A British Chocolate Maker

Most chocolate is made with ingredients that simply shouldn’t be there. We strip everything back to the essentials — where simplicity, design and process matter.

01.11.2007 LONDON

MayHawk is an established British bean-to-bar chocolate maker, founded in London in 2007. We have always made chocolate the hard way — through unhurried restraint and a commitment to using only natural ingredients. We make all of our craft chocolate from ethically sourced, single-origin cocoa beans and our packaging has become known for its elegant British aesthetic, blending environmental sustainability with high-quality presentation.

Using bean-to-bar manufacturing processes refined over twenty years we sort the cocoa beans before we roast, winnow, stone-grind and conche them. We do not add emulsifiers or lecithins to our chocolate. This is a creative process carried out in real time, tasting as we explore and discovering as we experiment. Those lessons are in everything we make.

A chocolate for the rest of us. The company was founded as a reaction against the declining standards of industrial, mass-market chocolate, at a time when chocolate had been reduced to a chemistry experiment. Today we continue to forge our own path, ignoring much of the noise around the industry, where simplicity, design and process matter. We make chocolate slowly, with a pared-back, simplified approach that champions the cocoa bean and carefully selected natural ingredients — reclaiming the depth of flavour in chocolate.

Does this make sense? Or is it done because every other company does it? This is what we ask. Our best work comes from the belief that great chocolate comes from the intention with which it is created and the attention with which it is prepared.

Intention is focusing on what is most important to people. How do we make innovative, beautiful tasting chocolate? How do we make this product visually compelling? Is this chocolate made naturally, with ethical and environmental considerations?

What does chocolate making mean to MayHawk: processing raw cacao beans in-house — roasting, grinding, conching and tempering under one roof — using the fewest possible ingredients, sourced ethically and transparently. The promotion of single-origin cacao, and the rejection of food additives and emulsifiers. Made with inventive processes and methods to solve whatever problems arise in manufacturing that would make the chocolate deviate from these principles. This is chocolate made with a sense of place — with a potential which needs to be uncovered, not buried.

Read more about the Bean-to-Bar movement.

ONE COMPANY, TWO STUDIOS

MayHawk takes a fully integrated approach to chocolate making — we make everything we can in-house, at every stage. From the outset we have worked as two studios, the Chocolate Studio and the Design Studio, with a shared sense of curiosity and a willingness to learn. The combined studios make craft chocolate using both artisan and modern manufacturing processes. We don’t follow trends, thinking instead of first-principles, looking at the fundamental truths of chocolate making and product development, and then follow where these ideas lead.