I recently had the opportunity to visit Alistair at the Chocolate Tree factory in East Lothian. Alistair very kindly gave my family and I a guided tour of their production facilities near East Linton.

The factory is situated amongst rolling fields of East Lothian farmland.

It's an idyllic setting, and Alistair and his wife Friederike have a wonderful business that they have created with love and attention to their craft. 

It all starts with the cacao pod. Here is my youngest Oompa Loompa for scale.

Then the roasting of the cacao beans. These roasted beans are a sensory delight, warm out of the oven, rough and smooth in the palm of your hand, and the room heady with the scent of chocolate.

Breaking the shell open gives you the chocolate nibs, which are the raw material for making chocolate. They are rich, deeply flavoured, with a lingering effect on your palate.  

From this point onward, a variety of ingredients and techniques are applied to produce different types of bars, all sourced carefully and with consideration for the quality of the produce and the working conditions of the growers.

On the day of our visit, white chocolate bars were being made, in the most mesmerising manner!

Frederike designs the flavours, applying her background in mathematics to ensure exact consistency in the recipes so that they can be replicated over and over again.

It's the attention to detail that lifts the overall quality of the range, and makes The Chocolate Tree so special.

This table full of hundreds of fruit and nut milk chocolate bars was the first thing we saw when we arrived at the factory, but the packaging (eco friendly!) is last piece of the process before bars are sent out to shops like Paper Tiger.

At Paper Tiger we stock virtually the whole of the Chocolate Tree range, in both of our stores and online. Alastair gave us a little taster of some new lines that are in development, which were very exciting and very delicious, and will hopefully be landing on our shelves this autumn!