Co-Founder & CEO
Hotel Chocolat
“I count myself as one of the luckiest people around – to work every day in a business that lives by my obsessions for chocolate, true creativity and honest ingredients, and which also has a link back to my childhood in the West Indies through our cocoa estate in Saint Lucia”.
To say that Angus Thirlwell is passionate about chocolate would be an understatement because, as he willingly admits, it’s more of an obsession. Together with his business partner, Peter Harris, he founded Hotel Chocolat in 2004 with three guiding principles that remain central to the brand’s success today – authenticity, originality and ethics. Angus religiously eats chocolate every day, tastes and approves every single recipe, and is as much at home in the development kitchen as he is in the boardroom or amongst the cocoa trees.
With its Rabot Estate cocoa plantation in Saint Lucia and a boutique hotel in the grounds, a chocolate manufacturing facility in Cambridgeshire, two UK cocoa cuisine restaurants, stores across the UK and three in Denmark, Hotel Chocolat occupies a unique space – being able to link all aspects of chocolate from the tree to the consumer.