We're ready to celebrate the New Year now!

We know it's far too late to be wishing a Happy New Year, but in our business we've found ourselves spending half the year living and breathing Christmas, we're now definitely over it and ready to get very excited about what's going to be happening in the year ahead. 

So 2016! 

Well we have decided that this is very much the year for us to Love Chocolate! Well that's nothing new, surely? Well it's not really! We adore chocolate, and we're still very much in love with it as much, if not more so, than when we started! However there's been some very sad stories in the media recently about bean to bar chocolate products and more recently about the questionable sourcing of beans. It's very much reminded us why we went into the chocolate business in the first place.

Our ambition has always been to make chocolate ourselves, from the cocoa bean to the finished product, shortening the supply chain and making sure we can pass more value onto our chocolate loving customers and more wealth to the farmers who grow the cacao.

With this in mind I've decided to declare our new year's resolutions. In 2015 we made our own products from what we in the industry call 'couverture' - that means that a much larger chocolate maker has roasted, ground and blended the cacao before it reaches us, the chocolatiers, pretty much most of the industry work this way. By the end of 2015 we were creating our Own Blend Couverture that we used to make our Elect Chocolates, our Award Winning Signature Hot Chocolate, 60% Own Blend Buttons and Fondant Creams. It was a start and was able to teach us lots about the chocolate making process and about our customers, we've been able to honestly say we don't use any soy lecithin to thin the chocolate down, and have never put milk into our machinery and we've learnt how much you value these points.

While it accounted for about 10% of our chocolate sales, we want to be able to have a much more distinctive quality to our products and ensure that money we spend in ingredients is being spent as wisely as it can.

This week our first shipment of South American Cocoa Nibs arrive, there might be some changes in taste, but we believe they will all be for the better as we start playing around with different blends and recipes.

I'm very much looking forward to sharing the results with you soon. In the meantime, come and ask for a sample if you're passing, you can help us get the flavour spot on!

Hope you have a great start to 2016!

Lots of Love

Sophie