Hallelu Chocolate: the car engineer who built his own chocolate line to pay farmers double for their cocoa

Hallelu Chocolate Co., Ltd · Thủ Đức, Ho Chi Minh City · halleluchocolate.com

The answer was to make chocolate. But an imported machine cost "around half a billion dong", and his assets, as he puts it, "were almost nothing but passion and a brain." So the engineer, who had worked for a Japanese car group, built the machines himself: a grinder with granite rollers, a winnower, a butter press, a tempering machine, a vibrating table and an enrobing machine, a full set of six, at half the price of imports. At midnight one day in 2017, the first finished chocolate came out of the mould. In early 2018 the workshop in Thủ Đức opened its doors. The name HALLELU stands for "Happy Leading Lucky", with the H for Huy.

Bean-to-bar, and machines for the whole industry

Hallelu makes chocolate bean-to-bar, in ten stages, using only batches of beans fermented 95–100 per cent as tracked by sensors, with no flavourings. Trinitario and Criollo cocoa beans are bought from Tiền Giang, Bến Tre, Đồng Nai, Lâm Đồng, Bà Rịa – Vũng Tàu and Đắk Lắk at VND 120,000–150,000 a kilo, double the raw-export price, more than 20 tonnes a year. The range includes 70 per cent and 100 per cent dark chocolate, milk chocolate, chocolate with cashews, macadamia and lotus seeds, chocolate-dipped dried fruit, and cocoa powder and butter, sold at four airports and exported to France, Japan, Singapore, Dubai, Laos and Russia.

In 2020, Covid halted exports, revenue fell to zero and the staff shrank from 30 to eight; Hallelu survived by switching to lip balm made from cocoa butter. Then the home-built machines became a second product: Hallelu has sold nearly ten sets to other cocoa businesses under the Haki Machinery brand, and its chocolate tempering machine is recorded as the first built by a Vietnamese engineer.

Huy won first prize at the 2023 Farmers' Technical Innovation Awards and the 2023 Lương Định Của Award, and was named an Outstanding Young Citizen of Ho Chi Minh City in 2023; Hallelu made the Top 50 Vietnamese Startups of 2022.

At Green Business Matching Day

India is one of the fastest-growing chocolate markets in Asia, and the story of Vietnamese chocolate made from Vietnamese beans on Vietnamese machines is the one Hallelu brings to Lumi Hub on the morning of 4 November 2026.

Green Business Matching Day Vietnam is co-organised by INCHAM with Canopus, AnChay.TV and Chay Vietnam, with the support of the Consulate General of India in Ho Chi Minh City, Ministry of External Affairs of India.

Based on material provided by the company; compiled by the organisers of Green Business Matching Day Vietnam as a gift to the businesses that joined the day.