Today, chocolate is everywhere. From North and South America, to Europe, Africa and Asia, all the way to Australasia, chocolate is consumed and/or produced in vast quantities. But that wasn’t always the case. Less than 500 years ago, it was confined to just one small corner of the globe. So how did chocolate spread around […]

Many people attempting Veganuary each year ask us: “Can I still eat chocolate?” Well, great news – you absolutely can! In fact, most of the chocolate in our library is vegan. Dark craft chocolate, so long as it isn’t a flavoured bar with a non-vegan ingredient, is perfectly fine for Veganuary. Be careful buying dark […]

So first and foremost, a huge THANK YOU for all your support this year at our Virtual Tastings and your passion for Craft Chocolate. We’ve been incredibly grateful for all your orders this holiday season.  Indeed, we’ve been blown away by your enthusiasm.  So thank you.  And a huge thanks to our warehouse team of […]

Vanessa Kimbell is a legend in sourdough, baking, fair trade, the gut microbiome and much, much more. During the course of the evening, Spencer Hyman will be chatting to Vanessa about her Italian mother, how she first began working in the village bakery in France as a child, why she fell in love with bread […]

This Black Friday, we’re resurrecting our “Chocs for Docs” scheme, which allows you to show your appreciation for frontline workers in the NHS. What’s more, on Sunday we’ll be donating 5% of our sales to this cause. This is instead of offering “yet another Black Friday offer”. We think that many of the problems in […]

Next Thursday is Thanksgiving in the US.  So we’d like to start by wishing all our American readers a happy holiday and suggest you celebrate with some Craft Chocolate, potentially with a Colombian twist: hot chocolate with cheese rather than marshmallows. In a last ditch effort to resist switching to Christmas shopping, we are exploring Colombian […]

On this evening we’ll be joined by Original Beans founder, Philipp Kauffmann. Former conservationist at the World Wildlife Fund and the United Nations, Philipp started his chocolate-making venture with the focus on protecting farmers, the rainforest, and thousands of endangered species. All through the means of incredibly delicious and sustainably sourced cacao. Philipp’s chocolate kit […]

Christmas, Black Friday and the like still aren’t quite “here” (although John Lewis’s Xmas ad is just breaking ….).  So this week we are going to be exploring cocoa bars, beans and drinking chocolate from Peru. The Peruvian jungle (along with Ecuador’s) is where Theobroma Cacao (aka the cocoa tree) is believed to have first […]

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 […]

James Hoffmann, co-founder of Square Mile Coffee Roasters, author of The World Atlas of Coffee, YouTube sensation, World Barista Champion, Prufrock Coffee, to name just a few items of his work… is also a craft chocolate aficionado and a dear friend of Cocoa Runners. During this Craft Chocolate in Conversation with James, we’ll take a deep dive into some of […]