The Wellington Chocolate Factory founder Gabe Davidson says Easter is a magical time in Wellington. Photo / supplied.
The Wellington Chocolate Factory founder Gabe Davidson says Easter is a magical time in Wellington. Photo / supplied.
INSIDER'S GUIDE TO ... WELLINGTON CHOCOLATE FACTORY
Wellington Chocolate Factory co-founder Gabe Davidson on Easter treats, future plans and the factory's popular chocolatier tours.
We make all our chocolate at our factory in Eva St, serve up delicious hot chocolates made with our chocolate (unlike any other hot chocolate you'll drink) and give people a total Willy Wonka experience with our Chocolatier for the Day tours, where visitors get to make and take home their own unique chocolate bars. Here, drinking and eating too much is totally encouraged.
This year, we've released our first collaboration with Duck Island Ice Cream, our Ambrosia Milk Chocolate Bar. It's a limited release made just for Easter. The base is made from cocoa beans from Vanuatu, and the back of the bar is loaded with fluffy and delicious vanilla and raspberry marshmallows. It also has an amazing cherry taste that lingers after every bite.
Duck Island ice cream has collaborated with Wellington Chocolate Factory to create the Ambrosia chocolate bar. Photo / Supplied
There's something magical about exploring Wellington city at Easter time. Nothing beats drinking one of our hot chocolates on the waterfront on a crisp autumn day. We're also running our Chocolatier tours throughout Easter but with a twist – aspiring chocolatiers on the tour will be able to load their bars up with Easter treats.
Chocolate-lovers can let their creative side loose on the tour and make their ultimate chocolate flavour. Nothing is off the table. We encourage everyone on our tours to name their bar well, sign the wrapper and mark it as "one of one'"because every bar is unique.
We're extremely proud to be an ethical bean-to-bar chocolate maker, lifting cocoa farmers (and their communities and families) out of poverty by paying them fairly.
We go to some crazy lengths to source our beans, including sailing a traditional waka to Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, to make the world's first Bougainville bar in 2016. The trip was supposed to take six weeks but ended up taking three months - we used mostly traditional star navigation and had lots of adventures and near-misses along the way.
We won gold in the international chocolate awards for our Peru bar in 2018, as well as a few others over the years, but we're too Kiwi to plaster the gold and silver stickers all over our wrappers.
In the future, we're looking to build on our relationship with Vanuatu cocoa growers, to source more beans directly from the Polynesian and Melanesian islands. We're also looking to open a new retail space in Wellington.
It's exciting that there's now a thriving craft chocolate industry to explore, here in Aotearoa and beyond.
