Sweet talk

Endowed with feel-good chemicals and aphrodisiacal properties, chocolate heads to the forefront of shopping lists everywhere around Valentine's Day. Kensington's Angus Thirlwell, however, has chocolate on the brain all year round. When I sit down with the founder of one of the country's most interesting chocolate makers, I get the impression I've met someone who eats, sleeps and dreams the stuff - and judging from his energetic cheerfulness, this is no bad way to be.

We're in the Hotel Chocolat café on Kensington High Street, the flagship of Angus' brand and it's doing a roaring trade in great slabs of inventive confectionery and hot, frothy drinks. Appearing completely at home deep in a leather, cocoa-coloured sofa, he's filled with praise for the neighbourhood.

"I think one of the nicest things about west London is the sort of village feel. People are very foodie, they like independent brands, they like true provenance stories and they like to buy real things," he observes. "There's an independence of spirit that I find really appealing."

This however is the adopted residence of the intrepid entrepreneur, who grew up in Spain, the north of England, the Channel Islands and the West Indies.

"My father was a businessman. He had an ice cream company in the UK, then sold it, and the people who bought it said, 'We've got an investment in the West Indies, this dairy and ice cream company, and we need somebody good to go sort it out.' He said ok, why not, so we went out on a banana boat to Barbados and ended up staying."

Like his father before him, the younger Thirlwell has built a business selling sweet things based on a Caribbean connection. Hotel Chocolat launched in 1993, but early on, a fan sent Angus a book on the history of the cocoa trade that got him musing about the islands of his upbringing. "It made me think about how things used to be in the early 1900s," he recalls. "It was much more common for chocolatiers to grow their own cocoa and convert it from the bean into chocolate, rather than these days people trade more with specialists who supply bulk chocolate. And so I thought this sounds like the most interesting part of chocolate - growing the cocoa.

"The idea of doing something in the West Indies really appealed as well. The reason I found it so attractive as a project - and that I'm prepared to commit years of my life to make it work - is I can see it's one of those very rare triple wins. It's a win for us because we can create value from it. It's a win for the people of St Lucia because we're creating employment, we're creating a chocolate-making enterprise there - it's going to be a source of national pride, that they're the only Caribbean nation to be making their own chocolate. And it's a win for our customers because they're getting to taste really rare, special cocoa and chocolate that wasn't on the market before."

Hotel Chocolat bought St Lucia's Rabot Estate three years ago from an elderly couple who'd run it as a cocoa plantation. Thanks to European subsidies, growers had bailed out of cocoa and shifted to bananas; with such a small amount of cocoa being produced on the island, it was almost impossible for the couple to get the crop on to the world market. "It came to the stage where they were making more money growing some carrots on a little patch of land and driving them around in their pickup to [luxury resort] Jade Mountain than they were from growing the cocoa."

Angus and his team closed the deal on the estate within a week of first laying eyes on it, and today the 140-acre property is home to cultivated fields and a chocolate conversion factory that supplies the primary ingredient of some of the most coveted confections in Hotel Chocolat's range - including Angus' favourite, The Purist, a single estate milk chocolate bar possessing 62 per cent Rabot cocoa.

Dedicated as he is to innovation, there is something of Willy Wonka in Angus; but unlike the Roald Dahl character, he has no intention of keeping his factory shielded from the public eye. In fact, later this year the Rabot Estate opens to visitors as Real Hotel Chocolat, a tiny resort of six lodges providing experiential holidays. Guests will be able to witness the cocoa harvest and chocolate production, enjoy special body treatments based around the local crop and of course consume as much estate produce as they dare.

Angus and Hotel Chocolat finance director Peter Harris started out over two decades ago supplying branded boxes of peppermints to corporate clients. When customers begged the pair to diversify their range, they settled on the brown stuff. "Gradually it got its tentacles on us. We got so obsessive we ended up buying our own cocoa estate!" he exclaims. From tentatively dipping their toes in, they're now up to their necks. "We didn't really realise that chocolate could be so dynamic. Gradually we succumbed to the spells of chocolate. Now it's too late and we're totally obsessed."

And to hear him talk, he truly suffers for his cause. "If you ask my wife, at a certain time in the evening I've just got to have chocolate. I start hunting around in the cupboards, saying, 'I can't believe I've got a chocolate company and there's no chocolate in the house!'" Sounds like a cry for help - and an indication of what he most wants for Valentine's Day. l

Hotel Chocolat
163 Kensington High Street, W8 6SU 020 7938 2144 www.hotelchocolat.co.uk

Sweet talk

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