2024 was the year craft chocolate fully proved its international character. From Vigdis Rosenkilde’s Scandinavian elegance to Kasama’s playful Canadian white chocolate, from Goodnow’s maple infusion to Sleep Walk’s spicy Guatemalan filling, the winners told a story of diversity and daring.

Several years ago, I was visiting two of our chocolate-making friends, a couple, in the French Alps. They had been running their business for a number of years, just to close it not long ago. But long enough to know that “we'll see how it goes” is sometimes not a perfectly respectable business plan.

Before it was a Swiss luxury or your afternoon pick-me-up, chocolate was currency, sacrament, and something close to a weapon — invented 4,000 years ago on the coast of Chiapas. The long, bloody, glorious story of where chocolate began, and the maker bringing it home.

Goodnow Farms' Putnam Rye Whiskey unites two New England makers and a Dominican bird sanctuary — a Civil War nail baron, an endangered songbird, and quietly the bar that wins every blind tasting we run.

This one means a lot to us. The Maritime Edit — the magazine of luxury living in Atlantic Canada, and a regular voice on Monocle Radio — ran a feature on Hello Chocolate.

To make one of the world's most decorated dark bars, Vigdis Rosenkilde travels from Norway to a remote valley in the Peruvian Andes — chasing Chuncho, an ancestral cacao the Incas once used as money, and possibly the mother of all fine chocolate.

Feliu just took two Golds at the 2026 ICA Latin America awards — but their most improbable bar is built from a desert cactus, tastes vividly of watermelon, and contains no watermelon at all.

Allo Simonne just took two Golds at the 2026 ICA Canadian competition — for buckwheat, sweet-clover flowers and a cacao cousin called Jaguar. A short, jargon-heavy love letter to everything that isn't single-origin dark.

Despite being the newest trend in chocolate, I find the name functional chocolate absolutely horrible. It suggests you can do something with it besides eat it — hammer a nail into the wall, say, or feed the fish in your aquarium. (Don't. It's a terrible idea, and the fish will not thank you.) But it is what it is, the name is already established on the market, and so, as the song says — let it be.

If you know, you know. And if you don't, this is a good place to begin — because the bar in question is made from one of the oldest and rarest cacaos on Earth, grown in a valley most people will never reach, by a maker who sold her home to get to it.

Let me get the awkward part out of the way. The single highest-scoring bar of the 2026 European Bean-to-Bar competition — higher than every dark bar, every heroic 100% slab, every serious-faced single origin in the room — is a white chocolate with flowers in it.

Sometimes you unwrap a bar and it's wrong. A pale, dusty, greyish film has crept across the surface, the gloss is gone, and it looks faintly stale. It's called bloom — a lovely word for something so disappointing — and it's one of the most common questions we're asked.

There is a convention in craft chocolate that goes largely unspoken but is observed almost universally. Dark bars are serious. Milk chocolate is not.

There is a farm in the Soconusco region of Chiapas called La Rioja.

There are places in Peru that exist at the edge of what maps consider worth recording. The upper Urubamba basin is one of them — a region where the Andes lose their confidence and descend, reluctantly, into something older and less legible.