McLean, who started the business with no prior industry experience two years ago, opens up about what it’s like when a product goes viral - and what the social media attention has done for his small business.

What has your venture set out to do?

I'd been made redundant, and we’d been talking about starting a business. When we looked at the chocolate market we realised a lot of chocolate businesses were centred around wholesale, as opposed to the European model where you have your direct retailing and you make chocolates very fresh. There was no-one making chocolate in the Auckland CBD in the European way so, naively, we decided to have a go at it. Almost two years later it's going well. We're fortunate that in this really tough climate, people like what we do, they keep coming back, and we're managing to get by.

Tell me about your viral hot chocolate - how did that come about?

It was our first year of business. We were coming into the quiet season off the back of Easter, and we knew we had a very good hot chocolate, but no one knew about it, and we wondered how we could bring attention to it.

We made it with a marshmallow decoration, which was a bit scrappy, but I remember I saw someone taking a picture of it and thought ‘this is the moment’, and sure enough, that person posted it on Instagram, and that video on Instagram ended up going to initially 8000 views, and I thought that was a lot. Then, over the course of three months, there were 300,000 views on each of those first two videos that two different people posted.

It was a mix of intention, strategy and luck. We knew we couldn’t go viral without it also standing up for itself and living up to the hype. But what happened is it challenged our idea of what the business was about. Overnight it helped us be cash-flow positive in our first eight months. We intentionally kept the price low and affordable because people were talking a lot about cost of living last year. We were a new business so we wanted to keep it as accessible as possible, but we nearly drowned. It was almost like the kiss of death, where you almost can't keep up with the demand, and you're at risk of compromising the quality or the consistency. We’re lucky we managed to keep up and live up to the hype.

Some days people would stand in line for 40 minutes before they would get a drink.

I assumed interest in it would naturally decline, but we've had longevity. We still have people coming to us for the first time, and people coming back. Interestingly, it’s a long tail of reach when something goes viral. You think you've saturated the market, but it’s easy to forget that there's just so many people out there always coming to Auckland or visiting New Zealand for the first time. When you're lucky enough for something to gain traction like that, it can have a lot more longevity than you might appreciate.

What’s business been like this year?

We’ve been really successful this year, managing to convert those people who visit us for a hot chocolate to try the chocolate too. We've grown more awareness of our chocolate product and so even as our volumes of drinks have come down to a more normalised level, compared to that crazy period last year, the business is actually performing better because we're selling more of our core product.

How much time and money have you invested?

It took us 10 months from the idea to actually open the doors, and in that period of time, I was working fulltime on that and looking after our second-born child. When we started last year, very quickly I made the business go seven days a week, and that meant I was working at least six days. I’m working generally four days to five days on the floor, and then one to two days of admin, having at least one day off.

We invested hundreds of thousands of dollars on kitchen fitout and equipment, our retail site, research, courses and packaging, and we haven't started to realise the full payback on that yet. Fortunately, we're getting really close to achieving profitability this year.

What we didn’t anticipate is that margins are much lower in this environment because of the cost of goods increases - chocolate’s up 200%, dairy and cream is also up, while consumer and corporate-level spending has also been constrained.

We flexed our staffing and a lot of things with the demand we had, and I think we would have got by even if our product didn’t go viral, but it's just the revenue story would have been different. The success we had has been all consuming, and it meant that we had to just adjust our plans as we went and put aside other business strategies or channel opportunities that we assumed we would pursue. When something's clicked and it’s working you grab it, hold on to it for dear life, and run with it.

What’s the biggest challenge your business is facing?

As a small business owner, it's making sure that I have a clear pathway to sustaining all of the time, effort and investment, and not compromising my valuable family time. That’s always front of mind for me.

What’s the biggest issue impacting your industry?

There are structural challenges in the cocoa industry that mean chocolate will never be as abundant and as affordable as we've grown accustomed to it being, and that means for businesses like us we have to be very careful about the types of products we make and the prices that we sell it at, and that we have a secure, consistent supply of chocolate for the products.

What’s next for Cocoa Wilds?

We know people like what we're making, now we need to make sure that we can extend that model. Because capital is harder and more costly to come by right now, we need to lean into making the most out of the site we have by doing more corporate orders, more chocolate-tasting classes and experiences to grow, without expanding our physical footprint.

What’s one thing you wish you’d known before starting the business?

Starting a business takes the right mix of vision, insight, confidence, but also enough ignorance and overconfidence to actually do it. If you knew everything that you end up knowing, more often than not you might not have had the bravery to tackle some of those challenges and costs, whether they're financial or personal. Remember that it's not just about the product you make, but really about the way you make people feel.

Most helpful piece of advice you have received?

Find a good bookkeeper, and a way to afford them, as early as possible, as that will make life easier. Your numbers are important, but you also need to focus on more valuable things, like your product and your customers.

If you would like your business to feature in The Small Business Project, email Aimee Shaw at aimee.shaw@stuff.co.nz