RURAL BUSINESS
After the pandemic forced Rebecca Rogers and Richard Buckley to shut their restaurant in Bath, they turned to handmade hot chocolate. Three years on, life is sweet…
So much of the magical lure of the confectionery shop at the heart of the film Chocolat is captured in a scene showing children peering through gaps in its papered windows, eager to catch a glimpse of the glossy truffles and pralines being conjured up for its big opening. The south-western slopes of Bath – tightly packed with terraced houses, takeaway shops and MOT test centres – might not have that French village charm, but signs of the same magic bubble away at the small industrial unit that’s home to micro-batch chocolate company Harth.
While the company’s co-founder, Rebecca Rogers, describes their manufacturing base as “all blue hairnets and shiny metal”, inside you’re instantly hit by a telltale fragrance of vanilla. The smell comes from cocoa powder, but it might as well be fairy dust for the transporting effect it has on the senses.
THE SWEET SPOT
Harth was founded by Rebecca and business partner Richard Buckley in 2020. At the time, the pair had been running Acorn, a fine-dining vegan restaurant in Bath. But then the pandemic struck. “Acorn was too specialist for home delivery,” Rebecca says. So instead, they started thinking about hot chocolate. “The version we wanted to buy for ourselves – that perfect camping hot chocolate – wasn’t out there,” she continues. “It’s so disappointing when you’ve gone to the trouble of taking a nice mug and a stove and made a fire and then you pull out some cheap chocolate powder.”
Most mass-produced hot chocolate is made with cocoa powder that’s a by-product of the beauty industry’s need for cocoa butter, explains Richard, and the quality of the beans tends not to be a priority: “In a lot of cheap chocolate, they add ingredients to bring the acidity down and make it palatable. Instead, we use natural cocoa powder from organic beans specifically grown for that.”
As well as that organic Fairtrade cocoa powder, Harth’s handmade, small-batch hot chocolate uses only sugar, cornflour and salt, its special editions gently spiced with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg or cloves. Wrapped in brown paper packages tied up with string (the string doubles as a carrying handle), sustainability and functionality are key.
RAISING THE BAR
Rebecca and Richard may have met indoors (in 2010 at Bath vegetarian restaurant Demuths), but they are out
