Celebrating 10 Years of Chocolate Soup

Chocolate Soup turns 10 this month (September 16 to be exact).

It’s a milestone birthday for any business, but it’s extra special for us. Our team has spent the last ten years helping businesses like yours recognize important milestones. From birthdays and anniversaries to shipping a major release and earning a critical certification, we’ve worked side by side with dedicated HR and people leaders to celebrate employees inside and outside of work.

Celebrating milestones to show recognition is something that runs deep in our DNA. Pj and I have founded multiple companies over the years. Each one was different, but we led them all with the same commitment to build recognition into our culture. It wasn’t just work milestones. We recognized events that we knew were important to our team. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Births, and many more.

We saw a tremendous impact in our culture that helped build a sense of ownership within each company. Our team cared because they felt like they were part of the business, not just another person on payroll. It even helped attract new talent. Employees would post about the recognition, and friends and family in their networks would see that. 

But what we didn’t know at the time was that we’d build a business around helping other companies build that same culture of recognition.

Back in 2016, Pj and I weren’t only running our startup. We were also helping other founders by mentoring as growth coaches at Communitech here in Waterloo. Our time with these founders was intense and personal. Every conversation was a chance to cut away all the noise and hype of startup culture and get to the core of the problems these founders were facing.

What stood out to us was one common theme. As these companies scaled, their culture wasn’t keeping up. Some had grown from five employees to over 100 in under a year. It was a whiplash-inducing speed, and their teams were suffering.

We had been there, too. But our experiences were different. So we asked ourselves: “Why aren’t more people doing what we’re doing?”

The answer is that it’s hard. HR and people & culture leaders are busy. Filling out mailing labels and keeping track of birthdays and milestones takes away from the core work these professionals do. 

It was there that we saw the potential. Could we take what we do for our team and turn that into a service for other companies. 

This isn't another software platform. It’s simple, personalized recognition.  We knew this was something other businesses could use. A way for them to recognize their employees the way that we have without all the heavy lifting.

That idea became what Chocolate Soup is today. Ten years later, we still believe in fostering recognition culture through personalized employee appreciation gifts. 

We’ve seen a lot of these ten years:

The move to remote and hybrid workplaces

When teams scattered across kitchen tables and home offices, the "hallway high-five" disappeared overnight. Recognition suddenly had to travel further to land the same way, and we watched companies scramble to make people feel seen through a screen. It's part of why personalized, tangible gestures became more important, not less.

The Great Resignation

Millions of people stopped to ask themselves what they actually wanted from work, and a lot of them decided a paycheck wasn't enough. We saw firsthand how the businesses that held onto their people weren't the ones with the biggest budgets, but the ones whose employees felt genuinely valued.

Quiet Quitting

When "doing the bare minimum" became a cultural conversation, we saw it for what it often was: a symptom of feeling invisible. It reinforced something we already believed—disengagement rarely starts with laziness, it starts with not feeling appreciated.

Cross-border trade issues

Tariffs, shipping delays, and shifting import rules made something as simple as sending a gift a lot more complicated. We had to get creative to make sure a thank-you could still cross borders and arrive on time, without losing the personal touch that made it meaningful in the first place.

Through every shift, one thing didn't change: the need for people to feel valued didn't go away, it just got harder to meet. We adapted right alongside our customers, and looking back, that adds up to a decade's worth of moments worth counting.

Ten Years, By the Numbers

A decade is a long time to spend obsessing over how to make people feel appreciated. Here's some of what that's added up to:

• 20,000+ gifts shipped per year

• 400+ companies supported

• Hundreds of thousands of bricks used

• Hundreds of packages of sample treats eaten in the office, from C’est Bon Bon Gummies to Come Back Snacks and EATABLE popcorn, and many more.

• Four office moves

Numbers like these are fun to look back on, but they're really just a record of a lot of small moments. A birthday someone didn't expect us to remember, a gift that showed up right when a team needed a lift. That's what we actually set out to build ten years ago.

Ten years in, I'm more convinced than ever that recognition isn't a perk. It's the thing that makes people feel like they belong somewhere. Pj and I started Chocolate Soup because we saw what happened when our own teams felt truly seen, and we wanted every business to be able to give their people that same feeling, without the heavy lifting. 

To every HR and people leader who's trusted us to help them celebrate their teams, and to everyone on the Chocolate Soup team who's poured themselves into making that happen: thank you. 

Here's to the next ten years of showing up for the people who make businesses what they are.