Angus Thirlwell

Angus Thirlwell is a self-confessed foodie. The chief executive and co-founder of Hotel Chocolat fell “hook, line and sinker” for the flavour of chocolate, but if he isn’t sampling his own new products then he is tickling his taste buds with something else.

And like his love of food, Thirlwell’s keen entrepreneurial spirit seems to be in his blood: his grandmother owned a patisserie and his father was the founder of ice cream business Mr Whippy and printing company Prontaprint.

Together with co-founder and finance director Peter Harris, Thirlwell has built his passion for chocolate into an international business with a £50m turnover and a vertically integrated structure ranging from manufacturing to production, retail, wholesale, mail order and multichannel.

For the past 14 years Hotel Chocolat has grown organically without any outside investment but last week it raised £3.7m via a unique offer to customers - chocolate bonds.

Returns will be paid to the retailer’s Tasting Club members in the form of boxes of chocolate and Thirlwell wants to use the funds raised to increase the store estate from 40 to 70, further expand overseas and invest in Hotel Chocolat’s factory in Cambridgeshire and cocoa plantation in St Lucia.

For Thirlwell, the desire to give shoppers access to pure chocolate is his driving force. Having spent his childhood in the Caribbean - home to some of the world’s best cocoa - and after dropping out of university and spending two years in France enjoying the food, he knew what real chocolate tasted like.

“When I came back to the UK I realised the chocolates we had here that were being sold as premium weren’t really premium,” he says.

Thirlwell met Harris at a computer company in Cambridge and Harris describes the year the pair spent working together there as a “business honeymoon”. They knew they could work well together. After a year, the pair left and began selling boxes of corporate-embossed mints to companies.

The business took off but Thirlwell was anxious that it was not hitting the lucrative Christmas market. It was then that he came up with the idea of chocolates. Mail order firm Chocexpress was born and subsequently rebranded to the more luxurious name of Hotel Chocolat.

“We started out on the corporate side but we feel that there could be so many businesses under the Hotel Chocolat name and every three years or so we have added another string,” he says.

The business is, for instance, in the process of setting up an eco-hotel on its St Lucia plantation, which Thirlwell says will “create a whole new area of engagement with our customers”.

His pleasure in chocolate has never waned and, following the mantra “less sugar, more cocoa”, the gregarious Thirlwell insists on tasting every new recipe. The retailer offers everything from very rare cocoa in its Purist range, to mojito or rose and violet chocolates.

He has been trained in chocolatier’s skills, but believes creativity is the key to new ideas. “Chocolate is a creative medium, there’s always another direction you can take it,” he says.

Harris says Thirlwell has more creative flair, while he has focused on the financial side, but says that they are both entrepreneurial.

“While Angus is more gung-ho and creative and I’m more measured and practical, we both know a good deal and know when to take risks,” Harris says.

Every so often though, they will swap roles. Harris recalls: “When we went out to St Lucia to look at the cocoa plantation I said almost immediately that we had to buy it. Angus was suddenly the practical one, telling me to slow down and consider all the options first.”

Like his father before him, Thirlwell is tempting shoppers with delicious treats and he is equally ambitious - Hotel Chocolat, he says, is only just beginning.