Have you ever wondered how chocolate is made? At Zotter Chocolate, we pride ourselves on taking a much different approach than other companies. Making chocolate is a complicated process, so other companies often take shortcuts, compromising the flavor. They start with cheap ingredients, then rely on other businesses to complete many of the steps for them (such as roasting the cocoa beans) in order to produce as much chocolate as possible.
At Zotter Chocolate, we only use organic, fair traded cocoa beans, elevating the flavor of our chocolate from the very start. From there, we handle all of the production processes in-house! Zotter Chocolate is the only company in Europe that uses organic, fair traded ingredients to make chocolate from bean to bar.
Complete In-House Production
Our bean-to-bar production allows us to dedicate time and attention to every step of the chocolate making process. This ensures we can make adjustments depending on the specific type of cocoa we’re working with, always highlighting the unique flavor subtleties in each one.
When we get the cocoa beans, we conduct a quality check for each and every cocoa sack, then we clean them up. From there, we roast the cocoa beans depending on the individual variety. That’s when they start giving off that delicious chocolate scent we all know and love!
After that, we clean the cocoa beans again, then grind them up. At this step, the liquid cocoa looks just like sweet, melted chocolate… but it actually tastes very bitter! We add sugar and milk to the mixture to give it a more indulgent flavor. After that, the mixture goes into the conche, where it’s finely ground and refined. This step takes hours, so it requires patience, but it’s definitely worth the wait. Once it’s done, the chocolate is ready to be used in various products here at Zotter Chocolate. Browse our selection of hand-scooped chocolates and taste the difference today!