Bare Bones Chocolate - Cacao goodness

Bare Bones Chocolate started with a phone call from a frazzled Lara Messer to her then boyfriend Cameron Dixon. The photographer was on the train home to Glasgow after a demanding fashion shoot when she found a craft chocolate bar in her bag. “I started eating it and daydreamed about how incredible it would be to make chocolate for a living,” she remembers. She immediately Googled how chocolate is made and phoned Cameron. “I couldn’t wait until I got home. I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited about something!” 

“Cam”, now Lara’s husband (they recently got married in the Bare Bones Chocolate workshop), was at the time a mechanical engineer in Glasgow, and was just as excited. The pair set to work, initially from home. It was 2017 and the craft chocolate market was tiny – “there was next to no information available about how to make it, so Cam’s engineering background was helpful,” says Lara. They spent a year sourcing and testing single-origin cacao beans and launched with the 70% Madagascar and 60% Honduras Milk in 2018. The milk chocolate won two stars at the Great Taste Awards within months of its launch. Now, almost every Bare Bones Chocolate product holds an award.

Lara attributes this success to flavour. During the initial development process, she was “blown away” by how much every tiny tweak changed the flavour – and Lara and Cam have since dedicated themselves to tweaking to perfection. Their roasting process takes place on a modified coffee roaster for greater temperature control, and to spotlight the natural cacao, each bar contains only beans, raw unrefined cane sugar and a smidgen of cocoa butter. Ultimately, says Lara, the taste of single-origin cacao depends on the bean’s genetics, the fermentation process, and the terroir, climate and humidity it was grown in.

This is why Lara describes their chocolate as “a passport through food that can have a positive impact on people and the planet”. They pay well above the fairtrade market rate and take a keen interest in the farmers they work with. They recently returned from a sourcing trip to Uganda, where they met cacao growers who were training to sell to the speciality market. “The speciality market is more complex than the mass market due to the process involved, but farmers can earn more money that can change their lives. We believe all chocolate should be farmed this way,” says Lara.

Lara as a little girl “would have cried” if she knew she would one day run a chocolate brand. Her favourite product is the 70% Philippines dark, originally a limited edition: “It tastes like pecans and banoffee pie or even a tray of brownies. I think it is the best chocolate I’ve ever tasted – which sounds bold, but I’m positive you’ll agree with me.” Everyone did agree: it sold out immediately and has become a permanent stock fixture.

These days, Bare Bones Chocolate occupies a turquoise- window-framed premises in the railway arches of Glasgow’s Osborne Street. It’s a bustling space, fresh and bright thanks to white-painted panels, and it’s here that the team of six manufactures chocolate, wraps it up in pretty pastel-coloured boxes made from recycled coffee cups, and carries out mail order, social media, wholesaling and customer service activities. There is a small factory shop too, where you can buy hot chocolate. Anyone for a single-origin Dominican Republic dark hot chocolate with vegan marshmallows?

Recipe from Bare Bones

Our hot chocolate is made using our award-winning bean-to-bar chocolate, shaved into flakes. No powder here! We have selected our 70% Madagascar dark and 68% Dominican salted for our hot chocolate flakes. The Madagascar is rich and fruity with a maple syrup and raspberry tone. Our Dominican has Maldon sea salt ground smooth through the melanger, giving it taste notes of salted caramel and hazelnut.