On January 18th, Minimal, a bean-to-bar chocolate specialty store, will release two new chocolate assortment sets in limited quantities, perfect for Valentine's Day gifts.

Minimal provides bean-to-bar chocolate, which visits local cacao farms across three continents, procuring the beans, and carrying out all processes from sorting to roasting, grinding, blending, and molding all in one workshop.

The new product being released, the "Tasting Set - Philippine Cacao, Five Original Fermented Chocolates" (1,620 yen including tax), is an assortment of five chocolates, each with a completely different flavor, made from unfermented cacao beans harvested at the same time on a single farm in the Philippines, using Minimal's five unique fermentation methods. By varying the amount of sugar used to feed the yeast and the number of times the chocolate is stirred, different flavors are created using the same cocoa beans, such as the mellowness of hazelnuts, the deep sweetness of candied almonds, and the refreshing acidity of green apples, raspberries, or peach compote.

The "Minimal Flight 2016" (5,940 yen including tax), themed around a "global journey around cocoa-producing regions," is an assortment of eight types of chocolate made using beans from eight cocoa-bean-producing countries in the world's three continents: Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. The chocolates, each with their own distinct flavor, allow you to savor the delicate characteristics of each cocoa bean, including Nicaraguan chocolate with a violet flower flavor, Tanzanian chocolate with a fragrant peanut-like flavor familiar to Japanese people, Ghanaian chocolate with cinnamon and dried fruit flavors, Madagascar chocolate with an exquisite balance of sourness and sweetness like fruit yogurt, and spicy Indonesian chocolate.

Furthermore, 400 "Tasting Sets" were released in advance on December 20th, but they have already sold out. 400 new sets will be on sale from January 18th. A total of 2,650 sets of "Minimal Flight 2016" are planned to be sold.