A British chocolate maker and retailer that grows its own cacao and sells through UK shops, cafes, restaurants and online.
Hotel Chocolat is a British chocolate company that designs its own recipes and sells them through shops, cafes, restaurants and online. Its range includes Slabs, thick-shelled Easter eggs, the Velvetiser hot chocolate machine, advent calendars, gifts and subscriptions. It also runs cafes and restaurants such as Roast and Conch in Leeds and Rabot 1745 at Borough Market in London.
The company says it started with three values: originality, authenticity and ethics. Originality means staying fresh and creative and rejecting the conventional rules of chocolate. Authenticity means growing its own cacao and making chocolate with more cacao and less sugar. Ethics means seeking a fairer share of the rewards for cacao farmers. It says it has worked on better cacao farming since 2002 and calls its approach gentle farming, developed with farmers and experts in Ghana and Saint Lucia.
Hotel Chocolat was co-founded by Angus Thirlwell and Peter Harris. Its first shop opened in North London in 2004, and its recent-highlights page says more than 80 UK stores opened over ten years, including its first Scottish store in Edinburgh in December 2011. The only address on its story page is Mint House, Newark Close, Royston, Hertfordshire. Its School of Chocolate runs events in London, Leeds and Cambridge. The company describes itself as an affiliate of Mars, Incorporated.
The company says its recipes come from in-house chocolatiers in a Cambridgeshire Inventing Room, never off the shelf, and that it does everything with its customers at heart. It also says it uses every part of the cacao bean, for example turning shells into infusions and selling misshapen but premium chocolates in Ugly But Good bags. These are the company's own claims. It owns Rabot Estate, a working cacao farm in Saint Lucia with an eco-hotel.
A business like this employs many kinds of people: shop and cafe teams, chocolatiers and recipe developers, factory and logistics staff, designers, online and marketing specialists, buyers, and head office teams in finance and technology. The best way to see which roles exist is its own careers page. We did not find the head office team size or a staff headcount. Its recent-highlights page also says it was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2016 and won Mid-Market Business of the Year at the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards that November, and it was named in the Academy of Chocolate Awards with 18 wins in April 2016, including three golds.
Website: www.hotelchocolat.com/uk
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