A Year in Chocolate: Reflections from 2025

It’s hard to believe we’ve reached the end of 2025. Perhaps because it’s felt so unseasonably warm. More likely it’s because this year has been relentlessly full – of travel, tastings, conversations, learning, and more than a few moments where we barely paused long enough to take a breath.

As ever, there’s a great deal to be grateful for. First and foremost, thank you: to our subscribers and customers; to the farmers and makers we work with across the world; and to our warehouse, logistics and finance teams who quietly make all of this possible.

What follows is a set of reflections and thanks, organised into Events & Trips, Industry Trends, Tastings & Classes, New Makers & Origins, and finally some broader Learnings from the year – because 2025 didn’t just keep us busy, it clarified a lot of things.

Farms and festivals

We now work with makers in over 50 countries and farmers in more than 80. If you’re a long-standing subscriber, you’ll have tasted chocolate from well over 40 countries just through your monthly boxes in 2025. One of the enduring privileges of craft chocolate is being able to visit, meet and taste with the people behind the bars – and 2025 was rich in those encounters.

A huge obrigado to Juliana for hosting a Brazilian Masterclass. Brazil remains one of the most mesmerizing cacao origins: vast, scientifically sophisticated, environmentally complex, and quietly undergoing a renaissance. Plus awesome people and, if you want to understand their bars, a radically different cuisine and set of flavours. Seeing cacao at this scale reinforces something we’ve learnt repeatedly – flavour doesn’t emerge from romance or marketing, but from agronomy, local history and flavours, long-term thinking and a LOT of hard work. Juliana’s work in Vale Potumuju remains one of the clearest ways to understand that. And if you are planning your holidays for 2026, I can’t recommend staying at her farm highly enough (but do be careful as you swim! I could make no headway against the current).

Equally heartfelt dankeschön to Peggy, Patrick, Jens and the entire Eurobean team for what remains my favourite craft chocolate festival anywhere. After years in a medieval castle (undeniably heroic to even get there, let alone put on a fair and make chocolate there), Eurobean’s move to the Industrial museum in Chemnitz made it far more accessible without losing any of its warmth, music or infectious enthusiasm. With three times as many makers this year for visitors to meet, it was also a reminder that community – not just commerce – is the real infrastructure of craft chocolate.

Closer to home, Gen, James, Nina and the Fidelio team somehow managed to make the Cocoa Runners Craft Chocolate Fair run even more smoothly than last year. Pre-booked tickets, heroic logistics and some very long days resulted in a complete sell-out. Thank you to all the UK makers – and especially to Fjak for travelling from Norway, and to Mikkel Friis-Holm from Copenhagen (and congratulations to him and Cendie on their recent new arrival). Diaries open: we’ll be back next year.

Industry trends

Many of these events were tinged with sadness, as we said “goodbye” – and we hope only “au revoir” – to a number of international makers.

Craft chocolate makers have always paid far higher prices for cacao than Big Chocolate, often under long-term contracts designed to give farmers stability. But the recent surge in cocoa prices created severe cash-flow pressures that some makers simply couldn’t bridge. As we’ve written elsewhere, this price crisis shouldn’t be castigated with simple explanations that it’s “just” about bad weather, corruption and crop disease. These are all important. But the underlying problem is far deeper. It’s the result of decades of underinvestment, concentration, and a system optimised for cheap volume rather than resilient quality. And we’re a long way from addressing this.

In that sense, high cocoa prices are a stress test. They revealed which relationships are genuinely long-term and which parts of the system are structurally fragile.
At the other end of the market, we’ve also seen consumers happily spending £20–£30 on a single chocolate bar – and queueing for the privilege – provided it glows neon green inside and looks awesome (or as Nina says “slay”?) on Instagram, TikTok, etc. Welcome to the era of the Dubai Bar. Credit where it’s due: their marketing has been exceptional. And we need more of this in Craft Chocolate. Side note: hats off to Raphio for their playful craft-chocolate response, see here.

Encouragingly, craft chocolate makers are organising more formally. We now have national craft chocolate associations in France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, the Nordics and the UK, alongside a pan-European body. These groups exist to champion the craft, collaborate, and explain why paying a little more delivers vastly better flavour, fairer outcomes for farmers, and lower planetary cost. Community isn’t, and shouldn’t be decorative and introspective. It’s about reaching out and building.

Health has continued to move into the mainstream conversation. Supermarket shelves now routinely carry 70% bars, with 80%, 85% and even 90% no longer niche (indeed 85% is the new 70%). Sugar reduction is finally being understood – less really is more here. The next step is helping people recognise that the same principle applies to processing tricks designed to encourage mindless scoffing. Less processing, more flavour, more satisfaction – and often better health outcomes too. Thanks to Jonathan and Tim at ZOE for returning to this theme in another excellent podcast on savouring – see here.

Fermentation has also had its moment. It’s been refreshing to see journalists realise that fermentation isn’t limited to kimchi, kefir and kombucha – and that in chocolate, fermentation of the cocoa bean is a start of the flavour odyssey. The BBC’s interest was encouraging, if it echoed what we’ve discussed for years in masterclasses alongside roasting, conching and texture. We’ve sold out of almost all of Iveé Promenade’s double-fermentation bars – but more are on the way, and here are some from Fu Wan.

Running quietly beneath all of this is a broader thread we keep returning to: chocolate as a lens for understanding the everyday world. From cups and saucers designed to stop drinking chocolate being spilled in bed, to the cocoa press emerging from hydraulic technologies once used for flushing Victorian loos; from Christmas trees to early industrial food processing. Chocolate was arguably one of the world’s first ultra-processed foods – and now, paradoxically, one of the best tools we have for learning how to savour rather than scoff.

Tastings and classes

We were honoured to be invited to host a range of tastings this year including the Financial Times, the Great Taste Awards, and the British Society of Flavourists. Thanks to Gen – and to the FT and GTA teams – for pulling off the first two with military-grade logistics, including laying out over 100 places with multiple samples in under half an hour.

In Edinburgh at the BSF, Andrea organised a whisky and craft chocolate pairing for over 80 flavour professionals, followed by some memorably geeky distillery tours. Next year’s theme is beer in Belgium – and yes, we’re already excited (and daunted!). What we keep learning is that the bedrock to all these “crafts” is savouring and flavour.

These events also allowed us to test ideas at scale. Sensory variation, super-taster distributions, and how people respond when they slow down and really savour – all reinforced the same conclusion: flavour perception remains one of our most powerful tools, and it’s something no algorithm can yet replace or even predict.

Much of this work feeds directly into our Taste and Flavour Masterclasses, formally launched last year and expanded throughout 2025. They’ve been huge fun – and deeply educational for us too. We often leave with as many questions as we arrived with, just better ones. This year we added a dedicated health section, debunking exaggerated claims while exploring more robust evidence: dental health, magnesium content, and why savouring remains one of the most reliable ways to assess real phytonutrient density and a key to gut health.

A final thank-you to the makers and speakers who contributed talks at Fidelio, and to everyone involved in our experimental tastings – including sessions inspired by Ukrainian food culture and by Brazil. We’ll be sharing more about our plans for 2026 soon, and if you’d like us to host something outside London, do get in touch.

New makers and new origins

If there’s one constant in craft chocolate, it’s expansion. New origins, new farmers and new makers continue to emerge – even in a seller’s market defined by tight supply.
Less than 18 months ago we launched our first Thai maker, Pridi. This year at Salon du Chocolat in Paris there were over a dozen Thai craft makers exhibiting. Similar dynamism is visible from China to Cambodia, India to Indonesia, Vanuatu to Taiwan, alongside more established origins.

And finally, a thank-you to New Zealand – and to Gen – for introducing so many outstanding Kiwi makers to Cocoa Runners. We’ve long admired Hogarth and Solomons Gold. This year we launched Foundry (featured in Septembers Box .. and worthy winners of many awards at the AoC), with more exciting additions coming soon.

In summary

For Big Chocolate 2025 has been a year of shrinking bar sizes, rising prices, and the not so quiet removal of the word “chocolate” from more and more products.

For Craft Chocolate, it’s been more nuanced. Craft chocolate hasn’t yet had its “Dubai moment”. But we’ve learnt a lot. To close, here are a few ideas that kept resurfacing all year – in tastings, travels, conversations and boxes.

Eight takeaways from 2025

1. Flavour is the master signal.
   Again and again, flavour proved to be the best single proxy we have for quality, processing integrity, nutrition, and ethical sourcing. When flavour is alive, something upstream has gone right. Learn to look for BLIC (balance, length, intensity and complexity) in everything – from tea to wine, cheese to coffee, olive oil to apples AND ABOVE ALL CHOCOLATE.
2. Savouring is the key to beat scoffing – behaviour matters.
   Craft chocolate works not because it’s “virtuous” or “cool” or “healthly”. It works because it slows you down and opens up a new world. Learning to savour rewires your brain to appreciate a new language .. and helps you control how much you eat, how satisfied you feel, and how easily you resist engineered snacks.
3. Ultra-processed food is a real problem.
   The message about Ultra Processed Food is finally getting through. Reading the label is important. Sugar reduction is critical. But the bigger issue is resisting scoffing. The “bliss point” and “sensory specific satiety” are the key ways Big Food has learnt to get us to scoff. And the pioneer here was chocolate (see this blog post). The good news is that Craft Chocolate, via savouring, gives us a literacy to fight back.
4. High cocoa prices exposed the system.
   Price rises aren’t just a crisis; they are a stress test. They are revealing which structures and relationships were long-term and resilient, and which parts of the system were built on fragility and short-term thinking. Craft Chocolate will survive .. and prosper. As I’ll discuss in my next blog looking forward to 2026, I’m a lot less confident about the practices of Big Chocolate.
5. Marketing (and packaging) are critical
   The Dubai Bar showed that people will queue and pay for visual drama. It’s reinforced that we need to be better at marketing and experiences. Watch this space (we hope …).
6. Health claims need mechanisms and tools, not vibes.
   In 2025 the health conversation matured. There are still WAY too many miracle claims made for chocolate (e.g. teeth – see here). But there is also more scepticism. And AI has entered the picture – see here on how to use your camera to assess the healthiness of your latest meal. But photos and labels can only estimate calories, macronutrients and micronutrients. It can’t handle phytonutrients, the quality of ingredients and how food is prepared. Flavour complexity and BLIC remains your best guide to ingredient and processing quality and phytonutrients. Palates remain irreplaceable instruments. If you take a picture of the food, also try to articulate the flavour in words.
7. Community is infrastructure, not decoration.
   Festivals, tastings, associations and shared language aren’t “nice extras”. They’re how a fragile craft survives shocks, shares knowledge, and builds trust across borders.
8. Craft chocolate is a practice, not just a product.
   At its best, it trains us to taste better, eat more slowly, ask better questions, build relationships and spot manipulation elsewhere in the food system. That skill transfers far beyond chocolate.

Above all thanks to your support, more farmers and more makers have been paid fairly, more flavour has been preserved rather than engineered away – and we hope your taste buds have been rewarded in the process.

Thank you