Suffolk’s chocolate-maker with a mission
2001, the year which ended with 9/11, started with Chocolat, a film whose fine performance by Juliette Binoche added to the sum of human happiness. It’s a tale of a single mother, Vianne, setting up as a chocolatier in a Burgundy village, blowing away its straight-laced Catholic gloom. Chocolat was shot in Flavigny-sur-Ozerain with its Eglise St. Geneste and Anis sweetie store just south of the no less beautiful, and more famous, Abbaye de Fontenay. The fictional village is called Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, probably a joke about soutanes (in English “cassocks”). Suffolk is doing its best to compete.
The Government has just announced it is investing a further £14.2 billion in Sizewell C nuclear power station on the Suffolk coast. Villages on the B1122 that runs south towards Sizewell B are soon to face the full traffic discomforts. A little before tiny Theberton, no match for Flavigny/Lansquenet, you come unexpectedly upon a Suffolk chocolate-maker. Mind you, not a chocolatier (they start with the pre-made chocolate melt) but Bean to Bar, back to chocolate basics, starting with cacao beans in hessian sacks.
However amiable and engaging you find Deanna and Jonathan Tilston the local chocolate-makers, when it comes to jollying up Theberton there’s no competition with Juliette Binoche’s impact on Lasquenet. But this is not to undervalue the fun potential of the neighourhood. If you read The Yoxmere Fisherman you will see that at Theberton’s ancient church, part of the Anglican Benefice of Yoxmere, they “…will be celebrating St. Peter’s Day, [28th June] once again with parachuting teddy bears from the tower”. Well, that does beat those licentious frissons from Lasquenet.
Here is how chocolate making in rural Suffolk came about. Deanne Tilston, who originally taught deaf children, started by prescribing herself chocolate for a magnesium deficiency and ended up making award-winning specialty chocolate bars, 1,000 a week at full production. She and her husband Jonathan named their company Tosier, after Thomas Tosier whose wife, Grace, kept a shop selling hot chocolate on Chocolate Row, Greenwich, in the 1720s. In 1717 Thomas had a plum job at Hampton Court serving King George l hot chocolate in his bedchamber morning and evening. At the time chocolate was a luxury and “chocolate houses” were frequented by the wealthy: one up on coffee shops, and the only way to taste chocolate at the time.
Beyond Europe chocolate has a more venerable history. The clue is in the (Greek) name for the cocoa tree: Theobroma cacao (“Food of the Gods”). Chocolate probably featured in religious practices. The actual beans come from large rugby ball shaped pods on trees that thrive in rain forests. In the highlands of Ecuador on the border with Peru, cacao farming goes back some 5,300 years, the trees having survived the last ice age. A faster–growing variety, somewhat lacking in flavour, was planted in colonial English and French West Africa with Ivory Coast and Ghana coming to account for over 60% of global production, supplying the big brands such as Hershey, Mars, Nestlé and Cadbury.
Chocolate is – surprisingly — a fermented food and 90 per cent cultivated by smallholders. Before they reach Suffolk, the farmers sell the “wet” cacao beans, well cushioned in the pod, surrounded with mucilage known as Baba, to fermentation centres. There the moisture content of the sticky fermented goo is reduced to 7% by persistent raking of the beans, before they are sent off to chocolate makers around the world.
The craftmanship which goes into Tosier chocolate now comes into play. Inside the shop, located in converted farm buildings, sparkling modern machinery (bought from Cocoatown, Atlanta USA) roasts and cracks the beans, grinds them in a melangeur and tempers by heating to above 45%. This is the temperature at which the crystals in what is now cocoa butter align, and the butter can be left to harden. Each step is a matter of fine judgement, exact temperatures and timings.
Chocolate making is not an easy start-up for a new small manufacturer, now in their third year. A bucket of “wet cacao” costs 44 per cent more than last year. The price of cocoa butter has risen in the last 12 months from £325 for 20 kilos to £1,560. Climate change, black beetle disease killing the trees, and general deforestation all have made prices shoot up. For once the primary producers are doing very well and big brands have had to search around to fill the gaps in their supply chain.
What of the child-labour scandals that have beset both the growers and the buyers of cocoa from West Africa, globally the leading region for cocoa farming? In 2021 International Rights Advocates, a US organization specialising in labour abuses by multinational companies, initiated a lawsuit in Washington DC against some of the big brand chocolate companies on behalf of eleven Malians who claimed to have worked in Ivory Coast as forced – i.e. slave — labourers. Reliable data from US labour organisations at the time estimated that over 1.5 million West African children in total were working in cocoa production in Ivory Coast and Ghana.
Deanne and Jonathan aim to achieve the highest standards. The sacks in the Tosier shop when I visited were from Ecuador and Uganda. On beginning trading they became a B-corporation member, a global network of ethical companies, subscribing to, and held to, certification criteria devised by B-Lab, an NGO committed to transparency, accountability, sustainability and equitable economic relations. In B-Lab’s words, “the B-Corp Certification label is a tool to signal a company’s ethical brand identity to concerned consumers deciding which products to support and endorse”.
Tosier is also purist in being made without additives, emulsifiers and lecithin, the sort of processing found in the big brands. And, as the books arrayed in their shop testify, it is also dedicated to teaching shoppers how chocolate is made and should be made.
Most of the money in these parts of Suffolk is from pigs or tourists. Both require careful handling and particular skills. But artistry can also be found in a heartfelt pursuit of purity and quality in chocolate-making. Not least in lives less ordinary in Suffolk. As the lawyer and writer Louis Nizer said: “A man who works with his hands is a labourer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.” And for Tosier, read “man and woman”.
Tosier Chocolate Tasting Rooms are to be found at Reckford Farm, Middleton, near Saxmundham, IP17 3NS. Open Wednesdays to Sundays.
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