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 […]

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 […]

Next week, as I’m sure you are aware is the US Presidential Election.  And we are also putting on sale our Craft Chocolate Advent Calendar.  These two events are linked.  Read on below for the history of Advent Calendars to explore the link (it’s not that tenuous) and an overview of our Craft Chocolate Advent* […]

Which Northern Irish county is famous for: Being the birthplace of Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum, inventor of making drinking chocolate with milk, and Royal Physician to the crown? Having the highest mountains in Northern Ireland (the Mourne Mountains)? Being the home, and birthplace, of the father of the Brontë family (Patrick – father […]

This week over a third of people watching TV (an estimated 6.9m people) tuned into the Great British Bake Off’s “Chocolate Week”.  To put this in context, around one in five Brits eat chocolate every day, over 70% of us eat chocolate at least once a week, and over 15% of households in the UK […]

This week at Cocoa Runners we’re all about Canada! This Monday is Canadian Thanksgiving, and we here at Cocoa Runners are certainly thankful for a lot that comes out of Canada. Any list of the world’s greatest Craft Chocolate makers will include the likes of SOMA, Palette De Bine, Qantu, Sirene and DesBarres (and some […]

Few industries have as powerful a discovery mechanic as music enjoys with radio DJs, mix tapes and now playlists. How else do you first come across a new band, a new album, a new song? Before the internet had come up with the “Viral Marketing” the cool kids were doing this for music via mix […]

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 […]