In recent years, the rise of Taiwan’s chocolate industry has seen Queenie Wu’s emergence as a game changer in the field. Between 2020 and 2024, she won six Golds at the International Chocolate Awards, becoming the first Asian chocolatier to accomplish this feat.
When Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the United States House of Representatives, visited Taiwan in 2022, one of the gifts presented to her by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was a box of chocolates from Queenie Wu’s Q Sweet.
A born chocoholic
Wu doesn’t claim culinary expertise, but when it comes to sweets and desserts, her enthusiasm is contagious. At the age of 24, she had already become product director of a chain business, successfully challenging the constraints of age, gender, and education.
It was back then that Wu was initiated into the world of artisan chocolates. Ever an enterprising woman, she recalls what motivated her in the first place: “I’ve been a chocoholic since day one.” Her mother developed a fondness for chocolate when pregnant with her, and when Wu was a child, her father always bought chocolate for the family when he went abroad on business. So her decision to become a chocolatier was a very personal one. “Eating chocolate is sheer bliss for me,” she says.
After leaving her job, Wu traveled to Belgium to train as a chocolatier. In 2015 she opened Q Sweet on Taipei’s vibrant Xinyi Road. With violet as its brand color, the chocolate shop feels like a dreamworld that emanates feminine elegance.
Carving out a new market
At the time, however, Taiwan’s chocolate market was still dominated by mass-market products, and artisan chocolates were few and far between. Attempting to shift consumer preferences took a huge amount of effort. “A piece of cake can have three layers for us to savor slowly, whereas a chocolate, which can cost more than NT$100, melts in the mouth within just a few seconds,” Wu says.
Another challenge Wu had to overcome was a lack of skilled workers. She explains that not all pastry chefs adept at making Swiss rolls and cheesecakes find making chocolates congenial, because the latter requires split-second timing and extremely precise hand movements. Showing us a ruler from her kitchen, she says earnestly that even a difference of one tenth of a millimeter in the outer layer can completely ruin the mouthfeel.
Navigating the uncharted waters of a new market, Wu strove very hard to gain visibility and the approval of consumers. There was no shortage of frustrations. In the early days, with little existing demand for artisan chocolates in Taiwan, Wu felt as if she was “planting flowers in a desert, not knowing whether the rain would ever come.”
The rocky road to glory
In 2019, at a low point in her career, Wu wasn’t particularly keen on entering professional competitions. “I just wanted to do what I liked and to commit myself to what I was doing.” Nevertheless, just as she was about to close her business for good, she decided to give it one last shot. Surprisingly, she fought her way victoriously through the International Chocolate Awards (ICA)—considered the Oscars of the chocolate world—and won two Bronzes at the World Final. She thanks God for inspiring her to take part in the competition.
In 2020–21 she went on to win a Gold. But the victory coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic. “Having worked so hard to reach the pinnacle of the world, we were nevertheless forced to close down the next day,” she recalls, with disappointment in her voice.
The following year Wu submitted entries for a third time, and won four Golds in the 2021–22 Asia–Pacific Bean-to-Bar and Craft Chocolatier Competition, earning a moment of pride for Taiwan. It was a particularly challenging time, however. As her staff contracted Covid one after another, she had to complete the entries on her own. Eventually she won 11 awards at the World Final for her dark, milk, and white chocolates across the categories of ganaches/truffles, chocolate bars, and chocolate-enrobed whole fruit. That year, she was the most versatile and the most decorated Asian chocolatier at the ICA.
