Vegan chocolate. How often do you see it? And when you do, are you enticed to buy it? If the answer is no, then you haven’t seen Raven Chocolate. They are a new brand of luxury chocolate who create flavoursome chocolate with just a few ingredients. So, we’re happy to say, in this chapter of start-up stories we got to hear all about their products from Jade, the owner of Raven Chocolate!
So, tell us about your company, what is Raven Chocolate?
Raven Chocolate is made up of myself and my husband Oliver, we make vegan, dairy free, gluten free chocolate in Glasgow. We have been making chocolate now for 3 years. We only use Venezuelan cacao when making our chocolate.
There aren’t many confectionary options for vegans, why did you choose vegan chocolate?
All of our recipes started out vegan before we added any extras such as milk powder or inclusions, so when it came to it we decided not to go with non-vegan ingredients. We just wanted to make our chocolate as pure as we could, no hidden extras, nothing that would take away the real taste of our chocolate.
When did you decide to start making chocolate?
We were living in Aberdeen and I was a chef, then a pastry chef for a while and this is how I found out how to make chocolate.
“I was fascinated that you could make chocolate without the need for a huge factory or lots of ingredients.
Once I ordered my first grinding machine and cacao beans I was hooked and knew I wanted to carry on doing it as long as I could.
You have a range of tasty chocolates, which is your favourite?
My favourite is our Salted Peanut bar, it’s like eating a solid bar of peanut butter. It’s divine.
Are there any disadvantages of a chocolatier?
Well, what we do is more than what a chocolatier does. Chocolatiers buy chocolate from a maker and they mould them into fabulous chocolates but with us, we are the makers, we start from scratch and we grind the beans and add our ingredients then we age the chocolate and then once that’s all done we make our chocolate bars.
“What we do is more than what a chocolatier does”
The process takes a long time. So it can be hard to explain why our craft chocolate costs that little bit more than your average Cadburys bar.
What makes the perfect chocolate bar?
To us, it would be: keep it simple. Our 80% bar has 2 ingredients and is one of our best selling bars. Less is definitely more when it comes to craft chocolate.
What’s the most rewarding thing about what you do?
The look on peoples faces when they try our chocolate and they can’t believe it’s vegan or gluten-free or diabetic friendly.
“It’s rewarding to know that we can make someones day”
because they’ve been craving milk chocolate since they went vegan and they can finally get it and it tastes exactly the same.
Where can people find your chocolate concoctions?
You can find us at www.ravenchocolate.co.uk where you will find our list of stockists around Glasgow, London and even Germany.
What’s next for Raven Chocolate?
Right now we are developing a few new flavours which will be revealed in April and we hope to carry on spreading the vegan chocolate love as far as we can.
We’re very eager to see where Raven Chocolate is heading, they’re filling an essential gap in the market and making it as tasty as possible!
