Not content, however, in making taste buds sit up and take note, Wong has yet another ambitious project in mind as she sets out to produce Singapore’s first single-origin chocolate. There are seeds to be planted and trees to be grown, and however wacky the idea might seem, if anyone’s going to pull it off, it’s going to be Wong. There have already been several buy-ins—Gardens by the Bay may be a standout—and a host of schools has allowed her to plant and educate (on cultivation, nurturing and sustainability). “The schools will take care of the trees,” she says, “and the harvest belongs to us. The school kids get to learn how to plant, grow the crop and harvest.” It’s a stewardship that Wong is committed to and she would like as many people as possible to get on board the cocoa train.

“I want to sell chocolate bars that are comparable to those produced in Peru or Colombia,” she says earnestly, while accepting that the enterprise is probably at least two years from fruition and that there are no guarantees of success. This doesn’t seem to bother Wong a jot and one gets the impression that she’s contrary enough to embark on any project that someone told her would be impossible. Or, at the very least, a bad idea.

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She’s a dreamer, so it seems appropriate that she cites Walt Disney and Coco Chanel as inspirations. They dreamed—they may even have hallucinated—and Wong appears to be in the mould and ready to break out of it.

I ask her to give me three words that other people would use to describe her, and get “daring, competitive, serious”. I ask for three words of her own to describe herself and all she can manage is: “intense and innovative”. I offer to give her more time. Four hours later, I get “inspiring”—since I had insisted that it be a word that began with “in”, purely for alliterative purposes. The very next day, she comes up with “adaptable” and ruins everything.

It may be odd to describe someone as “serious about chocolate”. It seems frivolous. But Janice Wong’s vision, hopes and dreams amount to a lot more than a hill of cocoa beans. She’s a woman on a mission to put Singapore on yet another niche map, and bearing in mind her determination to thoroughly engage with everything that she does, no one would be surprised if the sweet smell of success doesn’t follow hard upon and in a couple of years time, we get a single-origin chocolate from this island that can take its place on the world stage.

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