There can be few British food businesses that have been given – or rather bought – as much TV airtime as Hotel Chocolat. Since 2019, across Channel 4 and Channel 5, there has been Chocolate Dreams: Inside Hotel Chocolat; Hotel Chocolat at Christmas; Hotel Chocolat: Inside The Chocolate Factory; Hotel Chocolat at Easter; and most recently Hotel Chocolat Unwrapped, which has now returned for a second series (Channel 4, 28 July, 8pm).
A lot has changed at the company since then. It was acquired by Mars in 2024 for £534m, long-serving executives have departed, and co-founder and CEO Angus Thirlwell’s son-in-law Ollie Pearce has been tasked with the global expansion of the Velvetiser drinking chocolate offer.
None of which is covered in this episode, which instead plodded some low-stakes subjects: the launch of bakeries at some locations and a rain-soaked recent outing of the brand’s Chocmobile.
Will the skies clear by the time festival-goers start arriving? Who cares, frankly. Will taste-testers like the Nibbly Rye One, in what presenter Matt Baker called its “moment of reckoning”? Probably.
Mildly more exciting was a look at the company’s plan to “crack America” with the opening of a new store in Chicago, from which the most peril the episode could muster was a slight construction delay.
Thirlwell stated that the planning permit-based hitch was “thrilling with a slight whiff of danger around the edges”. Which is the complete opposite of how you would describe this programme.
No comments yet