Daniel Khachab worked at Rocket Internet and lived in Colombia before he founded Choco in Berlin in 2018 with Julian Hammer. The company is named after the Chocó region of Colombia, not after chocolate.
Chefs were ordering by phone and WhatsApp, and wholesalers typed the orders in by hand. Choco turned this into a chat-style app. For the first two years it had no marketing team and no website.
In 2020 restaurants closed almost overnight, and the company shifted its effort to helping wholesalers keep selling. A Series B of about $100 million followed in 2021, and by January 2022 Choco counted more than 15,000 restaurants and 10,000 wholesalers on its platform.
In April 2022 a $111 million round led by G Squared and Insight Partners valued Choco at about $1.2 billion. In February 2023 the company cut staff to streamline.