Montezuma's

Award winning British chocolate

When Montezuma.s founders Helen and Simon Pattinson left their careers as City lawyers they never imagined that by 2007 they would have founded one of the UK.s most talked about quality chocolate companies.

Today Montezuma.s have a fantastic production team working hard on the South Coast to make Montezuma.s the UK.s leading quality chocolate maker. As Rick Stein said about them, it is .food obsession at its best..

Having become totally disillusioned with London, law and all the trappings of a material life, Helen and Simon left for South America. They both had a long term love of chocolate but the chocolate business was not something they had considered until they accidentally ended up on a cocoa plantation in Venezuela, rapidly becoming fascinated by the complexity of cultivating quality cocoa.

They experienced cocoa being grown, harvested and processed into cocoa liquor, and soon realised that there was a lot more to chocolate than at first meets the eye. Having seen the little cocoa tree and tasted all varieties of the eventual product further afield in Argentina, they could think of little else.

Almost a year to the day that they returned from their travels, the first Montezuma.s store opened in Brighton, with more than 200 products. They specialise in bringing together the best raw ingredients under their .trading fairly. policy and combining them in a simple fashion to produce a great range of chocolate including bars, drinking chocolate, dipped fruit and after-dinner discs. Many are organic, vegan, soya-free, gluten free and wheat free and they never use any artificial flavourings or other additives so there is a chocolate for everybody. Montezuma.s products are now sold through health food stores, delicatessens, farm shops and fine food stores throughout the country.

Try the very dark organic chocolate blended with essential oils of orange and geranium or for a real treat, the strips of organic dried mango dipped in a blend of white chocolate, lime and chilli.