Comment: Hotel Chocolat's Angus Thirlwell on retail authenticity

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We are fortunate at Hotel Chocolat in having the world’s most seductive food as our subject matter. Chocolate plays on the emotions as well as the taste buds and that’s perhaps why we have so many ultra-committed customers.

A new year, and my favourite time to think and plan.

Staying one step ahead of our keenest brand loyalists never feels like a chore as we love the evolutionary adventure we are on.

Our latest step was to open two 6,000 square foot ‘temples to cocoa’ in November. Located in London’s Borough Market and Leeds, the format includes a cocoa cuisine restaurant, an all-day cocoa bar-cafe, as well as a chocolate boutique with on-site chocolate making from the bean.

For a supposedly mature market, there’s a lot of innovation and change happening in the chocolate sector. Consumers of premium chocolate want to know more about what goes on behind the wrapper, just like wine connoisseurs.

These larger spaces enable us to show just that. And, with innovations such as cocoa pulp martinis, cocoa balsamic braised lamb and cocoa shell and peppermint tea stretching the imagination, we are constantly providing customers with reasons to come and see us again.

Being a cocoa grower as well as a chocolate maker has given us a unique perspective in the luxury chocolate market on the relationship between the two. Man has been eating cocoa for 3,000 years but it’s only the last 500 that have been sweet. The previous 2,500 were more savoury.

Exploring both sides of cocoa involves fun and hedonism, sharpening our distinctive positioning in the international market, setting us apart from our Belgian, French, American and Asian rivals.

But more than that, it brings together cocoa agriculture and chocolate luxury. These two worlds have been separated for a long time, to the detriment of farmers and consumers.

Cocoa farmers are disconnected and impoverished and consumers largely none the wiser. It doesn’t have to be like this - cocoa growing should be as noble and skilled as running a Bordeaux vineyard. Coming to stay with us at our plantation hotel on the island of Saint Lucia is one way to see our model for sustainable cocoa. Our new larger spaces in London and Leeds bring this home to the consumer, too.

None of this would have been possible without the benefits of a bit of scale behind us. Most of us naturally think that when things get bigger they become less authentic, but that’s such a cop out.

My new year thought is always around the theme of ‘have we got better as a brand over the last 12 months?’

If 2013 was a year of risk-taking evolution for us, 2014 is about building on this bridgehead.