Upgrade your chocolates this festive season
What is fresh chocolate and is it really better?
This is a question we get asked a lot!
Put very simply, most mass-market chocolate you see in the shops uses palm oil from Asia (cheap, tasteless), whereas we use fresh organic double cream from the Cotswolds (expensive, delicious).
Let's look for a moment as to why this is important...
From the perspective of big business - palm oil is a dream - it is largely odourless and tasteless, it behaves brilliantly in the factory (super-efficient and easy to clean), it is cheap and it helps to give a 12-24 month shelf-life.
From the consumer perspective it fools your mouth and brain into thinking that what you're eating is creamy and delicious, whereas all you're really eating is oil. If you concentrate, you can usually tell a chocolate contains palm oil as you get a waxiness on the top of your palate.
You can read more about it here in a earlier blog: 'Palm, pouches and striving to make the right choices'
At Russell & Atwell, we use lashings of organic double cream and a knob of organic butter, both from the Cotswolds - this gives a looooooooong and lingering, deeply indulgent melt (try sucking them, they last for ages!) and critically a clean finish (without the waxiness on the palate). It is expensive to buy and a pain to make as it changes consistency throughout the year depending on what the cows are eating - but the taste - the taste makes it worthwhile - just check our reviews!
This is why our chocolates need to be kept in the fridge and have a maximum shelf-life of 12 weeks vs the market norm of 12 months+.
Oh and in using real, kitchen ingredients like British Wildflower Honey and Dorset Sea Salt and minimally messing with them, we believe we deliver not only a tastier, but also a better chocolate vs mass-market offers.
If you are interested in reading more about our ingredients, try our other blogs on:
We are primarily about taste - put simply, we believe that using better ingredients (fresher, higher quality, more local), made better...could even be better for you. Indeed when one of our cofounders tried 'Zoe', we could even see this in his results...
So this is why we pre-order
We started 'pre-ordering' last year and it worked really well both for our loyal customers (reserving their favourite flavours before they run out) and for our small business (we can pack orders before the last-minute December panic!)
If you pre-order from our Festive range today, we will deliver from 2nd December - and we will ensure that all festive pre-orders will stay deliciously fresh at least until the 6th January, (although we really don't think you'll need that long!)
Here is the (festive) news...
In case you've bought from us before, we've got all your usual favourites, but also tons of new stuff this season.
So, if you'd like to try one of our award winners or new 2024 lines, click below:
Or you can browse our bestsellers and find your favourite flavours and combinations from the 9 flavours we've got available this year -
We hope this has been a helpful intro to our business - you can find out more about our co-founders Steve & Giles - real humans with 40 years of experience in chocolate and 100+ years of heritage - you could say we have chocolate in the veins!
