Raw passion
Established in 2006, The Raw Chocolate Company makes pure chocolate bars, chocolate berries and bagged supreme foods. Confectionery Production caught up with Kris McGowan, customer insight, to find out more about the brand.
What is the background to the brand?
It started with looking at our own diets and a concern for those of our children. So many ‘healthy’ snacks and alternatives just aren’t much fun at all – they are more like wearing (or eating) a hair shirt! So we started creating fruit and nut/seed balls and coating them in chocolate. They were a massive hit at school fairs, so we started to think about how we could make the chocolate better. Years and years of learning, experimenting, making mistakes and chocolate messes passed by. We came around to realising that ‘good’, ‘healthy’ and ‘high quality’ chocolate meant raw, organic, Fairtrade vegan chocolate, so we set about inventing a way to make it.
Did you carry out any market research before starting the business?
Only if you count selling at small school fairs as market research! Everyone loved what we were doing so we decided that there might be something in it.
How did you get the money together to get started?
We just started with a few domestic appliances in the kitchen. Linus Gorpe, founder of the Raw Chocolate Company, read books, attended training courses and experimented over and over and over. Linus had never run a company before, never made chocolate before. He just had a passion for it and knew it was the right thing to do. He sought out people to give him advice and the company has grown sustainably ever since. Soon demand for the chocolate was so high that he needed to convert a whole floor of his house and employ a number of people to assist with production. Then came the first factory about five years ago and we are now onto our second factory, which we have just doubled in size.
How have you developed your range?
We started off with just three raw chocolate bars. Pitch Dark is pure and simple and very rich, with only three ingredients. Vanoffe is at the other end of the chocolate spectrum – light, creamy and dreamy, but also dairy free. It is our most popular bar. Then we have Vanoffe Dark, which was originally known as Twilight. It is our ‘Goldilocks’ bar – just right. Vegan or not, everyone loves this bar.
As these became popular we were asked by a few customers to create a ‘sugar free’ chocolate bar. We experimented with lots of options and settled on Finnish Xylitol from birch trees, adding mint and orange to differentiate the bars from others in the range.
Through Linus’s experiments with sugar free options an accident occurred that led to one of our most popular products. Linus tried using various types of fruit to sweeten the chocolate. However, often it was not sweet enough. Then he discovered Turkish white mulberries, which had the right amount of sweetness, but were very sticky. He tried creating a mulberry sugar with them, but during processing the fruit would always clump back together and create a solid mass of chocolate. He broke quite a few machines in the process too! What he had discovered though, was that white mulberries and chocolate went very well together, so he set about working out how to combine the two, which led to the development of our Raw Chocolate Mulberries.
How do you decide on the next new flavour?
As you can tell, a lot of our range has occurred through experimentation or by accident. Some of this is inspired by a flavour idea, or a sensation that we have had in our everyday lives. We also regularly get customers asking, “Could you make this?” or “Have you thought about doing it like this?” There is certainly no lack of ideas.
The trick is to establish which ones will work. Firstly we have to work out if we can do it properly. Are organic ingredients available for example? If we can make it, is it a product that people will want and is it tasty, nutritious and also a treat? We have a team of fans and friends who test products. They know our range, what we stand for and our quality standards. If it passes muster with them, then we try it out on people who don’t know us. After this stage we will do a limited run of the product, released through select trading partners or in a particular country. If the product passes all these tests then we add it to the range properly. Currently we have about five new products in this phase and three more in the pipeline.
How do you source the fruit, nuts and other inclusions you use in your products?
When we first started, we obviously did not have established trading partners. So initially a lot was trial and error, getting recommendations from other companies in the industry. Although competing with each other for shelf space, we are on quite friendly terms with our competitors. We also look to our trademark holders – the Soil Association, the Fairtrade Foundation and the Vegan Society to help us find accredited suppliers. As things have moved on over the years, our suppliers now understand us and we have also forged some relationships direct with growers. We are in a very exciting phase now where our suppliers are sourcing products for us that are specific to our needs. We are also working with a number of growers who are working on strains and varieties that will give us the flavours and textures we require to make our products stand out even more.
Have you hit any particular problems with the supply of your ingredients?
We have, and this is mainly due to the unique demands we have and also the unique nature of the products. We are the only raw chocolate manufacturer that uses fair trade cacao – there is not much of it around and hopefully our activities are increasing its availability. We also use Lucuma Fruit Powder from Peru. It is very popular as a flavouring and a sweetener in South America, but has a restricted harvest time and again, not much is grown organic, which we want. With most of our products we have to be very aware of harvest times and global availability as well as predicted growth in sales to enable us to continue to source our ingredients.
What type of retail outlets do you sell through?
Our main retail outlets in the UK are independent wholefood retailers, such as Infinity Foods in Brighton, Real Foods in Edinburgh and Eighth Day and Unicorn in Manchester. We have at least 500 independent outlets in the UK that we know of, as well as independent chains such as Planet Organic, As Nature Intended and WholeFoods Market. In Europe the picture is slightly different. We sell in some of the larger national chains, such as Coop in Sweden and through gyms and sports shops such as XXL in Norway. We also sell through a large number of online retailers as well as through our own website.
What are your best sellers?
We have three product ranges: Raw Chocolate Bars, Raw Chocolate Berries and Supreme Foods – individual ingredients for people to make their own products.
The Raw Chocolate Bars come in six flavours, all in two sizes. The best selling of the bars is Vanoffe – it is a name we made up to describe the flavour, vanilla-toffee. Second to this is the pure, Pitch Dark bar, which at 72% cacao and with only cacao, cacao butter and coconut palm sugar on its ingredients list is a great chocolate hit.
We have three Raw Chocolate Berries in a variety of sizes – mulberries, goji berries and raisins – all organic. The most popular product is the Raw Chocolate Mulberries. This now comes in four formats – the 32g snack pack, 100g and 200g resealable pouches and a 150g seasonal gift tin. Our Supreme Foods range allows people to make their own chocolate. Unsurprisingly, the most popular products in this range are the Raw Cacao Powder and Raw Cacao Nibs.
What do you consider to be your unique selling points?
Our products are pure, organic, Fairtrade and vegan certified. They are also raw – relatively untreated to retain as many nutrients as possible. We also minimise our environmental impact wherever possible; our factory is solar and wind powered. Lastly, we love what we do and we only do something if it is worth doing and with love and we think this shines through in our products.
How do you promote and market the brand?
We don’t have an aggressive marketing strategy. We want people to buy our products because they know they are great, not because they have fallen for some marketing gimmick. How does someone know? Through word of mouth and tasting products. We are very active with social media and we work with our retail outlets so that they can run in store tastings regularly. Once people try the products, they realise the quality!
You recently won a Great Taste award for your Goji Berry & Orange Raw Chocolate Bar. What was it that stood out to the judges about this product?
It was a great privilege to receive the two gold stars from the Great Taste awards. Can you imagine, this is like getting two Michelin stars! The 12 judges blind taste the products, so the award is purely given on taste, flavour and sensation.
This is what the judges said: “A well balanced chocolate bar, very rich and bitter.” “The goji comes through the dark chocolate nicely.” “Well tempered with a good snap. Gorgeous.” “Lovely crack when broken, high quality chocolate.”
What is really great for us is that this award is just about great taste. We set out when we started to make great chocolate. We have taken no shortcuts, in fact several long ones, and it has been very difficult.
What are your plans for the future of the business, particularly in terms of product development?
We will continue to try to restrict Linus to only five new product launches per year! Our main focus is to continue to make high quality products with low environmental impact, which are good products in their own right. We will grow the business sustainably, within its means. We are not trying to take over the world with our chocolate, but there are still a lot of people out there who have yet to fall in love with us, simply because they have not yet tried our chocolate ♦
