Chocolarder

Can you talk us through the process of creating your chocolate?

Mike: We want full control over everything that goes into our chocolate, so we make it from bean to bar. When cocoa beans come in, we put them through a basic standardised roast and add a standard amount of sugar to make a 70% dark chocolate. Then we taste it. Chocolate is like wine: it has these amazing nuances that change, depending on the farm, farmer, year, yield, even what day of the month it was made. The flavours can range from leather and oak wood to cherry and tobacco. We want those complexities, so we then work out what roast and sugar we’ll use to bring out those flavours. The process of making the chocolate then takes about 60 days. We roast the cocoa beans, take the shell off to get the cocoa nib, refine it, age it for 30 days, remelt it, temper it and then finally wrap it. That’s all stuff we do in house.

How were the Selfridges Easter eggs created?

Mike: Working with Selfridges to create this year’s Easter eggs was a really fun process. You know your customers, so you develop the flavour ideas and then we get to put our spin on it. We’re a company that is focussed on ethics and sustainability, so this year we rescued would-be-waste orange peel from local cafés to give the vegan egg its orange flavour. 

How do you work to make your manufacturing process more sustainable?

James: We think carefully about how we get the beans over here – we often bring them over via sailboat. We also use vintage machinery wherever we can. We source it from all over the world to save them from a life of rust or ending up in landfill. We’ve got quite the museum here at Chocolarder. We’ve recently been restoring a vintage roaster. We found it in France; it had survived a fire in its previous factory where it used to roast hazelnuts. Had it not been for those residual hazelnut oils, it would have rusted beyond repair. 

What’s your favourite part of making the chocolate?

Becca: The foiling! Everything we do is obviously quite brown. But when you see the glisten of the foil when they’re being wrapped up, it just brightens the place up. And seeing a massive pile of eggs is always fun – it just makes me want to go out and hide them all. 

Why chocolate?

Becca: Chocolate is obviously the dream. Like, who wouldn't want to work with chocolate? When you’re a kid, if someone said you’d get to work in chocolate, you’d think you were dreaming.

Mike: Chocolate is a little bit of everything. It’s everything a geek like me enjoys. It’s amazing flavours, amazing people. It’s tinkering with machines. It’s science, it’s physics, it’s chemistry. At the end of it you get something that everyone thinks they know, but really they don’t until they try chocolate like ours.