Aneesh Popat

I don’t have a typical day. I wear very many different hats. One is making chocolate as a chocolatier. So, it could be, you know, piping, rolling truffles, making bars. A lot of the time I spend developing recipes and developing concepts, whether that’s new ways of eliminating plastic from the product source, packaging-wise that is. Finding ways for chocolate to travel safely with paper product or indeed the product itself, you know, how can we create a product that looks like something and tastes like something else or matches a particular brief. One of my favourite projects was L’Oréal’s… they had a 4x4, so 16 different blushes, and we replicated the colours of those and flavoured them as well. It’s on our Instagram as well at The Chocolatier Official. And it looks exactly like the product. It’s a lot larger but it’s exactly a replica of the product. You open it and it looks like blusher, but it’s actually chocolate. And to be able to develop those things is really interesting. And also running the business, of course, because ultimately if you remove the fact that we’re selling chocolate, there’s still a business that sits underneath, whether that’s accounts or all the other things that a business needs to run, you know, people and premises and everything else. I never have a same day. So, the business is nine to five. I love chocolate, so I don’t really switch off from it, and I love business as well, so as soon as I wake up, my head’s ticking for ways to do something with chocolate and with it, its production or finding solutions to problems. And once I’ve done that, I will sit and I’ll watch videos on chocolate and how to hone my craft and learn new skills. The industry is always moving and changing. There’s lots of new techniques out there. And I love food thereafter as well, so I’m always in and around the food scenery.