“I firmly believe that buying Rabot estate was destiny,” said Angus Thirlwell, the co-founder of Hotel Chocolat. A customer clearing out an office sent him a 1920s book about chocolate making just as he was visiting his father in the Caribbean. The book inspired Thirlwell in 2006 to buy the 101-hectare (250-acre) cocoa estate in St Lucia.
“We wanted to get close to the origins of chocolate,” he said in a company video in 2008. “It just made sense to do the opposite of everyone in the industry.”
