‘‘ I have taken quite a roundabout route into this job, which is developing new chocolate recipes. After school I did a management degree and then, after almost becoming a chef, I went to Oddbins, the wine merchant, to do three years of wine exams.

I love wine, but I’d gone into the industry to be a buyer and in that job you do have to taste a lot of rubbish wine.

Then I read a layman’s book about food science by the famous food writer Harold McGee and, at the same time, spotted a vocational degree at South Bank University.

After a work placement at the New Covent Garden Food Company I got a call from the marketing director, who’d moved to Whole Earth Foods, which owned Green & Black’s, and so I ended up here.

I knew food theory, but you only really get knowledge of the food processes when you get your hands dirty.

Chocolate is very sensitive and our most recent innovation is our 85 per cent dark chocolate. I had to work out how to make a chocolate with a high level of cocoa solids that would be better than that of the competition.

A major challenge was getting the fat content just right — if there’s too much fat then the chocolate will just roll off the refiners during the manufacturing process.

Even though I eat chocolate every day, it’s not like I’m stuffing it in — I take in only small amounts. Although with the ice-cream there have been days when I could easily have been sick.

It’s not like wine when you can spit it out. It’s quite high in fat, and as a result it’s difficult to eat a lot of it at one sitting. But you do get used to taking in small quantities and judging it on that.

And, obviously, I do get lots of friends offering to help me.

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