ASK THE EXPERT WITH WHITE RABBIT CHOCOLATIERS

How can chocolate be local when it doesn’t grow in England?

A very observant question and one that I get asked all the time. I am always trying to encourage people to shop local as it is so important for small communities like ours, but how can we possibly frequent our local shops for everything when the beauty of modern times is we have access to anything at the touch of a button? The answer is simple; even the most exotic products can help build the local economy if the business is being run by your peers.

At White Rabbit Chocolatiers, we like to do as much as we can ourselves. As you may remember from a previous edition of ask the expert where we ventured into how chocolate is made, we used the analogy of bread making. In this analogy, the chocolatiers are like the bakers. The bakers don’t grow the grain, and they certainly don’t mill it (that would be the job of the millers), but they are local people that go on to bake the bread in their local oven and sell it in their local shop. Of course we are always trying to get our supplies from as close as we can, and if you were a baker and you could get flour from up the road no one could question your ‘localness’. But since this cannot be done with chocolate we give ourselves a licence to explore, to expand our reach find the best quality chocolate, no matter where it is from. We then purchase these fine ingredients and begin our task of working and crafting this alien ingredient into a locally made delicacy! It is the job of local people, like our chocolatiers Kathy and Amy to use their refined skills to bring something new and delightful to the offering of our market town. We even like to add other locally sourced ingredients, like Cherry View Milk from Cherry Burton or Yorkshire honey to ensure our local provenance stands up to the test.

As part of Welcome to Yorkshire, the Yorkshire tourist board, White Rabbit has represented Yorkshire chocolate at the Houses of Parliament (2019), we have won a raft of local Beverley food awards, and have even presented our business to delegates in the Netherlands with the government’s Department for International Trade. We supply chocolate to businesses up and down the country, each product carefully made and wrapped by our team of local people and shipped directly from our Beverley HQ. Each time we forge a new business relation the footprint of this little white rabbit grows, and with it the message of our historic market town.

Perhaps one day technology will develop, and we could be the first company to start growing chocolate in the UK. But for now we will keep doing what we are doing, with the hope that everyone understands how local we really are and how many Beverley families rely on your support during these difficult times.