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 […]

Barry Smith is a professor of philosophy and directs the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. He is also the founding director of the Centre for the Study of the Senses, which pioneers collaborative research between philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists. A philosopher of language and mind, his current research […]

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 […]