When it was decided to make candy, I had to establish a basis of existing flavours and to do that I bought quite a bit of candy. This provided valuable insight into the variety of flavours, as well as correlations between flavours and shapes and pushed me to work with chocolate instead of candy.

Ideation revolved around creating a set of 4 or 5 chocolates with a consistent theme and family feeling. Consideration was placed on how would that shape change as it melted, impacting the eating experience. Once the pieces were decided upon, ideation was done around mold making and packaging.

Taking inspiration from cubic illusions, I created the set of four chocolates all based off a 5 x 5 cubic grid. The idea behind their cubic forms and hard edges is that as the chocolate melts, these hard edges round over creating a unique eating experience.

After the general form of the chocolates were built out in CAD, I began to prototype the pieces using a variety of mediums. First I created foam blocks to work out the most comfortable eating size before 3D printing the actual forms to test scale, mold ability, and radii. The final molding pieces were resin printed for surface quality.

This was a project of firsts for me since this was the first time I had ever done silicone molding, so I had to research the best way to achieve a proper mold. I created the chamber out of foam core and attached my cleaned resin prints at the bottom before pouring in the food grade silicone.

It became clear when I cut the mold open to remove the resin pieces that I had not done the best of jobs. Most likely due to lack of rolling the mold while pouring, a lot of air bubbles were trapped in the pieces causing surface imperfections in the chocolate. I'm confident if I gave this another shot, I can achieve better results.

The next step was to create an identity for the chocolates. Thinking about word associations for the chocolate, eating experience, and production method, a number of words starting with the letter 'E' were quickly discovered. The four most prominent being Elegant, Edible, Experiential, and Engineered, hence E4.

Flavour variations include white, milk, and dark chocolate, and there could be a possibility of creating a number of other collections using different forms.