Louis Barnett is the young chocolatier who has developed a Mayan-inspired Easter egg for Selfridge's.
Far from being simply a 3pm craving, chocolate was once considered the gift of the gods.
For the Mayans, who toasted and fermented seeds of the cacao trees in the Yucatán forests 3,000 years ago, it was sacred. ‘Wars were fought over chocolate, and the beans were used as currency,’ Louis Barnett, who founded and runs Louis Barnett Chocolates, says. Barnett is obsessed with the history and craft of chocolate making. His own range of bars includes dark chocolate with spiced ginger and cacao nibs, milk chocolate infused with lime, chocolate truffles, fondants and pips (for cake decoration and hot chocolate). For this Easter he has gone back to chocolate’s roots to create a Mayan-inspired egg for Selfridges made from Mexican cacao beans fermented in the traditional way (trodden on rather than left in wooden boxes, which gives the chocolate a rich, fruity taste) and decorated with designs inspired by early Mayan drawings of rabbits.
In a development kitchen opposite his house in Kinver, Staffordshire, Barnett invents wacky-sounding flavour combinations, including white chocolate infused with cola fizz (this new product is already a bestseller, along with the milk chocolate with honeycomb, sea salt and black pepper). In a hand-written book of more than 1,800 recipes, his latest creations are bacon- and pork-flavoured chocolates – pancetta truffles are his current favourite. ‘As you experiment, the library of flavours in your head gets bigger and easier to access,’ he says.
Although Barnett has run a business for nine years, he is only 21. He left school at 11 after being bullied and was home-schooled (shortly after leaving he was diagnosed with dyslexia, dyspraxia and dyscalculia). As a hobby he made cakes for family and friends and then started supplying local restaurants. He also became obsessed with chocolate making. ‘I remember the first Belgian chocolates coming to Britain when I was about eight; the flavour was a whole new experience, it was fantastic. After that it became a little quest of mine to try as many brands as I could, and that led on to me trying to make my own.’ His grandfather lent him £500 to buy his first chocolate machine (‘essentially just a melting bowl’), and in 2005, at 12, he launched his company, Chokolit (a nod to his dyslexia; on his 21st birthday he renamed the company Louis Barnett’s Chocolates) from his parents’ kitchen. His revolutionary product was an edible dark chocolate box filled with nine chocolates. In 2007, the year after it was launched, Waitrose started to sell it, making Barnett the supermarket’s youngest-ever supplier. The same year, his parents raised the funds to open a factory in Burton upon Trent, where Barnett now employs 10 people – his mother, Mary, a former muralist, has worked with him full-time since the start, and his father, Phil, left his job as a health-and-safety officer to do the same role in the business seven years ago. By the time he was 14, Barnett’s products were stocked in Sainsbury’s, by 15 in Selfridges. Last year the renowned chocolate maker Callebaut appointed him as one of its world ambassadors. ‘It’s like the Nobel Prize for chocolatiers,’ Barnett says.
Barnett delights in new technology. His latest hi-tech device cuts down the tempering process to 15 minutes (his old machine took two and a half hours). ‘It has speeded up production, but I’m glad I learnt using the old methods so I have that knowledge,’ he says. Even more hi-tech is a laboratory in France that Barnett uses (along with other chocolatiers) to analyse the molecular make-up of all chocolate sources in the world. The taste of the beans changes from season to season, so every six months the $150 million machine recalibrates his recipes, changing the percentages of beans so that his bars taste the same.
Barnett is often away travelling, meeting the cocoa farmerswho supply him. In Mexico he is treated like a celebrity. ‘My picture is on billboards and buses, it’s crazy,’ he says. At home, a number of television deals are in the pipeline. Could he have imagined any of this when he started? ‘Absolutely not. It was a hobby, something to take me away from the tough time I was having. But now I am travelling the world, doing public speaking and running a business. There’s never a dull day in chocolate.’
Louis Barnett Mayan Egg (milk or dark chocolate), £89.99, exclusive to Selfridges
