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Steve Russell and Giles Atwell had spent more than three decades working for some of the biggest players in the chocolate industry when they took the plunge to set up their own company less than three years ago to offer an alternative to the ubiquitous, mass produced long-life chocolate, made with fresh ingredients supplied from a few, thoughtfully selected sources. Atwell warned me a few times during the course of the interview that he's not a sustainability expert, but the startup’s commitment towards a sustainable business is noteworthy. It’s one of the reasons they won a £90,000 investment for 20% of a stake in their company on Dragons’ Den, a TV show similar to Shark Tank, earlier this year.
Atwell’s comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
I imagine that some of that investment will go towards scaling up your operations. But how far can you scale when this is a premium product that has very strong, sustainable credentials?
The investment will go towards several things—it allows us to buy a cooling room instead of industrial-style fridges. We currently take three days to make our chocolates through an artisanal process; an average chocolate bar will take an hour or two. We'd like to get quicker at that, but we won't do it at the cost of compromising quality. It’ll be a challenge for us to scale. We know it's possible—as long as we keep the integrity of the ingredients, I don't think the consumer cares quite so much about the process you use to make it.
You’re very transparent about the suppliers you use. How did you go about choosing them?
We wanted to create our product with kitchen ingredients—we wanted food, real stuff. In terms of the chocolate, or the content of the chocolate source, we were aware of a company called Casa Luker in Colombia that worked with cocoa collectives, farms with sustainability programs. In terms of the organic cream, we source it in the Cotswolds, near where we make the chocolate. We use two different types of honey from Wainwright Co., they're a family-run business. Then we've got the Dorset salt. We love the way that they hand-harvest and use biomass.
We're definitely not experts in sustainability—we are people who know how to make a delicious chocolate product—but we have placed sustainability at the heart of this [business]. We've tried to do the right thing every time we have had to make a choice. And those choices go beyond ingredients, you know? We started off using a tape to seal our boxes that was plastic-based. Now we use a paper one. We use paper to surround our jars instead of bubble wrap. It’s all about making a myriad of small choices rather than a great big gesture.
Was sustainability always part of the criteria for your choice of suppliers? Or did it just so happen that some of the best suppliers also had very strong sustainability credentials?
If I'm really honest, I would say that taste was the number-one most important thing that we wanted to go for, because that's what enables you to have a sustainable business—if people don't like how your product tastes, they’re not going to buy it. Once we were happy with the taste, we wanted to make sure that we sourced as sustainably as we could, and that did mean that we would need to make a choice between one supplier or another [depending on] how they supplied, whether it's in metal drums or plastic, etc.
We’re being asked about a vegan option, and there’s no doubt that the water use and emissions from organic or any dairy are exponentially worse than non-dairy alternatives. So the choice to use organic cream was based on taste, and we are trying to source it as close to where we manufacture as possible, so we keep the food miles low.
Do all these small choices that you mentioned end up costing more than the alternatives? And do you see this as a cost, or is it a form of investment?
I see it as an investment. Any business beginning today has to think about sustainability; it has to come right off the bat.
A lot of the time, a positive, sustainable choice is a good business choice as well. For instance, recently we've attracted investment to get ourselves a large chilled room we can bring chocolate into and out of much more easily than the fridges we currently have. We stacked it up with thick walls to increase insulation so the energy spent on cooling it doesn’t go to waste. It obviously reduces our fuel bill, but it's also an environmental choice. There was a small cost, but you want to do the right thing by the business and by the environment, so it was a very easy choice to make.
And if you’re going to make chocolate, you have to be prepared to talk about your supply chain—but big manufacturers prefer not to touch that subject. Why is that the case?
Around 60 to 70% of the world's cocoa comes from West Africa, and the big challenge there is that cocoa comes mainly from small farms and small holdings. It’s really difficult to know where your cocoa actually comes from, because of the number of different hands that cocoa passes through, from a very small holding farm all the way up to a bar of mass-consumed multinational chocolate. Unlike other industries that have become much more mass-produced and largely industrialized, a lot of cocoa production still comes from these very small holdings—small farmers making a small living, often actually not even having cocoa as their primary crop. Often cocoa is a secondary crop.
Do you think there's a way to make this process more transparent, or is it down to entrepreneurs who are able to have more direct contact with their supply source to take the lead?
I'm really reluctant to say that small business should take the heavy lifting on this, because we don’t have a sustainability manager or a procurement director or any of these people. Big business has to make some big strides on this. When a small business like ours gets going, we show the market that it doesn't have to be this way. With that and consumer power, people voting with their wallets and lobbying companies, things will change. And to be fair, at a lot of these larger companies things are changing. It will take a while. Due to how concentrated the world’s cocoa growth is, there aren’t readymade solutions to buy cocoa in the quantities that they want from other regions around the world.
Have the effects of climate change already affected your supply chain, and are your suppliers concerned about what might happen to their businesses five or 10 years down the line?
Because we’re so small, I don't think it impacts us massively now. But when you deal with natural products—bees, for instance, are massively at risk all around the world, whether that's from the almond crops in the U.S. and the forced pollination that they're required to do, or from climate change and the destruction of woodland and wild habitats—it's a major, major issue. Every part of our supply chain is affected by climate change.
We would like to get B-Corp certification or similar, so that will mean continuing to make choices to try to get better every year. We will try to safeguard ourselves as much as possible on the purchasing choices that we make and the supply that we work with.
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