As the popularity of gummy supplements continues to grow, US-based Good Day Chocolate offers an alternative with its chocolate supplement pieces for sleep, calmness and energy. The company combines pharmaceutical-grade ingredients with fair trade chocolate in a product that helps ingredients to absorb better.

Nutrition Insight meets with Simeon Margolis, COO and co-founder at Good Day Chocolate, to examine how the company creates effective and tasty supplements.

“The purpose of Good Day Chocolate is to provide relief while also spreading joy,” says Margolis. “It started by getting kids to take their medicine. The concept was born in a medical practice, wher my former partner in Good Day Chocolate gave kids medicine to numb their throat before and after a tonsillectomy in the form of a lollipop.”

“That idea of a sweet, joyful delivery mechanism for a very functional ingredient was the basis that Good Day Chocolate grew out of. Lollipops turned to caramels, then chocolate bars and mini chocolate bars. In the end, we settled on little candy-coated pieces of chocolate.”

The company aims to create chocolate supplements that are easier to eat and more tasty than typical supplements. “This business is about taking something that you use or should be using and putting it in a better, more effective and more joyful form,” underscores Margolis.

“Need states”
The company focuses on areas Margolis calls “need states” — wher people need something to sleep, calm down or get more energy. In addition to these focus areas, the company also offers a multivitamin product for kids.

“We launched with these little eight-piece boxes that fit nicely in the palm of your hand, which feel and look cute,” shares Margolis.

“It makes a big promise if you think about it — saying it’s chocolate and will help you sleep. To a lot of people, that’s counterintuitive to begin with — the same holds for the calm product.”

He adds that the company wants people to discover the brand through these small boxes to learn their preferred dosage. “You won’t hurt yourself even if you ate all eight pieces. If you ate all eight pieces of sleep, you might be a little groggy tomorrow; it’s the same with the energy, that would be like having two cups of strong coffee.”

Better absorption through chocolate
While the company has not conducted clinical studies on its supplements, Margolis details that its core functional ingredients — melatonin, caffeine and theanine — “absorb better in the body in chocolate than in a gummy.”

“The best example is melatonin — the human body produces melatonin daily, and the liver filters it out so we’re not falling asleep all day. The liver filters out around 80% or 85% of the melatonin it comes in contact with.”

“Think about the experience of eating a gummy — you pick it out of your teeth and end up swallowing it wher it gets absorbed through the stomach and liver. If you take a gummy or pill with five mg melatonin, you’re probably getting maybe one mg that enters the bloodstream.”

In contrast, when eating chocolate, the natural fat in the product coats the inside of the mouth. “You can taste that chocolate for minutes after you’ve eaten it. What’s happening is that we are getting sublingual absorption,” he underscores.

The ingredients cross the blood-brain barrier through the mucous membrane, getting a faster and higher absorption rate through chocolate.

Margolis adds that the company wants to verify this absorption rate by testing people’s blood after taking the product.

Product development
The company started almost ten years ago when the team determined how to create chocolate supplements in a small commercial kitchen.

Although a few companies had similar products at the time, Margolis adds that Good Day Chocolate was the first to break through and gain significant distribution, retail and online sales. He explains that it is challenging to create chocolate supplements.

“Everything about it was pretty difficult to figure out — how to put the right amount in the chocolate without it seizing up. I spent an entire summer trying to figure out how to put caffeine in chocolate and have it not taste bad,” he details. “Caffeine is very bitter, and when you combine it with chocolate, it has this horrible taste experience.”

“You can put a lot of stuff into a pill, gummy or tablet, but chocolate is a little harder to work with. And it’s expensive. We’re using fair trade chocolate — creating premium fair trade products, often milk and sometimes dark chocolate. We aim to have them taste as good or better than other candy-coated chocolate people know.”

Margolis explains that the company uses a different processing method for chocolate that allows the flavors to work without adding other ingredients. “There are nuances in how to have certain ingredients not interact with the heat level of chocolate or processing time.”

The company is third-party verified to ensure that “everything on the label is in the product at the levels we say it is,” he underscores. “It’s all-natural — even the coloring is from plants, fruits, and vegetables. It is very much a pure fair trade chocolate with normal sugar.”

Bringing to market
Margolis explains that the company’s expectations were limited when Good Day Chocolate launched its first product. The product was sold in 20 Whole Foods stores in Colorado in November 2014 for a relatively low price at the checkout counter.

“At the beginning, people bought it almost cynically, thinking it would not taste good or work. At the same time, they were also thinking that if it does work, it’s a game-changer. People discovered that it tasted better than other chocolate candies and worked.”

In the first stores, the company put in a lot of effort to determine price, product messaging and how to attract new consumers to the brand.

“We spent a lot of time figuring out why people were buying and why they weren’t. When we expanded to all the Whole Foods ten months later, we understood how it had to work,” underscores Margolis.

The company found that consumers were confused about the product’s appearance and added a descriptor to the in transparent boxes — “candy-coated pieces.” When Good Day Chocolate started selling the supplements in PET bottles, it ensured people could see the product through the bottle.

Range expansion
In addition to the current products, Good Day Chocolate is launching a tummy product — a probiotic for kids — by rebranding a product previously sold under a probiotic label containing one billion CFUs per piece.

Margolis adds: “We are working on other products in highly functional areas, such as focus, cognition and immunity, things that have more of a day-to-day necessity to them versus what we call compliance states — wher people take a daily regimen of something they need to be healthy.”