Why Willie’s Cacao grated with this chocolate addict

I’m a huge chocolate addict. The darker the better. Paul A Young, Rococo, Melt, William Curley, Philip Neal – I’m almost ashamed to say I’ve sampled all of the best hand-crafted chocolates London has to offer. Hotel Chocolat does some great rare and vintage collections too. However my simple daily fix is a bar of Willie’s Cacao Indonesian Gold from Waitrose. Sometimes I can resist eating the two slabs in each packet, usually not. I love the chunky pack design and the hopeful idea that I might actually be able to ‘keep one for later.’

Photo of the chocolate in Whole Foods

So when I was in Whole Foods Market in Piccadilly the other day, I decided to pick up my daily Willie’s fix. I was confronted by a new product in the range. Excitedly I picked it up, but my excitement quickly turned to confusion. What was the chunky cylindrical shaped item? Was it a stack of chocolate disks? Was it a whole cylindrical block of chocolate to gnaw away at singulair over the counter. I called over a helpful employee. He couldn’t work it out either. The packaging gave us no clue.

I now know from going to the Willie’s website that it’s actually cooking chocolate designed for grating. Well, at least I think so.

It’s the most interesting packaging I’ve come across recently in that it gives almost no clue as to the contents. It doesn’t look like any chocolate format that’s out there on
the market, whether for eating of cooking. Knowing this, the packaging should be doing a much better job of guiding the consumer.

I almost bought it to eat on the tube home. My imagined chocolate disks would have quickly morphed into a huge block of cooking chocolate, which knowing me, I’d have bitten into and most likely ended up needing a root canal filling.

Having told a few colleagues about my experience some of them had seen this Willie’s product before. Apparently it’s to be found in the home baking aisle in places like Waitrose. Now that makes a lot more sense. So Whole Foods might be partially to blame for incorrectly placing it with the standard confectionery range. Even assuming that it is correctly placed in the supermarket baking section, I still feel the packaging needs to do a bit more explaining!