HOTEL CHOCOLAT FULL
HOTEL CHOCOLAT TV

Just look at what they’ve done to Dairy Milk.

The firm recently announced the closure of its US stores, although we should not take that as a bad sign: Americans aren’t good at chocolate. The show was upbeat, but if you read the business pages you will have seen that the company’s shares plummeted last month after Thirlwell warned of lower sales growth. But it does take away a little bit of the magic of an “artisan” brand when you see it all being produced in bulk in a vast factory. Hotel Chocolat is a British chocolatier and a unique type of chocolate company that connects luxury chocolate making and retailing with cocoa growing it. There is something satisfying about seeing chocolate being made: glossy ribbons of tempered chocolate on a conveyor belt, or being poured into moulds. It was also interesting to see new products being road-tested on a group of customers, who weren’t sure about the cacao tea. “I want that flake to be gossamer thin,” he said, inspecting machines that produce the company’s hot chocolate (which is delicious, by the way, although I manage to make it without shelling out for their £99.95 “velvetiser” machine). All of this was overseen by CEO Angus Thirlwell, an ever-smiling presence who seemed to be involved in every aspect of the business down to a granular level. The team visited farmers in Ghana, where they gave a paternalistic talk about sustainability and saving the environment. We see development chefs road testing new products – in this case Easter eggs with pecan pie brownie, salted caramel cheesecake and cookies’n’cream coatings, and an attempt to recreate Caribbean and Mexican cacao tea. These types of shows are always uncritical advertising for a brand, albeit pleasant to watch.

HOTEL CHOCOLAT TV

It also has a publicity and marketing department with TV companies on speed dial, because Hotel Chocolat: Inside the Chocolate Factory on Channel 4 follows Inside Hotel Chocolat on Channel 5. Hotel Chocolat has 126 shops across the country. It costs 119 per person including a street-food-style lunch.

HOTEL CHOCOLAT FULL

The full Tree to Bar Experience combining the Tree to Bean and Bean to Bar sections lasts around three hours. No wonder the posh end of the market has grown in recent years. St Lucia chocolate tours at Hotel Chocolat’s Rabot Estate take place daily. Dairy Milk now tastes hideous, and Galaxy isn’t much better. Cadbury’s Easter eggs, once a joy to receive, offer all the sensory delight of eating plastic.

I don’t mean to sound like one of those “Remember the 70s” Facebook accounts that urges people to get all misty-eyed about Spangles and the memory of stabbing your schoolmate in the leg with a compass, but chocolate isn’t what it used to be.

Hotel chocolat