As CCTV footage goes, this isn't very dramatic. A man in a suit with a female companion browsing in a chocolate shop. Hotel Chocolat in Nottingham is busy at lunchtime and if it weren't for the barely perceptible movements of the man's arm, no one would have suspected him of the sabotage that has sent ripples through Britain's chocolate industry. The man caught on CCTV is Barry Colenso, the master chocolatier for Thorntons - and he is going from box to box squashing his rival's truffles.
Of course, afterwards when store manager Kim McCulley found the damaged blueberry bombes, she didn't suspect that the offender was such an important figure as Colenso, a man hitherto known as the Willy Wonka of British chocolate. Neither did she recognise him when she reviewed the CCTV footage and tracked him down to a branch of Thorntons 300 yards away.
No, it wasn't until a copy had been sent to Hotel Chocolat headquarters in Cambridgeshire that co-founder Peter Harris put a name to the face. A summit meeting was held between the Hotel Chocolat and Thorntons top brass, at which Thorntons insisted there was no master plan systematically to squish its rival's scorched caramel and whisky chocs or pomegranate truffles. Sadly, however, Colenso, a man respected in the industry, a chocolatier under huge pressure, decided to step down and the whole episode was left to wither away.
That was last August and most people, Colenso excepted, saw it as a silly-season story. What lies behind the episode, however, is something more serious - and in many ways exciting. It is a story about the changing face of chocolate on Britain's high streets, of seismic taste reinvention; a tale of how our national chocolate industry is transforming itself from an international laughing stock to one of the hottest and most innovative in the world.
Chocolate has been produced for more than 3,000 years from the beans found within the pods of the cacao plant, originally native to equatorial South America. Some say the Mayans and Aztecs made a drink called xocolatl, which means “bitter water” - chocolate became sweet only when Europeans later added sugar or honey.
The beans and pulp extracted from the pods are fermented for up to six days before the beans are dried, graded and roasted, in much the same way as coffee beans. The bean kernels are chopped into “nibs” and there are two ways to process them: one is to grind them down, add sugar, vanilla, extra cocoa butter and to keep processing until it is rendered it into solid chocolate. The other is to grind the nibs into a liquor before hydraulically pressing out the cocoa butter fats. The remaining “cake” is dried and ground into cocoa powder.
From this point onward the world of chocolate becomes as complex, elitist, ignorant, snobbish, elegant, weird and wonderful as the world of wine. The origin of cocoa beans and the chocolate they make is all important.
Single estate trinitario bean sourcing from, say, a highly regarded Venezuelan plantation, is something that would interest a connoisseur. Contrast that, however, with the howls of derision that a recent Marks & Spencer advertisement elicited when it boasted of its line of chocolate made from “the finest forastero beans from Ghana”.
The forastero is the workhorse of the cocoa bean, not very highly regarded and certainly not particularly delicious when sourced from Ghana.
The best chocolate - though this is a matter of opinion - may be single-estate, possibly South American, plain, or dark chocolate containing 65per cent or more cocoa, or at least 30per cent for milk chocolate. The less cocoa you have in your chocolate, the more sugar and milk (carbohydrates and fat) you have in it. The high street chocolate on which most of us were brought up contains 20per cent or less cocoa and up to 60per cent sugar. No wonder the French and Belgians used to shake their heads.
All that started changing in the mid-1990s, when people began to be fascinated by organic and Fairtrade chocolate and the efforts of producers such as Green & Black's. Since 1983, pioneers such as Chantal Coady, founder of Rococo Chocolates on the Kings Road in Chelsea, London, had been pushing the boundaries and educating small but growing numbers of people.
There are fewer than a dozen innovators pushing the boundaries in the UK and they are almost all based in and around London; the prices they have to charge (about £80 a kilo) for buying the best cocoa and ingredients militate against sales elsewhere.
Among the best are Richmond-based William Curley (voted chocolatier of the year for the second time running by the Academy of Chocolate, a body set up by chocolate-makers and food writers in 2005 to encourage the appreciation of fine chocolate) and Paul A. Young, based in Islington and famed for his imaginative creations - Marmite or goat's cheese-flavoured choc, anyone? Then there is Marc Demarquette in Chelsea, whose hand-made creations - including bespoke caviar and foie gras chocolates - have earned him a contract to supply Fortnum & Mason.
Others include former Harrods master chocolatier Bill McCarrick, who has taken over the Sir Hans Sloane Chocolate Studio; and Louise Nason and Keith Hurdman of Melt, whose jasmine tea truffles, which take five days to make, often earn rave reviews. “It's an exciting time to be in the business,” Demarquette says. “What we are going through is like the Eighties wine explosion and British appreciation of good coffee in the Nineties. People are more curious. They are more knowledgeable and prepared to pay more for a good product.”
We meet in Demarquette's tiny production facility just off Portobello Road, West London. Just he and his assistant, Maëllg Georgelln, work here and are responsible for all the output. Inside a chilled strongroom are boxes of herbs, spices and essences from the best locations around the world; lemongrass from Thailand, cassis from France, cumin from Egypt, pink pepper from Brazil, and so on. This is how the new wave of chocolatiers like to work; only the finest ingredients will do.
Arguably the most daring of the young guns is Paul A. Young, a 34-year-old chocolatier and former patissier for Marco Pierre White. He fell into chocolate in a big way after being commissioned by Rococo's Chantal Coady to make something for national chocolate week. He made a port poached-pear truffle, which was a big hit.
“I think being self-taught helps. I have had no one telling me what can and can't be done,” Young says. “The Marmite chocolate, for example was a challenge: I spent two months researching and making it. It was a novelty and I intended to sell it for one weekend and then forget it. That was two years ago, but my customers won't let me stop making it.”
All this innovation at the bottom end of the chocolate sales pyramid has had a knock-on effect at the top of it. Producers such as Mars and Cadbury have little to worry about; the total British chocolate market amounts to £2.2 billion and their sales have been barely dented. Nevertheless, Cadbury has felt the need to take a slice of the higher end by buying Green & Black's.
The real impact has been felt by those such as Thorntons, which was previously seen as the classier end of the market. It has been hit hard by the emergence - in three years - of 27 Hotel Chocolat outlets on the high street. (Hotel Chocolat had previously traded over the internet).
“Thorntons didn't see them coming,” says Demarquette. “You go into Thorntons and you think of Christmas and your auntie. You go into Hotel Chocolat and the place is dark and sleek and sexy.”
I twice arranged to meet Barry Colenso to discuss the British chocolate market (he didn't want to talk about “the incident”) but each time he got cold feet. One by one, his peers said they had found the Hotel Chocolat episode mildly funny at first, then worrying. More than one said today's chocolatiers are under as much pressure as Michelin-starred chefs to be innovative and consistent.
But will all this cut-throat behaviour and brave innovation benefit us, the consumers? Martin Christy, who set up the fine chocolate website www.seventyper cent.com, believes it will - if we are discerning. “Our biggest task is to encourage people to look behind the claims that companies and supermarkets make for their chocolate,” he says. “They all want to say their chocolate is made from the finest beans, or by a fine producer in Belgium. But they can achieve that with one call to the big industrial producers. They can give some specifications for the chocolate, e-mail a wrapper design and before you know it they are selling their ‘own-brand fine chocolate' to consumers who have no idea where the beans have come from or that it has been made in a mass-produced fashion.”
So, you could say that the pressure's on us too, and a little effort to find out what we are eating will go a long way.
