Mayana Chocolate Guide: The Layered Candy Bars From Wisconsin

October 12, 2026

Mayana Chocolate makes candy bars the way a chef builds a plated dessert: in layers. A bar might pair marshmallow with caramel, or nougat and toasted almonds with caramel, or shortbread with caramel, and each of the five bars in this guide is coated in dark chocolate. The company is run by a husband and wife, Daniel and Tamara Herskovic, and lists its address on South River Street in Spooner, Wisconsin. This guide covers the two founders, what each layer is and how it sets, and how to read five of their mini bars from the ingredient lists the maker publishes.

A few terms first. Caramel here means the chewy kind: sugar cooked with cream and butter until it holds its shape. Nougat is a sugar and honey syrup whipped with beaten egg white, so it turns pale, light and chewy, often with nuts folded in. Marshmallow is a sugar syrup whipped full of air and set with gelatin. Shortbread is a crumbly biscuit made from butter, sugar and flour. Enrobing means coating a filling in a curtain of liquid chocolate, and tempering is the heating and cooling that makes that chocolate set glossy rather than dull.

The makers

Daniel and Tamara Herskovic met while working a dining event in Chicago, according to the company's About page. Daniel built a career as a chef at restaurants in New York, San Francisco and Chicago before starting a private catering business. Tamara trained in interior architecture and ran an event planning company in Chicago. Today the work divides along those lines: Daniel makes the chocolate, and Tamara designs the packaging and the experience around it and handles communication with the company's customers.

The chocolate started as a memento for catering customers to take home after dessert. Daniel's first truffles kept growing as he added layer after layer of ingredients, until, as the About page tells it, they had tragically reached the size of golf balls. He went looking for instruction and trained with chocolate makers in the United States and France, among them Andrew Shotts, Norman Love, Franck Kestener, Christophe Morel, Jerome Landrieu and Lionel Clement. The page describes chocolate as difficult to temper and mercurial in texture (quick to change), and credits the training with truffles that became precisely sized, with inventive flavor and texture. Tamara helped him adorn them with designs.

In 2008 the couple entered the Chicago Luxury Chocolate Salon. They went home with seven awards, according to the About page, including "Best in Salon" and "Most Gifted Chocolatier," and the page marks that day with a short line: "Mayana had arrived."

Why Spooner

The road from Chicago runs through a yoga studio. Tamara, the About page says, earned a 200-hour yoga teacher certification and opened a studio in Spooner, Wisconsin, which the page calls "Mayana's future home." The company's website now lists its address as 1540 South River Street in Spooner. The company states its mission as serving its team members, customers and community with excellence every day while "finely crafting the most decadent candy bars the world has ever known."

On its homepage, alongside bars such as the Abu Dhabi and the Mother Fluffer, the maker lists three claims: no high fructose corn syrup, no artificial flavors and ethically sourced chocolate. The shop's product pages for the Space Bar Mini and the Fix Bar Mini describe the coating as Mayana's 66 percent custom-blend dark chocolate (66 percent is the share of the chocolate's weight that comes from the cacao bean; the chocolate percentage guide explains what that number does and does not say).

How a layer sets

The caramel, nougat and marshmallow in bars like these all start as sugar syrup cooked to different points, and candy makers name those points for what a drop of hot syrup does in cold water. The Exploratorium, the San Francisco science museum, gives the stages at sea level. Caramels are cooked to the firm-ball stage, 245 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit, where a drop forms a firm ball. Nougat and marshmallows are cooked to the hard-ball stage, 250 to 265 degrees. Toffee and nut brittles go to the hard-crack stage, 300 to 310 degrees, where the syrup snaps. A few degrees decide whether a layer chews, springs back or shatters. The caramel guide covers what heat does to sugar on the way to caramel.

Nougat and marshmallow both depend on air. France's official standard for Nougat de Montélimar defines that nougat as a white to cream-colored paste aerated with egg white and made from sweeteners, notably honey, with a filling of almonds. Its rules name whipped hen's egg white as the only permitted aerating agent. Marshmallow traps its air with gelatin instead. Food scientists writing in Acta Horticulturae in 2017 describe marshmallow as soft and foamy, a texture they attribute to its relatively high moisture, about 17 to 21 percent by weight, and its porous structure. That moisture and those tiny air pockets are what keep a marshmallow layer soft and springy. The nougat guide follows the honey-and-egg-white sweet back through Spain, France and Italy.

Then comes the chocolate. Cocoa butter, the fat in chocolate, can set in six different crystal shapes, and Popular Science reports that chocolate makers aim for one of them, called Form V, because it gives chocolate its glossy look and melt-on-the-tongue texture. They get it by tempering, carefully heating and cooling the chocolate. In an enrobing machine, as a 2014 report from the American Institute of Physics describes it, liquid chocolate flows like a curtain over the filling, some of it sticks, and the rest runs off and is tempered again inside the machine. The chocolate bloom guide explains what happens to that coating when a bar is stored too warm.

Reading a bar from its label

United States food labeling rules require ingredients to be listed in descending order of predominance by weight. On each of the five Mayana mini bars below, the maker's ingredient list starts with dark chocolate (cocoa liquor, which is ground cacao beans and contains no alcohol, plus sugar, cocoa butter, sunflower or soy lecithin, an emulsifier that helps fat and other ingredients blend, and natural vanilla), so the chocolate is the largest single ingredient by weight in every one of them. Further down, a few ingredients act as fingerprints for the layers. Gelatin marks a marshmallow. Egg white and honey mark a nougat. Wheat flour marks a biscuit. Pretzels and crispy rice mark a crunch layer.

The five mini bars

Cloud 9 (shop Mayana Cloud 9). The simplest of the five, and the one to start with: marshmallow, salted caramel and dark chocolate, three layers. The maker calls each bite a delicate dance of salt and marshmallow. Its ingredient list after the chocolate is glucose syrup (a liquid sugar made from starch), sugar, heavy cream, butter, dextrose (a simple sugar), gelatin, sea salt and natural vanilla, which is a caramel (cream and butter) and a marshmallow (gelatin) and nothing else.

Coffee Break (shop Mayana Coffee Break). The same marshmallow-over-caramel build, turned toward coffee. The maker describes layers of coffee marshmallow and espresso caramel, covered in dark chocolate and finished on top with sea salt and ground coffee. Coffee extract and instant espresso appear in the ingredient list, along with gelatin for the marshmallow and unsweetened cocoa powder.

Space Bar (shop Mayana Space Bar). The nougat bar. The maker names four components, vanilla nougat, toasted almonds, salted caramel and custom-blend dark chocolate, and calls it award winning. Its ingredient list shows the nougat plainly, with almonds, honey and egg white all present, the same honey-and-egg-white formula the French nougat standard writes down.

Fix Bar (shop Mayana Fix Bar). A biscuit bar: vanilla shortbread, salted caramel and custom-blend dark chocolate. Here the fingerprint is enriched wheat flour, along with corn starch, for the shortbread, with butter fourth on the list. The shortbread guide explains how a butter biscuit gets its crumble.

Kitchen Sink (shop Mayana Kitchen Sink). The most layered of the five. The maker blends peanut butter, pretzel and crisp rice with milk chocolate, salted caramel and its signature dark chocolate, and sums it up as everything needed to satisfy a sweet tooth. It is also the one bar of the five with two chocolates in it, dark outside and milk inside.

The five side by side

Bar	Components, per the maker	Fingerprint ingredients	Texture to expect
Cloud 9	Marshmallow, salted caramel, dark chocolate	Gelatin, cream, butter	Soft and springy over chew
Coffee Break	Coffee marshmallow, espresso caramel, dark chocolate, sea salt and ground coffee on top	Gelatin, coffee extract, instant espresso	Soft and springy, with a grainy top
Space Bar	Vanilla nougat, toasted almonds, salted caramel, dark chocolate	Egg white, honey, almonds	Dense chew with nut crunch
Fix Bar	Vanilla shortbread, salted caramel, dark chocolate	Wheat flour, corn starch, butter	Crumbly base under chew
Kitchen Sink	Peanut butter, pretzel, crispy rice, milk chocolate, salted caramel, dark chocolate	Peanut butter, pretzels, crispy rice	Crunchy and salty throughout

Every row shares two things, the caramel and the dark chocolate, so the column that changes is the third one. Read across a row, and the layer that is not caramel is the bar's character. The maker lists a serving of 1.4 ounces (40 grams) for Cloud 9 and Coffee Break and 1.5 ounces (43 grams) for the other three.

Beyond the five

The same building blocks reappear across the rest of the range. The Mother Fluffer (shop Mayana Mother Fluffer) is, in the maker's words, a bold mix of chocolate, peanut butter, marshmallow and crunchy potato chips, and its product page adds a layer of roasted white chocolate. Pecan Paradise (shop Mayana Pecan Paradise) moves the nougat idea to toasted pecans in vanilla nougat, layered with salted caramel. The Peanut Butter and Jelly bar (shop Mayana Peanut Butter and Jelly) pairs peanut butter crunch with raspberry caramel, and the Abu Dhabi bar (shop Mayana Abu Dhabi) layers pistachio creme and cookie crunch with dark chocolate.

How to taste them

Go from the fewest layers to the most, so each new texture is easy to pick out. Start with Cloud 9, then Coffee Break, which keeps the same build and adds coffee. Next the Fix Bar, for the crumble of shortbread, then the Space Bar, for nougat and almonds. Finish with the Kitchen Sink, where salt, crunch and two chocolates arrive at once. Let the bars sit at room temperature first, since a cold caramel is firm and quiet, and cut each one in half across its width to see the stripes before tasting. For the salt in those salted caramels, the finishing salt guide covers the flaky kinds.

To keep them, treat them as chocolate. Popular Science reports that chocolate brands suggest storing chocolate at about 57 to 61 degrees Fahrenheit, and that a bar going into the refrigerator should be wrapped well and allowed to warm to room temperature before unwrapping. That keeps water from condensing on the coating, dissolving surface sugar and leaving a white, powdery film behind.

A chef's dessert, cut to size

A candy bar looks like one thing in the hand and turns out to be four or five things in the mouth. Mayana's bars make that structure easy to see, because they set their changes against a caramel and a dark chocolate that stay constant, and the ingredient list names the change: gelatin, egg white, flour or pretzel. Daniel Herskovic came to chocolate looking for something his catering customers could take home after dessert, and a bar cut in half still reads like the plated dessert it grew from. Explore the Mayana collection.

The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.