James Cadbury sets £0.5m sales goal for Love Cocoa upon launching avocado chocolate bar

13-Nov-2017 - Last updated on 13-Nov-2017 at 15:48 GMT

Love Cocoa sources avocado from Mexico for its new chocolate bar. Pic: Love Cocoa

The great, great, great grandson of Cadbury’s founder, James Cadbury, has developed an avocado chocolate bar prior to this year’s holiday season for vegan consumers.

The 70% dark chocolate product is currently available online via Cadbury-owned startup website LoveCocoa.com for £4.25 ($5.61), which is 10% more expensive than previous chocolate bars in the portfolio. “The avocado ingredient used in the bar is 100% natural freeze dried avocado pulp powder (sourced from Mexico),” said the company.

“Growing up as a Cadbury, I’ve always loved chocolate and experimenting in the kitchen,” said Cadbury. “And like the millions on Instagram, I’m also an avocado fan, so I thought why not mix two of the most loved flavors and foods together? And that’s how the avocado chocolate bar was born.”

Darker chocolate in the making

Vegan and dark chocolate are on trend right now, as Love Cocoa found many consumers asked for vegan chocolate during a trade show earlier this year in London, Cadbury mentioned. Currently, all of Love Cocoa’s dark chocolate is vegan.

“For online orders, we’ve definitely seen a huge spike in dark chocolate sales. So that’s where we’ll be focusing on in terms of product development,” he said. “We’ve got flavored bars that are 70% [cocoa], but we’ll go higher cocoa content as well.”

Like many other chocolate makers who are facing consumer demand for sugar-reduced products, Love Cocoa has been trying to turn that situation around by playing with flavor combinations and adding new plant-based sweeteners, said Cadbury.

“Beats, at the moment, could be an option, and some berries could work quite well, like Goji berries.”

Online products with personalization

Love Cocoa has mainly been an e-commerce business, even though it started distributing its chocolate bars to local organic stores and other premium channels after securing £192,000 ($253,398) through a three-week crowdfunding campaign earlier this year.

The funds will expand Love Cocoa’s product range from chocolate bars to truffles in the near future, said Cadbury.

“As we’re gearing up for Christmas with new products, we’ll also be doing online personalization,” he added.

“We’re not quite there, yet, but customers will eventually connect with their Facebook and Instagram accounts [to choose a picture], and we will print [chocolate] products directly for them… We see online gifting as a huge growth area especially for chocolate.”

The product personalization will enter its testing stage in the next month or so, and is expected to launch in mid-January.

By the end of 2017, Love Cocoa anticipates £140,000 ($184,759) in annual sales. It is looking to achieve £500,000 ($659,745) in revenues by 2018 with 25% of sales coming from export.