New chocolate flavours and developments
An update on what’s been happening at Winchester Cocoa Company, and our next developments.
Last year was our first full year of trading and during that time we hit several main objectives. We finalised our menu of chocolate flavours, launched our range of chocolate bars, launched the e-commerce website and attended many successful events with our pop-up shop.
We were also lucky enough to win several awards at both the Academy of Chocolate and the British round of the International Chocolate Awards - Really pleasing and confidence inspiring as we continue our journey to provide the best chocolates you’ve ever tasted.
Finally we met loads of new food (and drink!) obsessed friends & partners including Hampshire Fare, Hannah’s B&B, Toscanaccio, Hambledon Vineyards and Hotel du Vin.
New chocolate
This year we’re focusing on widening the range of couverture chocolate we use to include more fine, ethical chocolate makers (including UK producers such as the multi-award winning Pump Street Bakery), to give us a broader canvas for the development of new flavours.
Refining flavours and releasing new ones
Our first year was fantastic and we were really pleased with our menu but things can always be improved so we’re spending time developing the flavours to improve them even further. Nuts have been our first port of call, and you can read more about those in the section below.
We’ve also been working on new flavours using the new range of chocolate and ingredients suppliers we’re working with and these are being released throughout the year.
Pralines are great!
Really good quality nut pralines are something of a rarity in the UK. After a huge amount of searching we finally found a source of the most amazing quality nuts and pure nut pastes. We’re now importing the majority of our nuts and nut pastes directly from our supplier in Italy who provides the finest Piedmont hazelnuts, sicilian almonds and Pistachios. We make our own praline pastes using the raw ingredients and a much higher 'nut to sugar' ratio than usual - The difference in flavour is incredible.
New coffee chocolate bar
Finally we have released a new coffee flavoured milk chocolate bar. It uses a high cocoa-content milk chocolate and ‘micronised’ (very finely ground) real coffee beans to deliver a lovely smooth coffee flavour.
Our bars can currently be bought at Toscanaccio in Winchester. Getting them on to our website is our next task!
