There are lots of important dates and calendar related events this week and weekend: This Sunday, the clocks go forward in the UK, Daytime is now officially longer than night time (we’ve passed the March equinox), Easter is ALMOST here (and Passover starts Saturday night), Lockdown restrictions continue to ease (e.g. the Hampstead ponds for […]

Easter is rapidly approaching: We are delighted to launch our Easter offerings – along with a quick recap of the history of chocolate and Easter below. And we are also very excited about a pair of Fine Wine and Craft Chocolate Tastings that we are launching with Corney and Barrow on Thursday 25th March and […]

Amongst warm-blooded mammals, humans have a number of unique traits, including: We communicate with extensive vocabularies and a wide range of sound We run on two legs holding our heads high (birds aren’t mammals and lizards are cold-blooded) We can detect flavour via both our mouths and our noses (through our sense of smell) All […]

See how the addition of milk changes a chocolate bar! These pairs of bars are all made by the same maker using the same beans – the only difference is the cocoa content and addition of milk. Notice the differences in texture and mouthfeel, and see how the sweetness of the milk changes the beans’ […]

Is chocolate an aphrodisiac? Clearly this would be GREAT news for chocolate makers But when you look at the history and science it starts to get a little “shaky” . There are a few tantalising suggestions from science as to why chocolate could be considered a “food of love”. And its romantic properties have been […]

We’ve just celebrated “Bonfire Night” in the UK, and so we are now officially in the run up to Christmas, with Black Friday as a commercial interlude. But fear not.  Our blog posts aren’t going to suddenly switch to hard selling you boxes of bars, bottles and beans for Christmas.  And, spoiler alert, we won’t […]

This week we’d like to congratulate a number of chocolate makers who have entered, and won, multiple awards at the Great Taste Awards — in particular Fjak and Tosier (ladies first), Standout, Firetree and Solkiki swept the boards. To celebrate we’ve pulled together an award winning box (see below) and highlighted a few other awesome […]

One of our mantras at Cocoa Runners is that “Craft Chocolate tastes better, is better for farmers, better for the planet and also better for you”. It is pretty easy to “show” people that Craft Chocolate tastes better.  They just need to try some There are also LOTS of studies showing how direct, transparent trade leads […]

From having been “the food of the goods” (Theobroma Cacao), chocolate has, sadly, often fallen to being a commoditised, mass market ingredient in confectionery. In some ways the “commoditisation” and “mass processing” of food, of which chocolate has been subsumed, has been great. For most of history the majority of humankind has been at risk of […]

Many of the world’s greatest foods and drinks involve fermentation – think wine, coffee, beer, yogurt, bread, cheese and, of course, chocolate.  Life would be a lot less fun without the miracles that yeasts and bacteria perform in transforming grapes into wine, hops into beer and cocoa seeds into chocolate. This week’s blog post aims to explain […]