We are delighted to announce that we have won the grand prize at this year’s Retail Week Interior Awards – the Retail Interior of the Year – for our flagship Roast+Conch store in Covent Garden designed by Terry Moore (www.terrymooredesign.com). This jewel in the industry’s crown took place on 27th September at London’s Park Lane Hotel, where 700 top retailers and designers gathered to hear the results.

Roast+Conch is our new Covent Garden store that encompasses all that we do under one roof – with daily cocoa bean roasting and ultra fresh, small batch chocolate making in a theatre kitchen, as well as a café menu and our exclusive brewed cocoa drinks. You can also find all of your favourite Hotel Chocolat gifts and treats in the ground floor boutique, with the café and kitchen in the atmospheric basement.

Roast+Conch continues our strong design ethos that successfully marries the dual personalities of Hotel Chocolat – namely the sophisticated, fashion-led side of our stylish products and the earthy, authentic aspects of a hands-on cocoa grower. Roast+Conch Covent Garden was created to take our design ethos to another level – being a restful sanctuary for our guests, while also strongly reflecting the fact that we are one of the world’s few cocoa growing chocolatiers. We are absolutely delighted that our vision has been recognised with such a high profile award.

National Chocolate Week just wouldn’t be complete without the Chocolate Unwrapped show – which this year is on 13th & 14th October in The London Film Museum, Covent Garden. It’s a chance for visitors to completely immerse themselves in the world of chocolate, from cooking demonstrations and talks, to tasting chocolate from around the world.

So come along and visit us, where we’ll be showcasing our Less Sugar, More Cocoa chocolate philosophy and staging a Roast+Conch Pop Up Café. You’ll be able to taste our unique cacao cuisine dishes, as well as trying our revolutionary new brewed cocoa drinks.

We hope to see you there!

For more details and to book tickets please see chocolateunwrapped.co.uk

In celebration of National Chocolate Week, the Academy of Chocolate is hosting a conference that will bring together an enormous array of chocolate and cocoa experts. It’s set to be a fascinatingly day, covering everything from cocoa genetics and sustainability, to flavour combinations, chocolate tasting and a whole lot more in between.

It’s aimed at anyone with an interest in cocoa and chocolate, whether you’re a budding chocolatier, starting a chocolate business, or simply love chocolate. The line up of participants covers cocoa growers, buyers and experts, chocolatiers, expert tasters and chocolate entrepreneurs.

Academy of Chocolate Conference – 12th October – RAC, Pall Mall, London

We are always delighted to win awards for our chocolate – this year alone we have won no less than 7 Gold Star Awards at this year’s Great Taste Awards. It’s a real seal of approval for what we’re doing and we’re particularly pleased that two of our passions have been rewarded this year – our Less Sugar, More Cocoa philosophy and our Saint Lucian cocoa. Both of which can be tasted in our 50% cocoa ‘dash of milk’ milk chocolate and the 100% Island Grower’s Bar.

The Great Taste Awards are acknowledged as one of the benchmarks of high quality in Britain and have been described as the ‘Oscars’ of the food world. To get a taste of our award winning chocolates, from this year and last, we recommend the following:

Spotlight On Midnight Mints (2012 Great Taste Awards)
Chilli Liquid Chocolat (2011 Great Taste Awards)
66% Rabot Estate Dark Chocolate (2011 Great Taste Awards)
50% ‘Dash of Milk’ Praline (2012 Great Taste Awards)
100% Island Growers Bar (2012 Great Taste Awards)
Hazelnut Bûche (2012 Great Taste Awards)
Spotlight On Salted Caramel (2011 Great Taste Awards)

There was once a time when Britain led the world in chocolate innovation. A time when the number of chocolate shops rivalled the number of coffee shops and a British company made the world’s first solid chocolate bar. And as a British chocolatier, we’re all for making Britain a leader in chocolate again with exciting chocolates made with plenty of imagination and a good measure of our world renowned national wit and charm.

The creative process is never ending – from the most successful Selector recipes graduating into our seasonal boxed selections, to our Giant Slabs whose iconic shape is now a national treasure. And if you’ve ever wondered just how many different types of chocolate we make, then just lift the lid of a Chocolatier’s Table.

All year long, the chocolatiers that make chocolates for our Tasting Club strive for just one thing – excellence. That’s because the only way their chocolates will feature high in the score charts is by impressing our members. It is their scores and comments that drive all we do in the Club, which guarantees that the pursuit of excellence is at the heart of everything.

So it won’t surprise you to hear that our annual ‘best of the best’ selection is called just that – The Excellence Collection. It’s full of nothing but the highest rated, best scoring chocolate superstars of the past year, brought together in one box for a delicious encore in an array of winning categories – from our overall champion, the ‘Best Leading Chocolate’ and ‘Highest 10/10’, to the ‘Most Uplifting’ chocolate and the infamous ‘Knock Your Socks Off’ award.

Yes? Then you’re not alone. Every year we get hundreds of entries for our Create a Chocolate Competition, which is open to all members of our Tasting Club. And it does just what it says – it’s a chance to let your chocolate imagination run amok and come up with your very own recipe. The winners, selected by myself, are then matched with chocolatier partners who make them come to life.

As if that wasn’t enough, each winning recipe then goes on to appear in a Tasting Club box so that fellow members can taste, rate and comment on it – which is nail-biting stuff, but having a whopping 5kg of your own creation to show off to family and friends helps get over that. You could even see your creation star in the Hotel Chocolat range too. Eton Mess is one of our iconic chocolates, but the first recipe was a winner in our Create a Chocolate Competition.

We founded our Tasting Club with just one aim in mind – to thrill our Club members with exciting chocolates. And that is exactly what we have been doing, for over 14 years now! As you can imagine, keeping 100,000 chocolate-loving Tasting Club members satisfied with a different selection every month equals a great deal of chocolate recipes to create. The question is… how do we do it?

The answer lies in the format of the Club itself – whereby we create a different selection of chocolates every month and our members tell us if they’d like to receive it. Every box they do receive contains a scorecard and we invite them to let us know what they thought of each chocolate (there’s an online version too). Those scores and comments in turn guide us in the creation of new recipes, although we’ll always seek to challenge with some more ‘Off the Wall’ ideas too. We call it Chocolate Democracy.

National Chocolate Week this year runs from 8th to 14th October and as one of the world’s few chocolatiers to grow cocoa, we’re uniquely placed to share our adventures, experiences and expertise with you – which is exactly what we’d like to do throughout Chocolate Week. Here’s what to look out for:

• We’ll be taking you on a different creative adventure every day of Chocolate Week – letting you into a few secrets about our Tasting Club and award-winning chocolates on the way.

• Tasting Adventures – we’re hosting our exclusive Chocolate Tasting Adventures in different locations every evening of Chocolate Week. Taking you on an expertly guided tour of different chocolates over two delicious hours.

• Boucan Supper Club 12th October – we’re hosting a one-off dining event with only 20 places available, a delicious taste of the ‘cacao cuisine’ pioneered at our Boucan Hotel & Restaurant in Saint Lucia.

• Chocolate Unwrapped 13th & 14th October – we’re also participating in the biggest ever Chocolate Unwrapped event in London’s Covent Garden, where you can experience our cocoa, chocolate and a pop-up Roast+Conch café too.

• Academy of Chocolate 12th October – I’ll be speak at the academy of chocolate conference on the Friday 12th October in London.

• Choctails 8th & 14th October – To celebrate National Chocolate Week we have teamed up with The Botanist on Sloane Square and Chiswell Street Dining Rooms near Barbican to produce an exclusive range of decadent hot drinking chocolates and cocktails

We’re delighted to have no less than seven Gold Star winners in this year’s Great Taste Awards, including two made with Saint Lucian cocoa from our own estate.

To have won so many is a real seal of approval for what we’re doing and we’re particularly pleased that two of our core passions have been rewarded – our Less Sugar, More Cocoa philosophy and our Saint Lucian cocoa.  Both of which can be seen and tasted in our 50% Cocoa ‘Dash of Milk’ Pralines and the 100% Island Grower’s Bar.

The Great Taste Awards are acknowledged as one of the benchmarks of high quality food and drink here in Britain and have been described as the ‘Oscars’ of the food world and ‘the epicurean equivalent of the Booker Prize’.  This year over 2,500 producers entered over 8,800 of their products for blind tasting by over 350 judges.

Our full list of Gold Star Award Winners – Spotlight On Midnight Mints • 50% ‘Dash of Milk’ Praline (made with Saint Lucian cocoa) • Salted Caramel • Chocolate Bûche • Orange Tangs • 100% Island Growers Bar (made with Saint Lucian cocoa) • Caramel Smudge