A growing appetite for craft bean-to-bar products
● Artisanal chocolate makers have taken chocolate to a new level with their handcrafted creations, offering consumers more than just a tasty treat.
At De Villiers Chocolate, what began as a hobby is going global, with the Western Cape company recently making its products available through US online shopping giant Amazon. Company owner Pieter de Villiers says demand on Amazon has been “surprisingly good”.
He says the company’s online sales have risen over the past eight months, although an initial attempt at this five years ago failed to take off.
“Chocolate is really an impulse buy, you walk past it and before you know it it’s in your handbag. And that for me was a barrier to buying online because when you buy online you really have to go through the effort to do that,” De Villiers says.
The bean-to-bar model has been a large part of his business strategy, which means the company is in control of the entire manufacturing process from buying the cocoa beans to making the chocolate.
The company has a chocolate studio at the Spice Route near Paarl, a venue for functions, dining and sampling a range of artisanal products, where people are taken through the chocolate-making experience.
Antonino Allegra, a former pastry chef from Italy, started the Afrikoa chocolate company, based in Milnerton in Cape Town, in 2016.
Like De Villiers, Allegra ensures that his cocoa is ethically sourced and also adheres to the bean-to-bar process. Afrikoa says it sources its cocoa in Tanzania using ethical and fair pricing.
Allegra says demand for the company’s chocolate is growing. Afrikoa bought 6t of cocoa beans in its first year of operation but last year it bought four times as much.