A Dream of Peace: Stranger Craft Chocolate in Ukraine
The elegant wrappers for chocolate bars from Stranger Craft Chocolate in Poltava, Ukraine, feature images of exotic landscapes: white sand beaches, verdant jungles, snow-capped mountains. They’re tiny photographic voyages, reminders that there’s an entire world out there that looks different from the one outside our own windows. It’s a needed escape for Stranger founders Ruslan and Tetiana as they make chocolate in the shadow of war.
Stranger was founded in 2016, but their work took on different significance after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in 2021. Overnight, these small business owners went from providing indulgent flavor treats to worrying about survival. They’ve faced supply chain issues and power outages, worried daily about the safety of friends and family, and hear alarms and sirens almost regularly, but they’ve persevered, and are creating something beautiful in the midst of violence.
“Chocolate is a place for creativity, although now with our realities, there is not enough inspiration. We are stuck in this time,” says Tetiana. “There is a dream of victory and peace, that’s the main thing.”
A Long Journey
Stranger started by chance. Tetiana and Ruslan were designers originally, and they were helping their daughter with a packaging design project at Academy of Arts. The result was an appealing but empty chocolate wrapper, and they decided to learn more about how chocolate is made in hopes of putting the design to use. The story from there is pretty standard—after many kitchen experiments and a lot of trial and error, they found their calling as bean to bar chocolate makers.
They now make several single origin bars, including Belize, Ecuador, and Zorzal Reserve in the Dominican Republic, among others. Their bars melt gracefully and offer beautiful, nuanced flavors profiles.
I’ve had the privilege to try Stranger’s bars thanks to the work of London Coe, owner of Peace on Fifth in Dayton, Ohio. London is a craft chocolate evangelist and educator who works tirelessly to track down chocolate makers she believes in to share them with her customers. The work she went through to get Stranger Chocolate’s bars from the Ukraine to the American Midwest is worthy of its own story. It took over a year and multiple methods to land on a plan that would work reliably for getting the bars to Ohio.
“What I want to communicate with people who shop for chocolate with me is what it took to get it here,” says London. “This was not flown in the bottom of a 747 and then lovingly taken by unicorns to the post office and then dropped off to me by local fairies.”
Thankfully, after trial and error and a few still-undisclosed steps, Stranger’s beautiful chocolate bars arrived in Dayton, and London was able to share them with her followers. The difficulty of the process hammered home for her the challenges Ruslan and Tetiana are facing on a daily basis in trying to run their business, and the fragile hope with which they put their chocolate out into the world.
“In many ways,” she explains, “when someone sends this off, they’re sending off their baby, and they don’t know if anyone will get it and if anyone will love it.”
Grace Amidst Violence
When I first tasted Stranger’s Zorzal Dominican Republic 70% bar, I was stunned. The bar wrapper is an aerial image of a white sand beach, green splashes of palms dotting one side and the celeste blue transparency of the sea lapping at the other. The bar itself is thick and sturdy with a hard snap, but melts silkily with notes of honey, red Jujyfruit, and fig, with rich and regal classic chocolate all around. It amazed me to think something this poised and peaceful came out of an area of the world being torn apart by violence.
London felt similarly the first time she opened the box from Stranger and tasted her first bar.
“I’m tasting it, and it was so graceful, and I’m like, you’re making this in a war zone,” she recalls. “It is just such a bizarre juxtaposition. That’s kind of the crux of the story. In the midst of everything that’s going on, you’re creating what is honestly something so superfluous, something just beautiful and graceful and not necessary, but maybe that’s why it’s necessary.”
The war in Ukraine has no end in sight, and the U.S. news cycle isn’t devoting nearly as much coverage to it several years in as it was at the beginning. The fundraisers that were organized early on are long past. Our attention is elsewhere. But for the individuals still living under the constant anxiety of war, nothing has changed. Ruslan, Tetiana, and their family are keeping on as best they can. One simple way to support them is to buy their bars, if you have the opportunity. Cocoa Runners in the U.K. has several of their bars in stock currently.
“War really complicates and destroys everything,” says Tetiana. “We are trying to survive. Everything is difficult, and it is not known how everything will end. It’s cool that [our bars] are so far from us. Maybe they will cheer someone up.”