AFTER creating their own delicious chocolate, a couple from Glasgow decided their homemade bars were so good that they simply had to be shared with the wider world.
Launching Bare Bones Chocolate from a single garage in 2018, Cameron Dixon, a former Product Development Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, along with his partner Lara Messer, a food photographer and chef, quickly grasped that the Scottish marketplace was hungry for a taste of chocolate that was free from emulsifiers and additives.
“Glasgow is a huge market for us. Undoubtedly, good products get a lot of support in the city and the locals certainly recognise quality,” says Mr Dixon.
Bare Bones Chocolate has experienced year-on-year growth, with Selfridges now stocking the product as well as a number of independent cafés and delis throughout the country.
In 2020, the firm won silver awards for all four of their bars in the worldwide Academy of Chocolate Awards – as well as taking second place for their Madagascan Hot Chocolate in the International Chocolate Awards. Bare Bones also secured gold in Brand Experience at the Academy of Chocolate Awards.
From their small workshop in the southside of Glasgow, Mr Dixon and Ms Messer make their product in micro-batches of around 8kg at a time. The couple import unprocessed ‘cacao’ beans from four different origins (Madagascar, Honduras, Dominican Republic, and Guatemala), which are then processed on a modified Giesen coffee roaster. Mr Dixon was able to engineer most of the equipment from scratch in order to get the desired quality for their batch sizes.
“Nobody in the UK is roasting chocolate on a coffee roaster, but in America that’s a big thing,” he admits.
“With a coffee roaster the benefits over roasting in an oven is that you’ve got a much more even roast and so much more control. So you can make all these incredible flavours.
“We’re one of three in Scotland making chocolate from cacao beans.”
As well as the award-winning flavour of the brand’s four core chocolate bars, Mr Dixon credits Bare Bones’ distinct minimalist packaging as a contributing factor to the successful growth of the young company.
“The bars sold very well from launch. I think it’s the packaging that drew people to the chocolate initially, because it’s a very simple high-quality design,” he says.
“It was absolutely essential for us to have recyclable packaging. People like sustainable products but it’s maybe not a make or break for a lot of them but I think the responsibility sits with the maker.”
The couple admit that since the pandemic, making, packaging and posting the chocolate in micro-batches from their compact workshop is becoming increasingly problematic. Mr Dixon explains: “Our production was so small at the start that we were constantly trying to keep up and it’s been that way since we launched.
“Covid’s been a real challenge, in terms of both getting stock and packaging, but also because our workshop’s so small we can’t employ anyone else, so up until Christmas we were super busy. It was a real struggle – we were working 100-hour weeks.
“We were so happy to have the orders, but it was hard not being able to hire any more help. It was quite scary at the start of the pandemic because a lot of our stockists shut, but a few stayed open and started offering delivery service which included the chocolate.
“The majority of our business though has moved online. We are really proud that we have a return customer rate of 44% on our online shop. But we still seem to be selling a lot through wholesale even without people in cafés and delis.”
Mr Dixon also cites Brexit as a factor already affecting operations after having their cacao beans in customs for six weeks as opposed to the standard timeframe of a week.
Despite the obstacles, demand continues to rise. Bare Bones Chocolate recently started delivering to Germany, France, Spain and the Netherlands.
In November 2020, the duo won Scottish Young Edge (a funding competition aimed at identifying and supporting Scotland’s high-growth entrepreneurial talent), which will help Mr Dixon and Ms Messer realise their goals for the company this year.
“We really want to move workshop this year into a bigger space,” says Mr Dixon.
“And then we also want to offer tours. We have a really big Glasgow audience and it would be nice to meet people, showing them the process first-hand and doing tastings – I think that would be really exciting.”
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