After three years and more than 700,000 handmade chocolate bars, Hey Tiger have made the tough decision to close its doors.

Victorian-based chocolate social enterprise Hey Tiger has closed its doors, with founder Cyan Ta’eed citing it had proven too difficult to scale the business into the profitability it needed to be sustainable moving forwards.

In a letter to their customers, published in early May on the Hey Tiger website, Cyan wrote, “as the scale of our chocolate production grew, so did the tensions between the very things that made Hey Tiger special and its ongoing viability. Ultimately while succeeding in one goal, we couldn’t reach the other.”

“The last three years have been some of the most incredible, most challenging, and most rewarding of my career. Our team created a constant stream of recipes, flavours and innovations that brought people genuine joy. Together we built a brand that challenged the status quo of what a chocolate business looks like by melding fashion, beauty and deliciousness in one intricate explosion of visual design and messaging.”

“One of my favourite quotes is that ‘a ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for’. It’s vital that entrepreneurs and dreamers everywhere take risks, go big and try. In the end, we may not have stuck the landing, but I’m still glad we took the leap.”

Hey Tiger sold ethically sourced, handmade chocolate, with a portion from the sale of each chocolate bar going to charity The Hunger Project.