Chocolatier Lavinia Davolio

LAVINIA DAVOLIO, 34, set up her own confectionery business, Lavolio, in 2013. She lives in London with her husband, Angelo, who works in the City.

I SPENT my childhood on a farm in Italy. We grew more than 100 fruits and vegetables and rarely went to a shop. I loved to cook and was taught by my grandmothers.

After university, I moved to London and started working for an investment bank. I was a director at 27, and sometimes the only woman in a team of 34 men. It wasn’t unusual for me to be mistaken for the secretary!

One day in 2012, I touched in at the bank’s gate as usual, but my pass did not work. All of a sudden, a security guard appeared and escorted me away. Like 4,499 other employees, I had been made redundant. As I stood there, stunned, I promised to myself I’d try to see it as an opportunity.

I decided I would retrain as a chef and open a restaurant — something that had always been an ambition.

Six months later, I was in a cookery class playing with ingredients to make chocolate bon-bons while experimenting with sugar coating — the technique used to make sugared almonds.

As I was pouring sugar into a revolving barrel filled with nuts, I wondered if I could use the same technique to keep more ingredients fresh without using artificial preservatives.

I realised I could encapsulate foods, including coffee beans, nuts, fruit pieces and chocolate, in a sugar shell. So Lavolio was born.

No one thanked me in the past when I did financial deals worth millions. Now, customers say my chocolates are ‘little nuggets of joy’. I have the best job in the world — and it’s all thanks to being made redundant!