Yahoo Finance Hotel Chocolat founder revels in sweet success after Mars takeover
The son of the inventor of Mr Whippy has made his own sugar-fuelled fortune after selling Hotel Chocolat to US giant Mars in a deal worth £534m.
Angus Thirlwell, who co-founded the upmarket chocolate maker, will personally bank £39m from the deal. Mr Thirlwell, 60, is the son of Edwin Thirlwell who invented the trademarked soft-serve ice cream sold from vans across Britain.
“[My dad] is a terrific inspiration for me,” Angus Thirlwell told the Telegraph. “I was very lucky to grow up in an entrepreneurial family. I’ve always had quite a lot to live up to.”
Born in Newcastle but raised in Barbados, the younger Mr Thirlwell’s first foray into entrepreneurship came in 1987 after he dropped out of university, ditched a career selling software and met fellow Hotel Chocolat co-founder Peter Harris.
Their first venture was built around selling branded mints that companies could give away to clients, which they ran from Mr Thirlwell’s cottage in Suffolk.
“It started as a couple of guys in a room with a shared telephone,” said Mr Thirlwell. “It was a unique idea, very niche, which was personalised, refreshing peppermints, with companies’ branding.”
Sales reached £1m a year by 1990 as they landed contracts with firms like British Airways. However, it soon became clear that greater opportunities lay beyond mints.
“Our customers eventually started saying, ‘look, we love your mints, but you must have something else’,” said Mr Thirwell. “And we didn’t. We were obsessed with mints at that point. But because of their line of questioning, we started to investigate chocolate.”
The company went on to launch a chocolate delivery service called Choc Express and “quietly ditched the mints,” said Mr Thirlwell.
Unimpressed by what he saw as a lack of quality chocolate, they identified a gap in the market for a premium offering. The business was renamed Hotel Chocolat in 2004 and it opened their first store in Watford that same year.
“We needed a brand name that touched on the magic quality of what chocolate does to a human being,” Mr Thirlwell said.
“And what it really does, in the best experience, is deliver escapism.”
Mr Thirwell’s passion for chocolate is reflected in his own diet. He has described himself as an obsessive chocolate eater who consumes around 50g a day, going as far as garnishing his morning poached eggs with cocoa beans and drinking water infused with them.
Hotel Chocolat now boasts around 125 stores across the UK and more than 20 others globally.
Its products range from slabs that cost around £5 to hampers priced as high as £300.
The business also owns a 140-acre estate in St Lucia where it grows cacao, the main ingredient in chocolate. It also runs a luxury hotel on the island, which the pair bought in 2006. It costs upwards of £400 per night to stay at the hotel, which overlooks a UNESCO World Heritage site and serves “cacao cuisine” in its restaurant.
“We made a big, bold move by buying a cocoa farm and pretty much staking everything on the belief that luxury would transform into being about authenticity and away from gold bows and gold boxes,” Mr Thirlwell said.
As well as stores and cafes, Hotel Chocolat launched a restaurant called Rabot London in 2013, which it described as “Britain’s first gourmet chocolate restaurant”.
The restaurant, which closed in 2022, offered dishes such as pea and mint soup with cacao pulp and king scallops served with summer vegetables and white chocolate purée.
Hotel Chocolat joined London’s stock market in 2016, making the founders part of a select group of British business leaders who have created a public company from scratch.
Mr Thirlwell and Mr Harris made more than £20m in the process.
Hotel Chocolat, which has a slogan of “more cacao, less sugar”, agreed to a takeover by the US confectionery giant Mars on Thursday.
The deal with the Snickers and Twix-owner will see Hotel Chocolat ramp up an expansion abroad after struggling to establish a foothold outside the UK in recent years.
Recent headwinds led to Hotel Chocolat posing a £800,000 loss in the year to July, down from a £21.7m profit the year prior.
Shares in the business rose by 160pc following Thursday’s announcement.
