“My family thought I was mad leaving my comfortable graduate job to start a chocolate company at 21 years old – and rightly so!” recalls Max Scotford, the founder of Yorkshire’s first bean-to-bar chocolate company, Bullion. But as it turns out, his hunch that craft chocolate was about to become the next big thing, was spot-on.
Now in his ninth year, Scotford, memorably titled chief chocolate officer, runs Bullion from a factory in Sheffield’s Kelham Island, as well as the hot chocolate cafe Chocolate Bar in the prominent Heart of the City redevelopment, and a sister company Dough Boy (a bakery). Employing a total of 20 people in the local area, he says his success was expedited significantly thanks to help from his old university, Sheffield Hallam, where he graduated in events management in 2015.
