Everyone assumes the name means chocolate. It does not. Daniel Khachab has had to explain this for years: Choco is named after the Chocó, a wet, wildly biodiverse strip of Colombia's Pacific coast, a place he had come to know while living in Colombia. He told the OMR podcast he liked it for what it stood for, a huge range of things and less waste.
That is a surprisingly soft origin for a company that now moves orders between restaurants and wholesalers. Khachab came out of Rocket Internet, the Berlin startup factory, where speed is a religion. In 2018 he started Choco with Julian Hammer and a third co-founder, named in most accounts as Rogério da Silva Yokomizo.
For the first two years there was no marketing department and not even a website.
The problem they picked was unglamorous. Chefs ordered ingredients by phone, scribbled notes and WhatsApp voice messages, usually late at night. Wholesalers then typed it all up by hand. Choco turned that mess into something that feels like a messenger chat. Khachab compared apps to kitchen tools: you reach for them and they just work.
What almost nobody expected was how little marketing it took. For the first two years there was no marketing department and not even a website. Wholesalers told their restaurant customers, who told other restaurants. The founders did, however, pay a significant sum for the domain name early on, which Khachab mentioned with some amusement.
Then came 2020. Restaurants shut from one day to the next, and the customer base that Choco existed for was suddenly gone. Khachab has described the shock plainly. The company pivoted its energy to helping wholesalers keep selling food, and the business model matured: Choco earns on payment services, letting restaurants pay invoices later while wholesalers get their money immediately.
Investors saw the recovery. A Series B of about $100m came in 2021, and in April 2022 a further $111m round valued Choco at about $1.2bn. By January 2022 it counted more than 15,000 restaurants and 10,000 wholesalers, and the United States had become its biggest market.
The boom ended fast. In February 2023 the company laid off staff as it streamlined, a reminder that hiring from 350 towards 800 in one year is a bet on a market that does not wait.
The lesson for founders is in the name. Khachab built a global software company around a place that mattered to him personally, and around a customer who was too busy to learn a new tool. Make the product feel like the thing they already do, and the brand story can stay a little strange.