Chocoholics delight

Meet our makers

John McCombe

Chocolate, the sinful, sweet delight that some people get to work with every day.

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Sugar and spice and all things nice are part of the job for Christchurch's chocolatiers.

Hidden in kitchens all over the city, Christchurch's chocolate-makers are producing delectable chocolate delights on a small scale for a loyal and diehard customer base. Lee Suckling visits the boutique producers of the world's favourite sweet treat.

Chocolate. It's one of the only words that can make you salivate just by reading it. First produced from the seed of the cacao tree - a native to Mexico, Central, and South America - chocolate has been cultivated from cocoa for more than three millennia.

Today, roughly two-thirds of the world's chocolate is made from cocoa produced in Western Africa. It is then exported across the globe to commercial manufacturers and small-scale chocolate-makers or "chocolatiers", including those in Christchurch. 

For Irish-born, former accountant Declan Scott, working with chocolate has become a way to fuse his business background with something that makes people happy. Declan moved to Christchurch from Australia with then partner Oonagh Browne in the late 1990s. 

"We had no work and no income, but my partner, Oonagh, had made chocolates as a hobby before," Declan says. He decided to turn Oonagh's creativity into something sellable by setting up a stall at the Lyttelton Farmers' Market. Together, they sold their "decadent dates" and, after overwhelming success, they set up She Chocolat in Governors Bay.

Declan and Oonagh's move to making chocolate wasn't driven by a need to escape the corporate world. "Chocolate is the perfect product, because everyone has a love and passion for it. Working with it is a happy medium between business and making people smile; selling something doesn't have to be competitive and cut-throat."

Declan and Oonagh are no longer partners in life, but they still work side by side at She Chocolat. For each of them, making chocolate for a living will always be the perfect job because it means they're either making people happy or about to make them happy.

"There is a real openness and responsiveness that comes with working with chocolate," Declan says. "It's a joy, a skill you can never get complacent with. Chocolate is like a living material; you're constantly able to wow yourself and others with it." 

Moving the family business from the wool industry to the chocolate trade seems a peculiar path to pursue, but it has proven a wise choice for the de Spa family. 

After immigrating to New Zealand from Belgium in 1959, the de Spas were prominent wool scourers for more than 30 years until they sold their business in 1992. John de Spa and his wife, Aliman, then saw an opportunity to make and sell premium Belgian chocolates in Christchurch and set up de Spa Chocolatier, a small chocolate-making factory in Ferrymead. Now run by John's brother, Philippe, de Spa Chocolatier has established itself as a fine house of Belgian delights.

"Belgian chocolate is the smoothest in the world because of the size of its particles," Philippe says. "The lower the number of microns in chocolate, the finer it is. Belgian chocolate contains 12 to 15 microns, while Swiss chocolate contains 21. Hershey's, the biggest chocolate-maker in the world, uses chocolate with a 40-micron grain." 

Unlike commercial chocolate producers who use cheaper fats, such as palm oil, Philippe uses chocolate made from a high concentration of cocoa butter, making the addition of extra fats unnecessary.

"A high concentration of cocoa is what we crave when we eat chocolate, so using dark chocolate with this high percentage of cocoa butter means we can reach a satisfaction point faster," he says. "You only need two or three pieces of Belgian dark chocolate to feel satisfied. You can eat a lot of commercial milk chocolate - which uses inexpensive, low-quality fats - and still never get to that point. You can just keep eating it until you end up making yourself feel sick."

*Be even more tempted by reading the whole article in the October issue*