Philosophy of Zotter Chocolate

CHOCOLATE – BEAN-TO-BAR

We make everything in-house, from the first step to the last, thus making us one of the very few bean-to-bar producers in Europe. The roasting, milling and conching is done in small batches, adjusted to the individual cacao bean so we can demonstrate the exciting world of cacao. We often travel to our cacao growing regions in order to find the most sublime and rare cacao varieties. Not unlike wine, each cacao variety has its own very distinct flavour, shaped by the terroir of its growing region. Sometimes that flavor is nutty, sometimes it has more of a flowery bouquet like the Ecuadorian beans or more citrus notes like the beans from Madagascar. All our chocolates contain only the best raw materials. We use fine flavour cacao bean varieties as opposed to ordinary bulk cocoa, we exclusively use cocoa butter instead of palm oil, raw cane sugar, milk from alpine farms and genuine Bourbon vanilla, the second most expensive spice in the world after saffron. The Austrian location employs around 200 people who produce fresh chocolate every day and also take care of all the other things our workshop requires.

Our entire business is Fair Trade verified. We are a member of WFTO – the World Fair Trade Organization, which is the umbrella organization for global fair trade. The WFTO monitors business compliance with the 10 principles of fair trade like, among others, transparency, respect for the environment, the payment of fair prices and no use of child labour. We buy our cacao directly from the growers and are happy to pay well above the global market rates for a high-quality product. A big factor in producing that exceptional quality is personal contact and collaboration. Julia Zotter has visited our Maya cacao farmers in Belize and Guatemala this summer. Afterwards she has been in Peru, where a lot of our cacao suppliers live.