Chocolate makers, brands and manufacturers
Bean-to-bar, tree-to-bar, melters and private-label producers, from craft workshops to larger manufacturers. Each maker page shows what they make, where they are based, and the bars indexed on Chof.
Read our buying guide to choose better chocolate bars and makers.
Looking for a shortlist? See the Top 20 chocolate makers, browse makers by country or explore the makers map.
Types of chocolate makers
Not every chocolate brand actually makes chocolate. Here is the short version of what each label on Chof means, and why it matters when you read a wrapper. When another company makes a brand's bars, the brand gets that company's label.
- Bean-to-bar
- Bean-to-bar chocolate is made by a maker who works from raw cacao beans all the way to the finished bar. Roasting, winnowing, grinding, refining and conching all happen where the chocolate is made, instead of starting from finished chocolate bought in. The signature of craft chocolate.
- Tree-to-bar
- Tree-to-bar chocolate is made by a maker whose cacao comes mostly from farms it, its group or its co-operative owns, and which makes the chocolate itself. One step further than bean-to-bar, and the post-harvest fermentation is usually the maker's too. Maximum origin transparency, but rare.
- Melter
- Buys finished couverture from a third party, melts it and reshapes it into bars. The bar quality depends almost entirely on the supplier's couverture.
- Private label
- A supermarket's, shop's or café chain's own brand, whether the retailer makes the bars in its own factory or has another company make them.
- Industrial
- Made in a factory that works at mass-market scale, or that mainly makes bars for other brands. That covers the multinationals and also the contract factories behind many smaller brands, some of them organic or fair trade. Origins are often blended, so the story behind a bar can be harder to trace.
Craft chocolate
Craft chocolate is chocolate made in small batches by makers who care about cacao sourcing, traceability and flavour, rather than mass-market scale. Most of it is bean-to-bar or tree-to-bar, though a melter working from good couverture can make craft-quality bars too. It describes how and why a bar is made; it is not a legal label.
Looking for chocolate makers in the Netherlands?
Chof is based in Amsterdam and tracks the Dutch bean-to-bar scene closely. See Original Beans, Heinde & Verre, The Chocolatemakers, Krak and other chocolade makers from the Netherlands.