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"Iris regularly has dreams about food and chocolate and literally finds inspiration in her dreams."
Few chocolate makers are as daring and imaginative as Solkiki Chocolatemaker, a small UK-based team pushing the boundaries of fine chocolate one dream (and one bar) at a time.
From casting every bar by hand to sourcing some of the world’s most unique and traceable cacao, Solkiki’s approach is grounded in flavour, ethics, and unfiltered creativity.
In this exclusive interview, Iris and Bob share the stories behind their 2025 British Craft Chocolate Award-winning bars (including three Golds!), their uncompromising philosophy, and why they think it’s time we rethink everything we know about chocolate.
International Chocolate Awards: Can you tell us the story behind your winning products? Why did you choose these particular bars to enter to the 2025 British Craft Chocolate Competition?
Iris&Bob: We always enjoy assessing new origins, new ingredients, equipment and techniques. We like choosing new recipes to showcase every year, as our very large core range of over 60 bars demonstrates! We are honoured and proud this year to earn 3 Golds, 2 Silvers and a Bronze for Britain, in addition to 5 special accolades including British Chocolatemaker 2025, Direct-Trade, Organic, Vegan and Gastro.
A little look at each winner:
Wild Bolivian Beniano dark milk 61%, BRITISH GOLD 2025
We’ve been following, tasting, trying to secure and generally stalking Wild Bolivian cacao for almost a decade, so when Ben and Katya of Kindred Forest sent us samples we were very excited to trial. Ben and Katya are actively pursuing biodiversity through close collaboration with local and indigenous communities, this is exactly what we want to see in our partners. Our focus as always was to make an extremely delicious chocolate, in this case a dark milk, with a flawless profile. We aim to support this cacao in future and are proud to collaborate with Kindred Forest as they build their business with locals including fermenter Socrates and the Ojapi family of canoeing cacao collectors.
Malagos Stroopwafel 60%
Malagos cacao from the Puentespina family in the Philippines produced this award-winning Heirloom cacao in the Heirloom Cacao Preservation (HCP). We wanted to work with Rex and his family ever since we met at a fine cacao fair pre-covid and the cacao brings to us a rounded, chocolatey, nutty, caramelly profile. Iris grew up in Holland, Bob lived and worked there for a few years, both share a long love of Stroopwafels! The chewy, gooey caramel profile is so fun and nostalgic to work with to create this delicious fusion bar.
Salted Esmeraldas 64%
This cacao comes from the Cloud Forest in Ecuador. We were the first to import this superb cacao to Europe, I believe it was in 2018, direct from Freddy’s farm and originally won a lot of acclaim for our dark milk chocolate, made with this cacao. The Celtic Salt brings pleasant salinity to the chocolate, helps one experience the cacao in a new and moreish way, adding a savoury edge to the profile. Freddy, the whole family Salazar and the team at Costa Esmeraldas have had a tough year with a low harvest and more issues at origin. It’s our privilege to continue to support during these difficult circumstances.
We have 3 bars that won in the No Milk White Chocolate category, which we call ‘Gold Bars’. Gold here refers to high % cocoa butter bars, without a dairy or alternative-to-dairy ingredient. We feel this is a new and more precise descriptive category of chocolate, next to what we already know as white, milk, dark and alternatives to those. More of these Gold Bars are arriving in the market every day and we feel they deserve their own category, hence we call them Gold Bars and we hope others will adopt this much clearer description. Many of these bars are absolutely nothing like white chocolate. Chocolate is evolving and the market and the consumers deserve better, clearer and more precise descriptions.
Bourbon Vanilla Gold (No Milk White Chocolate BRITISH GOLD 2025),
Tahitian Vanilla Gold (No Milk White Chocolate BRITISH SILVER 2025).
Since the cocoa crisis early 2024, we have seen prices for cocoa butter increase sharply. Vanilla has been increasing for years already (though recently recorrecting slightly) and we are in a world where we notice other people working with chocolate moving away from working with cocoa butter and vanilla. We don’t want to do that! We want to continue working with these amazing products and not compromise on quality. There is such a range of different flavour profiles available in cocoa butter AND vanilla, we enjoy the privilege to continue exploring those profiles and want to share this with our customers.
Pineapple Stroopwafel (No Milk White Chocolate – inclusion – BRITISH GOLD 2025).
We set out to create a delicious and fun dessert chocolate, a gourmand experience. Pineapple plays nicely with the natural uplifting notes in the cocoa butter we use here and the Stroopwafel delivers the caramel and waffle textures and notes.
Awards: How did your journey with chocolate begin and where are you now?
Iris&Bob: Unable to find satisfactory vegan white chocolate in 2007 and looking all over, Iris decided to make her own white chocolate. The first bars were made in January 2008. She sold chocolate originally just to cover her costs! It wasn’t intended to become a business, it was a treat for ourselves. We’ve been making chocolate ever since.
After moving internationally a few times, we settled back into the UK in 2015 and continued making chocolate, but this time also providing cacao beans, cacao butter and cacao powder to other makers, we also offer ingredients and couverture to Michelin kitchens, chocolatiers, coffee shops and culinary businesses around the world.
We take enjoyment exploring and pushing boundaries in fine chocolate, we typically only submit our favourite new bars every year to the International Chocolate Awards and we always enjoy assessing cacao, cacao derivatives and other ingredients to do with chocolate.
Awards: What is your philosophy when it comes to making chocolate? How do you see the vegan / plant-based chocolate scene evolving in the UK and worldwide?
Our first commandment is to make the most delicious chocolate possible! We start by finding the best ingredients, grown and traded in the right way. We look for flavours and techniques that excite us.
As well as makers, we are serious chocolate fans, we must have tasted thousands of chocolate bars over the decades. Despite the time, energy and effort of bean-to-bar, we’re not afraid to make mistakes.
Self-taught and independent, we don’t really follow the scene too closely, because we want to stay true to our inner chocolate guides and what we feel we want, need and which directions we want to develop into.
We have noticed that people are more adventurous in trying new types of chocolate today, then in 2008 perhaps, which we love to see, because we like to push boundaries of flavour. So, we make what we feel is exciting at the time.
Awards: What challenges have you faced in your chocolate-making journey and how have they shaped you? How does the current state of the chocolate industry impact your business?
We started off avoiding the use of animal ingredients in chocolate, because that aligns with our personal philosophies. Then we stopped using lecithin very early on. We feel both of these ingredients are better left out of chocolate entirely since they influence flavour in what we feel is a negative way.
We like seeing that chocolate and fine chocolate in the past, even going back millennia, was most often plant-based, so being a vegan company never felt restrictive to us in any way. More the opposite really, we always are open to new ways of creating food, being driven by flavour and possibility, rather than convention. Nevertheless, we are sometimes side-lined as a niche business or a business riding the ‘vegan trend’.
Since veganism goes back at least millennia, we feel this does a bit of a disservice to people in general and it restricts the adventure that food can be, being open to new foods, new chocolates and new ways to enjoy foods and new news of creating chocolate. Even in the law chocolate is described in such limiting ways, we feel that it doesn’t meet with the current times anymore and we would like to see the categories thrown wider open, keeping the quality (high amounts of cacao) together with fully traceable cacao ingredients to origin.
Another challenge for us is space. On one hand, we could use bigger machinery, but land and property are very expensive in the south of England. Our roastery, grindhouse, tempering room and stores are all very small and well thought out spaces. Each space can be used in various ways. Unfortunately this also dictates to us that we can’t take on all the cacao we would like to. It pushes us to be resourceful though, it keeps us on our toes and sometimes we need to make difficult decisions.
The global cocoa crisis has pushed prices up and availability down. We have not increased our prices for a few years, hoping to absorb the increases as long as we can. Some farms are unable to supply even half a tonne since the crisis started early 2024, others increased price by 75-80%. The crisis is a way to earn trust, reinforce relationships at difficult times, always with a long-term view.
Awards: What inspires you when creating new products?
Iris&Bob: We tend to inspire each other and we always let curiosity get the best of us both! We are always experimenting with flavour combinations and techniques, cook from base ingredients daily and always have chocolate on our minds!
Maybe this sounds a bit superfluous, but, as chocolatemakers, we always both loved chocolate and we still love chocolate! Ideas come naturally, time, energy and space are the only limitations!
Awards: How does it feel to have your work recognised by the International Chocolate Awards?
Iris&Bob: It’s very special to create something and have a team of trained, highly experienced judges single out our products and award them. We are here to delight people, delighting people is a core motivator, so the awards are serious compliments for us.
Having done the excellent IICCT training ourselves, we know how critical and discerning the judges are. If anyone is seriously thinking about pursuing chocolate we can highly recommend the IICCT training; you’ll learn a lot and get to enjoy wonderful chocolate in the process! The objective rigour, sheer judging experience and commitment to quality makes the ICA the most meaningful awards for anyone in chocolate to win.
Awards: What’s next for Solkiki Chocolatemaker?
Iris&Bob: Ever curious, we are already working on new recipes and techniques, it can’t be helped! New chocolate will be coming!
We are currently assessing exciting new origins and designing packaging for our newly awarded bars, we want to keep sharing our chocolate and continue being creative and eating delicious chocolate.
Awards: What’s one surprising thing people might not know about your chocolate or your process?
Iris&Bob: Every Solkiki Chocolatemaker bar is cast by hand (we have never used a tempering machine, unless you want to call Iris a tempering machine, honestly she doesn’t mind it, her own words!).
Awards: Is there a chocolate maker, mentor, or tradition that especially inspires you?
Iris&Bob: Recently in Belize, we visited a lot of locals who make their own chocolate. Interesting to see how they each grow, ferment, roast and grind their cacao into chocolate bars. It’s very much their own product. Great fun to see the chocolate they make, the chocolate they enjoy, and this inspired some thoughts back here at our workshop, Anandamide, in the UK.
Stay tuned for more on this in the British ICA 2026. We are deeply inspired by the traditional recipes dating back centuries in South America and Europe of fully plant-based chocolate.
Awards: Finally, if you could create your dream chocolate bar (with no limits!), what would it be?
Iris&Bob: That is a funny question and this would have to be answered quite literally in the ‘dream’ sense.
Iris regularly has dreams about food and chocolate and literally finds inspiration in her dreams. We never told anyone this, but Iris often finds herself in dreams at buffets of food, cakes, chocolates or other delicious treats and wakes up with an idea of flavour or food or a preparation of ingredients and then she sets out to recreate this in some way.
Sometimes particular flavours are really difficult to recreate, but this can bring us onto new recipes and unexpected flavour combinations. Many bars like this have gone on to win ICA awards..
Think of unusual ingredients used in our bars like samphire, miso, fig leaf, buckwheat, pineapple, CBD, mushrooms, cherry blossoms, pumpkin seed, star anise and interesting combinations with these.
We focus a lot on the future of fine chocolate… but it would be a dream to work with ancient cacao like pure pure pure nacionals and criollos – wouldn’t that be something to dream about – a trip to the past!
All photos: Solkiki Chocolatemaker
