I should cocoa: how Hotel Chocolat became a £534m prize for Mars

With US group's might behind it, upmarket UK chocolate firm may overcome recent stumbling blocks

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."