Our Story old Page
During much of the 1990's I was travelling in Asia, eating raw foods, exploring ingredients, doing yoga and meditation and really loving a healthy lifestyle. When I returned I found this really hard to maintain in our cold climate and was craving chocolate! There was no chocolate that didn't have refined sugars or really worked for me on a level of health or taste - so of course, I started to make my own!
Friends loved my creations, that I was giving away in a desire to excite and turn people on about the opportunities of raw chocolate; to be able to eat an indulgent, luxurious food that is good for the body and soul. This snowballed into me making all sorts of raw cacao treats and selling them at festivals such as Glastonbury and The Big Green Gathering in 2004.
At the Big Green I made raw truffles with a raw chocolate sauce to dip them in. Everyone was going crazy for the chocolate sauce, so when I got home I tried setting the sauce into ice cube moulds and it worked! The bar was born!
From here I created my raw chocolate in bar form as well as fun ice cube shapes and started selling my chocolate to small shops in The Lanes in Brighton, doing Steiner School Markets and Borough Market. It was from Borough Market, where I sold bars of chocolate unwrapped in paper bags, that shops started asking me to get listed with a Wholesaler so they could buy it. Now I had to find packaging and start the next stage. I had no funding but was so passionate about my chocolate and believed in it so strongly that I simply went from shop to shop with a suitcase full of chocolate and got raw chocolate on the shelves of health food shops for the first time; and so the story of Conscious Chocolate started!
In the beginning I did every thing myself as a self made chocolatier making the chocolate recipes and bars in my family kitchen, then cutting out the packaging with a guillotine, and stamping on the bar names, wrapping it, marketing and selling!
Much has changed over the years but creating indulgent, chocolate that makes you feel good is still the idea! We all need ways to pamper and self-love in this busy world and Conscious Chocolate is one of them; a treat you can feel good about.
I'm a qualified yoga teacher, self made chocolatier, single mum and entrepreneur and I now work with a team of chocolate purists in Sussex and we're proud of each and everyone of our delicious vegan, free-from chocolate bars, all still hand-made and hand-wrapped with love.The thing that makes me smile the most about where we are now is that Conscious Chocolate is made in a carbon neutral factory with plastic-free packaging and a strong sustainable and ethical commitment; Yay! And I still love my chocolate.till love my chocolate!
