By Greg Gonzales

Stopping to take a breath now and then can help us pay attention to our inner voices. That’s how Alak Vasa, co-Founder of Elements Truffles, says she found her way to making chocolate. She left a career on Wall Street to follow her passion, and now she and her team make truffles and chocolate bars with a mission in mind.

Vasa spent more than a decade on Wall Street before she quit to train at Financier Patisserie in Manhattan. A friend had introduced her to meditation, which enabled her to understand herself better, she said. While she appreciated the chance to learn a new craft, she still didn’t feel at home. That inner voice kept getting louder, she said, telling her she had to create something of her own. In 2015, she got to work finding the right product.

“I never thought I would be making chocolate,” said Vasa. “When I quit my job I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I did know I wanted to do something with food and with good food ― food that you can trust, food that you can give to your child and not worry about what they’re eating ― and to build a company with values, in terms of the partnerships, the sourcing of ingredients, the packaging, the people. When we decided we wanted to build the company, we wanted to be mindful, to make it a human-centric company.”

The brand makes chocolates in small batches that are raw, organic, dairy-free, with no refined sugars, preservatives or emulsifiers. Each of its products is made in its New Jersey facility, where they’re sweetened with local honey that makes each bite melt slowly. Elements Truffles mixes in essential oils, ginger, black pepper, beet root, turmeric and lavender into its products. The result is a new kind of flavor experience, and a bar that’s less likely to end in a sugar crash.

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Beyond providing nutrient-dense, delicious chocolate to customers, Elements Truffles also donates 25 percent of its profits to the Care for Children project by the Art of Living Foundation, a non-profit. The project helps educate underprivileged kids in India.

And it’s not just chocolate bars at Elements Truffles. The company also sells Turmeric-Infused Drinking Chocolate, truffles infused with flavors like turmeric or cardamom or lavender, and gift boxes that contain an assortment of all the company’s products as well as smaller bars in the Pantry Edition line.

All the bars come in a cardboard box, with a fabric label hand-stitched onto the box, colored with vegetable ink. On the back, consumers can read about Ayurveda and Ayurvedic doshas, right above the nutrition facts.

Suggested retail prices are $6.99 for the bars, $4 for Pantry Edition bars, $12 for drinking chocolate, $12 for a small box of truffles and $35 for a large box of truffles.