The Chocolate Cottage began life as a concept just over five years ago. Having both been working in education in Germany then Somerset, Richard and Angela Barker wanted to move back to their native Cumbria and find a new challenge.

Discovering the empty premises in Grasmere they sat on the wall and counted the number of people passing by. They asked themselves: ‘what would we cross the road for’? Great tasting chocolate of course!

“So, the seed was sown and we booked ourselves onto a variety of specialist chocolate making workshops round the country, sold our house in Somerset, thought of a name and opened The Chocolate Cottage in October 2013.

We were determined to make a luxury range of chocolates that would be different to the norm. We brought high quality chocolate seed from Belgium, married this with Lakeland double cream and a range of fabulous ingredients from around the world. This enables us to create our initial range of twelve truffles, pralines & fondants.

Over the years our business has developed and grown with a lot of help and assistance from the Growth Hub. This included: One -to-One mentoring and guidance in our early days followed up by workshops on social media & marketing, IT and website design and development.”

Participating in the workshops has helped steer the business forward.

This support has certainly helped us steer our business forward in directions we may not have considered.”

As well as developing their retail outlet The Chocolate Cottage now supply a range of high-end hotels throughout the region with complimentary guest chocolates. It also supplies a number of prominent retail outlets in Cumbria and its online business has quadrupled over the last two years.

“We are constantly looking to move forward, develop and grow our business with new and innovative ideas. With further support from Growth Hub we are looking to re-brand and re-package our chocolates in 2019 to help us break into wider market outlets.”