About

Pukerua Bay

The Chocolate Bar is Aotearoa New Zealand's premiere high quality chocolate retailer. Founded in 2015 with a focus on importing and selling ethically sourced, high quality bean to bar chocolate to Aotearoa New Zealand.

We stock the largest collection of craft chocolate and fine chocolate available in the Southern Hemisphere, from a curated selection of the best artisanal chocolate makers in the World.

These days, the business is located residentially in the small coastal village of Pukerua Bay, about 30 minutes away.

What's special about Bean to Bar Chocolate?

Bean to bar chocolate comes from artisanal producers around the world, all of whom are crafting their chocolate from scratch, from the cacao bean to the finished chocolate bar, using rare and heirloom varieties of cacao that was grown sustainably by farmers who are also remunerated fairly.

These 'fine flavour cacao' beans account for just 5% of the cacao grown around the world, and within that 5% there's a huge spectrum of flavours to be discovered - flavours you would never find in cheap industrial chocolate. Fine chocolate makers use less sugar and unnecessary filler ingredients, making cacao the star of the show. Once you've had real fine chocolate, you can't go back!

Quality and Ethics

We believe that quality and ethics go hand in hand. All of the chocolate makers we work with use ethically traded cacao and sugar, often forming direct trade relationships with the specialty farmers who grow, ferment and dry the fine flavour cacao. In some instances, bean to bar chocolate makers have visited the origins and their families have become close friends.

Bean to bar chocolate makers pay well above the commodity and Fairtrade prices for their cacao - usually two or three times more than the current Fairtrade price. This price is reflective of the ethos of bean to bar; a desire to improve the ethics of the global cacao trade by putting more profits in the hands of farmers, higher quality fine flavour cacao beans, and better chocolate for the consumer celebrating the unique terroir of the beans.

Bean to bar is the old and new

As conscious consumerism continues to make headway and improve standards of production around the world, more people are aware of the problems that exist in industrial chocolate. Household name brands who have long sourced cacao from West Africa are slowly being made to answer for monoculture stripping lands, farmers trapped in cyclical poverty, child labour and many other injustices.

As the bean to bar chocolate market grows, more chocolatiers are going back to producing from bean to bar, and steering away from using couverture bulk chocolate from unethical sources that is a significant part of the problem. The couverture market is dominated by three brands who have become prevalent in chocolate over the last 100 years.