Articles and reviews
November & December 2011
See www.facebook.com/chocolateandlove. Lots of coverage about our Diamond Campaign.
October 2011
September 2011
Review of Crushed Diamonds
"In terms of score this bar receives 9/10 not only for its great taste but because it is organic and uses fairly traded ingredients. Not only that , Chocolate and Love has committed to supporting reforestation in Ethiopia in conjunction with WeForest."
April 2011
www.faerietalefoodie.com
Report from The Chocolate Festival
February 2011
And so I have found my new amore, called Amano - Madagascar. Amano Madagascar is dark, rich and very tasty. Smooth on the tongue with a hint of liquorice, citrus and berries and no bitter aftertaste. I will never look at chocolate the same way again. I’d like to keep my new amore to myself, but maybe that is a little churlish; after all, you may prefer one of the Amano siblings or a even a contemporary. So, if you look carefully you can find them on www.chocolateandlove.com – heaven for chocolate lovers who want a real relationship.
January 2011
Newsletter by weforest.org
Together with our local partners and thanks to the wonderful individuals and corporations that trust us, we have ordered over 333,000 trees in 2010! We already have many more in our pipeline, ready to be confirmed for the beginning of 2011. We are restoring the balance to the planet by co-opting our consumer instincts into causing reforestation in a sustainable way. Balance of the planet also means addressing poverty.
We do want to acknowledge all our contributors: the donors, partners and volunteers who have made this possible.
Our 10 Largest Donors in 2010
- http://www.sappi.com/
- http://www.thefundingnetwork.org.uk/
-
Bettina (private donor)
- http://www.ice-watch.com
- http://www.sas.com/offices/europe/belux/
- http://www.chocolateandlove.com
- http://www.contraste.com/index.html
- http://www.avego.com
- http://www.selor.be/
- http://www.lets.org/
January 2011
www.fellwalkingclub.co.uk
Some of the most amazing chocolate I've ever tasted. If you're a chocaholic, this might just send you over the edge!
December 2010
www.sojournposse.com
Video from The Chocolate Festival
December 2010
Chocolate and Love Promo video.
20 November 2010
www.bristolfoodie.co.uk
Review of Filthy Rich and Orange Mantra Bars.
7 November 2010
http://foodwinediarist.wordpress.com
Review of Filthy Rich and Orange Mantra Bars.
6 November 2010
Review of Friis-Holm 'Johe' bar.
6 November 2010
http://taste-my-plate.blogspot.com
Review of Filthy Rich and The Coffee Affair.
5 November 2010
http://mostlyaboutchocolate.com
Review of Filthy Rich Bar.
3 November 2010
www.seventypercent.com
Review by Stuart Robson
(see also review by Alex Rast)
28 October 2010
www.seventypercent.com
"Friis Holm goes for an even more rarefied category than the already exceptional with the Nicaliso – the single-plantation chocolate, hinting at perhaps even better flavours. And indeed, this one is on almost all counts that marginally better than the Chuno. Sharing likewise the same extraordinary texture, and an even more remarkable flavour development that even the textural perfection can’t overshadow. Here is chocolate that is clearly the product of an obsession."
28 October 2010
www.chocolatereviews.co.uk
"The mouth-feel is divine, it’s smooth beyond belief and exhibits a texture that is as satisfying as it is perfect. What I loved about it was that if you place enough in your mouth and let it melt for a while, and then move it around it releases a fantastic burst of flavorous juices just is the case when you bite in to a grape. That punch of flavour is exceptional."
October 2010
www.chocablog.com/reviews
Review of Bojesen's Wild Bolivian bar.
28 October 2010
http://www.remotegoat.co.uk/review_view.php?uid=6133
Review of Chocolate and Love chocolate tasting session.
27 October 2010
http://www.mrfoodie.co.uk/1126/ingredients/chocolate-and-love/
Review of Chocolate and Love: Orange Mantra and Filthy Rich.
October 2010
http://www.connosr.com/distilled/issue-2/pairing-whisky-with-chocolate/
Whisky and chocolate pairing. Also with Friis-Holm bar.
25 October 2010
http://choclogblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/chocolate-and-love.html
"Orange Mantra: This had a good snap and a pleasant melt in the mouth texture. Orange flavouring in chocolate can easily be overdone. This bar, however, had a very pleasant true orange taste which was not in the least overpowering. It was somewhat like a seville orange, bitter and marmalady - it tasted like real fruit rather than something synthesised in a lab.
The Coffee Affair: This had a nice snap, a firm texture and was rather crunchy in the mouth as befits a strong, robust flavoured chocolate. The coffee flavour persists on the palate for quite some time. It was delicious and not overly sweet nor cloying."
October 2010
The Economist - More intelligent life
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/lifestyle/jackie-hunter/pleasure-raw
An article on raw chocolate with quotes by Richard O'Connor from Chocolate and Love.
19 October 2010
http://www.seventypercent.com/2010/10/friis-holm-chuno/
"Representing perhaps the ultimate in exclusivity, this is a series of only 250 bars total made... A remarkable bar for its extreme exclusivity, but also an important bar for establishing that textural perfection is possible while retaining interesting flavour... But it’s that melt that you can’t ignore: it’s simply perfect."
19 October 2010
http://mostlyaboutchocolate.com/bojesen-chocolate-bar/
Review of Bojesen Wild Bolivian Bar.
17 October 2010
http://www.chocolatereviews.co.uk/chocolate-unwrapped-2010/
"I also a good chat with Richard from Chocolate and Love who retails some awesome chocolate that you just can’t get anywhere else as well as Rasmus Bo Bojensen. I had a try of Rasmus’s Wild Bolivian chocolate which I hope will be on the market soon. I’ve got a bar to review for you sometime this week – but I already know its exceptional."
17 October 2010
Video from Chocolate Unwrapped during the weekend:
http://www.chocablog.com/features/chocolate-unwrapped-2010/
12 October 2010
http://www.chocolatereviews.co.uk/friss-holm-nicaliso/
"But it’s the flavours I love most. I just love chocolate that takes you on a journey as it melts and this bar certainly does that. It’s strange, there’s a sort of mushroom initial flavour which then exhibits a walnut character and then a slight acidity and a truly delightful creaminess to follow. It really is incredible."
7 October 2010
Foodies Magazine
http://www.foodies-magazine.com/features/interviews/217-interviewchoclove
. . . FOR THE LOVE OF CHOCOLATE
One couple is turning the chocolate world on its head, importing the highest quality products that also help the environment. Words Isobel Palmer
Chocolate just took another step forward on the path to adulthood. Now buying a bar of the good stuff can help to combat global warming and poverty in the developing world. Chocolate and Love, the luxury online shop set up by a Scotsman and his Danish fiancee last year, has bought 14,000 trees in Ethiopia and will pay for them with donations from 14,000 bars of their chocolate. But there’s more. The trees will be planted by single mothers and HIV/AIDS widows whose wages feed, clothe and educate their children. Could this be the most ethical bar of chocolate on the market?
Chocolate and Love owner Richard O’Connor certainly hopes so. He was thrilled to complete the deal after he discovered WeForest – a non-profit organisation that empowers communities to reforest their environments. WeForest’s target is to plant 20 million square kilometres of sustainable forest to achieve a 2% increase in cloud cover. It’s this cloud cover that will help to cool the planet.
Richard admits to tasting 400 bars before they found one good enough for this, their signature bar. “It has beautiful cacao from Peru and The Dominican Republic,” he says. “Many of the producers of the best chocolate and cacao are small businesses. I love chocolate but had found that the best in the world was really hard to get hold of, and that’s where the idea for Chocolate and Love came from.”
Former chartered surveyor Richard, 42, launched www.chocolateandlove.com a year ago alongside his Danish fiancée Birgitte Hovmand, a former international solicitor. With a track record of several successful e-commerce ventures behind him, he wanted a business that would enable them to split their lives between Copenhagen and London, and travel while working. Three weeks in Brazil armed only with a laptop, growing customer numbers and an expanding range of products and services shows both goals have been met.
“We decided to pick the best and offer it on one site. Since then, we’ve become experts and, I’m afraid, real chocolate snobs,” Richard adds with a laugh. “We’ve developed our taste buds so we only want the best. I think chocolate is like the new wine. Whereas people used to ask for Belgian and Swiss, now it’s Venezuelan or Equadorian as they learn more. There are different beans like grapes and as many processes involved in its production, from fermenting, drying and roasting to milling, conching and tempering. ”
On the website you will find 10 brands, each with various products, from bestseller Crushed Diamonds with its crunchy cocoa nibs (£3), to the most expensive, the Venezuelan Porcelana from Amedei (£8.50 for 50g) – only the connoisseur will truly appreciate its myriad of flavours, says Richard. Men are drawn to Filthy Rich, a 71% dark bar, while white lovers go for Amedei Pistachio. For children there are chocolate lollipops sprinkled with space dust. There’s dark, milk, white, filled, fruit, nuts, spices, even a luxury spread. There is a chocolate club, hampers and a corporate section.
Richard and Birgitte are constantly adding lines, and their latest find is Bojesen, from a Dane who went to extraordinary lengths to source his beans. Richard says: “He trekked 10 hours into the Bolivian jungle, four of which were in a canoe, six through swamps, before he found the most amazing wild Criollo – the champagne of cacao beans. He brought back almost six tons and we have just tasted the first bars. It’s among the best chocolate I’ve ever tasted.”
With chocolate from all around the globe, where should the novice make their first port of call? Richard advises Chocolate and Love’s £3 range or The Chocolate Tree, quickly followed by Amedei’s bars at £3-4. Then work your way up, developing your tastebuds as you go. “There are more than 300 flavours to uncover, and even a tiny change in the roasting can open up a new one. The flavours develop over several minutes with a high quality bar.”
Richard’s passion for his product is infectious – as his customers at a pop-up shop in Edinburgh in May and June this year discovered. Such was the success of the opportunistic venture on George Street – they were up and ready within 27 hours of being offered the premises – that he is keen to repeat it, if only for the pleasure of watching customers’ reactions to their first taste of quality chocolate.
In the meantime, he’ll continue to split his time between Denmark and London, and anywhere else in the world where there may be new chocolate to discover. Sounds too good to be true? Well, there is one drawback. The couple still has more chocolate to taste. Good chocolate in moderation is their philosophy, but that still means an awful lot of trips to the gym.
14 September 2010
www.therecipeblog.co.uk
Review of Chocolate and Love Crushed Diamonds and The Coffee Affair.
July 2010
i-on magazine
See link below and type in page 63 in the top middle white bar
25 May 2010
The Scotsman
The phenomenon of the pop-up shop takes a sweet turn as a couple with a passion for cocoa offer up a piece of chocolate heaven
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/features/The-phenomenon-of-the-popup.6315534.jp
Published Date: 25 May 2010
By Jackie Hunter
EYES ARE certainly popping on George Street. Walk past number 46, and you'll find it hard to ignore that huge poster over the door, a close-up photograph of a beautiful, naked woman with only pools of molten chocolate to protect her modesty. The tantalising logo, Chocolateandlove.com, is a clue to what other sensual delights lie within this intriguing new Edinburgh store.
"One customer said he'd thought it was a sex shop," laughs Richard O'Connor, 41, the strikingly tall and tanned entrepreneur who founded the company with his elegant Danish girlfriend, Birgitte Hovmand, 39. That customer was not disappointed, though, having found that Chocolate & Love is a pop-up chocolate boutique for the connoisseur, a temporary outlet for exclusive and exquisite edibles, which will melt away again three weeks from now.
"Pop-up" is the buzzword of the moment. All over the UK, recession has left a glut of vacant retail spaces, housing dust and spiders until new leaseholders can be found – not an easy task for any commercial estate agent right now. However, just as nature abhors a vacuum, so entrepreneurs like O'Connor, educated at Glenalmond school and Aberdeen University, cannot pass up low-risk opportunities to road-test a new business – which is why pop-up shops, galleries, bars and restaurants are flourishing.
"We never wanted a shop at all," O'Connor stresses, almost filling the bijou space as he strides back and forth, dropping nibs of astonishingly delicious chocolate into my hands. This founder of successful past Edinburgh businesses Ambergreen and We-Entrepreneurs, he always adored good chocolate but was frustrated at being unable to buy the best of different kinds – nougat, pralines, flavoured varieties – all in the one place. So he and Hovmand, also a chocolate fanatic, combined their business brains with their lusty palates to create a unique fine-chocolate boutique. O'Connor explains: "After six months of travelling, sourcing products from Switzerland to South America – saying 'give us your best chocolate' wherever we went – we came home with 350 different bars and started selling our favourites online at Chocolateandlove.com, which had always been the planned route because of my background in e-commerce."
"Then in early May, at a dinner party in London, I told the woman sitting next to me I was looking for somewhere to put on a chocolate-tasting event. She said, 'Well, I have an empty shop in Edinburgh,' and told me I could have it at a low rent for a few weeks. That was on a Tuesday. On the Thursday I arrived in Edinburgh, picked up the keys and looked at the shop. An hour later, I phoned her to say we'd take it. By 5pm on Friday we had opened."
Pop-ups, as the dynamic and shrewd O'Connor has found, make good commercial sense, enabling retailers to try out new locations and market-test products without committing to long leases or expensive refits. Homeware brand Cath Kidston – whose Edinburgh shop is just a few doors down from the space currently filled with Chocolate & Love – recently negotiated a six-month rental on a vacant site in Glasgow's Princes Square, and has stuffed it with products, from clothes pegs to deckchairs and teacups, in her signature retro prints. Even though her brand is already huge, a pop-up allows Kidston to cautiously test the fashion-forward Glasgow retail scene and see if it will embrace those nostalgic florals to the extent that Edinburgh has. Japanese fashion label Comme Des Garçons has taken its own pop-up – the Guerilla Store – to cities all over the world since 2004, including Glasgow, where it popped up 18 months ago. These outlets have remained in each location for no more than a year, selling the label's lower-priced diffusion line, BLACK, and proving massively popular.
Yet pop-up retail is not all about high-end designers and luxury goods: even ubiquitous brands, such as Marmite and HMV, have adopted the pop-up approach over the past year, to test an untried site or shop format. For customers, it adds a sense of excitement to the shopping experience – their feedback and whether or not they subsequently recommend it via word of mouth, Twitter or Facebook is crucial to the retailer, because there's usually no advertising or PR budget to publicise pop-up ventures. The fascination inspired by its ephemeral nature – like the mayfly that lives for a day – is what makes it a must-see.
Equally elusive are the treats to be found at Chocolate & Love, an irresistible haven which manages to indulge all five senses. Fat, creamy roses bloom in black vases, interspersed with votive candles, peacock feathers, even a pair of sexy leopardskin stilettos that would doubtless catch the eye of Theresa May, on tables draped with tactile leather. More provocative posters are pinned on the walls; ambient music plays softly: this place is to sweet shops what Agent Provocateur is to M&S's knicker racks.
Most of the chocolate bars here you're unlikely to have seen before. "This Wild Amazonian bar you won't find in any other shop in the UK," O'Connor says, "but give it to someone to taste and watch their eyes light up." There's Amadei from Italy; Beschle from Switzerland (which the couple discovered on a skiing holiday); the fair-trade and organic Pacari, and Edinburgh's own exquisite Chocolate Tree. Raw chocolate by Conscious, prepared by a process during which the cacao is never heated higher than 47C, is rich in magnesium, high in antioxidants, low GI and yet utterly delicious. O'Connor describes the Love Potion version as "pure Viagra", and its Mint Hint flavour tastes divine, despite being practically a health food. Everything about this place will confound your expectations of chocolate, and that includes prices: you can pay £2.90 for a 100g Crushed Diamonds organic truffle bar with cocoa nibs, or £49 for 50 truffles in a plain wooden box tied with plain string and sealing wax. "But they're the best you've ever tasted," says their purveyor.
We carry on sampling. Jane, the photographer, claims she has never liked licorice – a hugely popular sweet in Denmark, where the couple live for half of the week when not in London – yet she is reduced to a whimpering wreck after tasting a Lakrid chocolate-coated licorice ball, and begs for another. My personal nirvana is the Beschle chocolate nut spread. It's like a celestial Nutella for grownups, and as a tiny spoonful melts against the roof of my mouth I believe I can hear angels singing. There is only one jar of it in the shop, and as it's whisked away the thought that I may never taste it again makes me want to cry. How can such simple bliss exist?
"There are some 400 different flavours in chocolate, but most of the stuff sold nowadays is so bad," he says. "The beans are roasted at such high temperatures, you end up tasting just one flavour and a lot of sugar. For the connoisseur, it's got to have the right balance.
"A taste for chocolate is something you develop," he adds, "the result of an ongoing love. It's like wine, a fascinating subject. Our palates are pretty discerning now, but the beauty of it is that it'll take us years to try everything."
Has opening a pop-up shop given fresh insight into his latest business, I wonder, or is it simply a novel way of guiding customers to the website?
"It's been a real eye-opener," he admits, "because when you're on the other side of a computer screen, I can't see your reaction to the chocolates in the way I can here.
"We'll definitely do more pop-ups, either here, in London or in Copenhagen – maybe three weeks before Christmas, a fortnight before Valentine's – because this is teaching us very intensely about getting new customers and we're teaching people about chocolate, too. We've got three bright young boys and girls out on George Street today saying 'Try some'. You give people chocolate and they go 'Wow!' then they're straight in the door. If we just sit here waiting for people to come in, it won't happen."
His enthusiasm is as addictive as his wares and innovation is in constant flow. What else can we expect to see during the shop's short life? "Hot chocolate," he says, "the really thick sort you get in France. I'll put a few more tables and chairs in the window, get even more people in…"
Looking out at the dazzling blue sky and the passers-by in their shirt sleeves and cotton dresses, I think to myself that if anyone can sell mugs of molten chocolate in high summer, it's this man. Get it while it's hot.
• Chocolate & Love is at 46 George Street, Edinburgh until 11 June, or see www.chocolateandlove.com
4 June 2010
www.minutemanpress.co.uk
Pop up shop in Edinburgh.
27 December 2009
The Sunday Times
Looking to the future of love, fame, celebrity, reality: what's going to define us in the decade ahead?
Click here (Number 24 on page 4 and 5 ) to read the article or view a scan