What The Proper Chocolate Company is known for

The Proper Chocolate Company makes bean-to-bar chocolate in small batches in Dublin. Patrick and Kelli Marjolet founded the business in 2016 after experimenting with cocoa beans while living in San Francisco. The makers select and roast the beans to bring out their individual flavours before turning them into chocolate.

The Proper Chocolate Company makes bean-to-bar chocolate in micro-batches in Dublin, and the phrase is meant literally. Every step happens in their own facilities. The beans are hand-sorted before roasting. They are cracked and winnowed on site. Refining and conching happen there too, and the chocolate is aged before being tempered and moulded on the premises.

Very little chocolate sold anywhere is made this way, and the difference is not marketing.

Patrick and Kelli Marjolet founded the business in May 2016, but it started three years earlier in San Francisco. Patrick was given a bag of cocoa beans by a local small-batch maker and decided to try making his own chocolate. The obsession that followed has not let up since.

The sourcing argument is the one worth hearing. They compare it to winemaking: seek out the beans you want, then roast them to bring out their own flavours rather than to a house standard. Treated properly, cocoa releases a range of savours and subtleties that do not survive mass production.