The eccentric chocolatier talks to Charlie Cottrell about his attempts to create the finest and purest chocolate bar in the world, and teach a nation of chocoholics how wonderful real chocolate can be
We did some amazing stuff with Brunel University. They found your perception of energy was much greater with a drink made from my cacao. They hooked you up to all sorts of machines and they found you basically burn fat when you drink my hot chocolate first. This was the case across the board.
It was very important to me. When I made my first chocolate drink on the farm in 1993, I thought 'wow' - it really picked me up and that's the moment where I realised chocolate was something else. To do a trial with a leading university was proof that, 16 years ago, I was right.
I was pretty nervous because I simply didn't know what they were going to say. I'm confident that, if you can feel something, you know what you're talking about - but I'm not a doctor. To tell people about the great stimulation of chocolate is one thing but to hear it from doctors was another thing.
From a sports person's point of view you hit a brick wall when you run out of sugars but in my case you drink my hot chocolate, you then burn fats and I'm presuming you've still got your sugars left.
I think we should see people drinking it on the Marathon. When is the next one? I should be there. How many people do it?
I can't comment on that. We should put it to the test. There's certainly a lot of undiscovered compounds in chocolate; we're a long way from knowing the full benefits and attributes of chocolate - there's no doubt about that.
Spain is way ahead of us - they started ahead of us but they are still ahead of us when it comes to chocolate. They produce it in an artisan way; that's where I sourced all my machines from, that proves it. They are into all the different haciendas and different cocoa percentages from around the world. They're quite cutting edge.
I hope that other people are inspired to make it from the bean. England's full of great chocolatiers that make very fine chocolates but let's make sure we define that there are great people like William Curley and Melt using a variety of chocolate from around the world. On the other side pretty much all the other stuff you see is the same chocolate moulded into different shapes with a different label on it.
No.
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