Product Spotlight: Islands Chocolate
Interview by Jimmy SandisonWelcome back to our Good Food Product Spotlight series, where we highlight good food producers stocked at The Hawarden Estate Farm Shop.
Each product sold within the Farm Shop is chosen for its unequivocal stance towards sustainability. The team (our team) know every maker and producer directly, we take deep pride in knowing the stories behind things, who made them, where they were made and how.
Some Good Ideas: Please introduce yourself and your product?
Wilf at Islands Chocolate: Hey, I’m Wilf Marriott and I’m the founder of Islands Chocolate. We are an entirely clean and award-winning chocolate business. Our Michelin-star Caribbean chocolate is vegan, entirely sustainable and completely traceable.
SGI: Why do you make chocolate?
Wilf at Islands Chocolate: I make chocolate because it is the most widely loved food ingredient out there. You don’t hear of many people that dislike chocolate. It brings joy to people’s lives and I want to be a part of that. I want to create chocolate that has flavour which is off the scale, that is used and loved by top class chefs in restaurants and hotels, as well as our customers, globally.
SGI: What do you love most about your chocolate?
Wilf at Islands Chocolate: It’s beautifully balanced, smooth and each product has an interesting flavour profile. The fact it is seed-to-bar and entirely traceable takes all the guilt of eating it away, well most of the guilt anyway – if I don’t eat the whole bar.
Going that extra mile. Leaving no stone unturned and never to just say, “oh I’m sure it’ll be fine”.
SGI: What has been the biggest challenge to bringing your product to the market and how have you overcome that/what are you doing to try to overcome that?
Wilf at Islands Chocolate: Pricing. We are competing with big multinational conglomerates who have questionable supply chains and are producing eye opening quantities of chocolate each day. We are different. We meticulously manage the whole process from choosing which variety of cocoa to plant, to unique roasting programs. We cannot compete with the big boys, but what we can win on are our ethics and flavour.
SGI: If you had to use your chocolate in one recipe, what would it be?
Wilf at Islands Chocolate: Our chocolate works really well with both sweet and savoury food. Bringing it back to basics, the goo level that our chocolate brings to some classic chocolate and fudge brownies is out of this world. That being said, we also made a vegan chilli which was so tasty and unique – the flavours were amazing. The recipe is on our blog page on our website.
SGI: What does quality mean to you?
Wilf at Islands Chocolate: Going that extra mile. Leaving no stone unturned and never to just say, “oh I’m sure it’ll be fine”. That’s not good enough. Quality to Islands means obsession. Obsession with flavour, sustainability and the welfare of our team both here in London and in St Vincent.
SGI: What is the secret ingredient?
Wilf at Islands Chocolate: Our Caribbean cocoa beans.
