English chocolate makers, mapped

How we built the list

There is no official list of English chocolate makers, so we built one. We took the names on public chocolate directories, then went to each business's own website to see what it says about who makes the chocolate and where.

A business is on the map if its own site says it makes chocolate in England today. We left out shops that sell other people's chocolate, online resellers, outlets of chains, makers outside England and sites that have closed or been taken over. Where a business has many shops but one kitchen or factory, it appears once, at the place it makes the chocolate.

The official figures

The Office for National Statistics counts businesses by the type of work they do. Its count of sites making cocoa and chocolate confectionery in England was 255 in 2026, rounded to the nearest five in each region. It only includes businesses registered for VAT or PAYE, so it misses the smallest makers, and it includes sites that are not on our map because their own websites did not say they make chocolate. The two counts are not the same population, but they are a useful check.

Trade: England imports its cocoa

No cocoa grows in the UK, so every bean is imported. HMRC trade figures show the UK imported 67,594 tonnes of raw or roasted cocoa beans in 2025, worth £400 million. In the same year it imported 480,216 tonnes of chocolate and other foods containing cocoa, worth £3,273 million, and exported 137,845 tonnes, worth £1,024 million. These are whole-UK figures, and the chocolate figures cover the whole of HMRC's chocolate and cocoa-food heading, not only bars and boxes.

The industry in numbers

UK manufacturers sold £5.2 billion of cocoa, chocolate and sugar confectionery in 2025, according to the ONS Prodcom survey. That is up from £2.7 billion in 2015, in the prices of each year, so part of the rise is inflation. The figure includes sugar sweets as well as chocolate, and covers the whole UK. The Business Register and Employment Survey counts about 9,000 employees in making cocoa and chocolate confectionery in England in 2024, rounded to the nearest 50.

The countries that trade the most with the UK in chocolate, by value in 2025:

HMRC records the country a shipment came from or went to, which can be a trading hub and not the country where the beans grew. Cocoa beans are grown in West Africa, Latin America and Asia, and none are grown in England.

Visiting a maker

Of the 166 makers, 51 say on their own websites that they run workshops, classes, tours or visitor experiences. Use the Workshops or tours filter on the map to see them. This is a minimum, because some sites list sessions only when they are on sale. We do not link to makers here, so check a maker's own site before you travel.

Chocolate Week

UK Chocolate Week is a week-long celebration of chocolate held every October, with tastings, workshops and events at chocolate makers and shops, mostly in London. One trade guide says it was started by the Academy of Chocolate to raise awareness of quality chocolate. The 2025 week ran from 10 to 18 October. In 2026 the London Craft Chocolate Fair ran from 16 to 18 October at Fidelio Cafe in Farringdon, at the start of Chocolate Week 2026. We could not find one official page that gives the full 2026 dates, and the calendars we found disagree, so check with the organisers each year. This page is a record of where English chocolate is made, not an events listing.

A short history of English chocolate

Three families in three cities built English chocolate: the Frys in Bristol, the Cadburys in Birmingham and the Rowntrees in York. Today all three brands belong to companies based abroad. Filled dots mark the moments that changed who made English chocolate and where.

1. 1657London

   Chocolate goes on sale in London. A Frenchman sells it from a shop in Bishopsgate Street, the first recorded sale in England.

2. 1689London

   Sir Hans Sloane mixes Jamaican cocoa with milk and sugar, which is credited as the start of milky hot chocolate. Cadbury later acquired the Sir Hans Sloane's Milk Chocolate branding.

3. 1693London

   White's Chocolate House opens on St James's Street, one of the first places in London to serve chocolate to drink.

4. 1761Bristol

   Joseph Fry is making chocolate in Bristol by the 1760s, and the Fry business is later dated from 1761. Sources disagree on the start: Bristol Museums says the business ran from 1728.

5. 1824Birmingham

   On 4 March John Cadbury starts selling tea, coffee and drinking chocolate in Bull Street. In 1831 he moves into making cocoa and drinking chocolate at a factory on Bridge Street.

6. 1847Bristol

   Fry's makes a moulded eating chocolate bar. Some sources call it the first chocolate bar; Bristol Museums says Fry's made the first mass-produced one this year.

7. 1862York

   Henry Isaac Rowntree takes over a cocoa works at Castlegate in York. His brother Joseph joins as a partner in 1869.

8. 1866Bristol

   Fry's Chocolate Cream appears, which Bristol Museums calls the oldest chocolate bar brand in the world.

9. 1879Birmingham

   The Cadbury brothers open their new factory at Bournville, built in the countryside outside the city.

10. 1905Birmingham

    Cadbury launches Dairy Milk.

11. 1919Bristol and Birmingham

    Fry's merges with Cadbury to form the British Cocoa and Chocolate Company. Bristol Museums says the two were fully merged by the end of the 1960s.

12. 1935York

    Rowntree launches the Chocolate Crisp, later renamed Kit Kat. York has been the home of Kit Kat since the mid-1930s and still makes it.

13. 1988York

    Nestlé takes control of Rowntree's, after a share raid by Jacobs Suchard earlier that year. The York factory is now Nestlé's.

14. 2010Birmingham and Bristol

    Kraft Foods takes over Cadbury. The Fry's Somerdale factory near Bristol, which Cadbury had planned to close, shuts in 2011. Kraft's snacks business became Mondelēz International in 2012, and Cadbury is part of it.

15. TodayEngland

    We could confirm 166 makers on their own websites, 27 of them bean-to-bar. Most are small businesses.

Timeline sources: Cocoa & Heart; Bristol Museums; ITV News, Cadbury timeline; Science Museum Group, Rowntree; Confectionery Production, Kit Kat in York; Wikipedia entries for J. S. Fry & Sons, History of Cadbury and Rowntree's. Where sources disagree or hedge, so do we.

How much chocolate households buy

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs publishes Family Food, a survey of what UK households buy. Chocolate bars, solid and filled together, were bought at 84.7 grams per person per week in 2024/25, down 13% from 2022/23. The highest year in the series was 2020/21, at 111.6 grams. These are household purchases for the whole UK, not just England, and they exclude chocolate eaten out of the home.

Two kinds of maker

27 of the 166 are bean-to-bar makers. They buy cocoa beans and roast, grind and refine them into chocolate themselves. The other 139 make their own chocolates, truffles or bars, usually starting from chocolate made by a larger supplier. We show the difference because the two are often described in the same way, and they are not the same job. The 3 large factories on the map are included because the companies say on their own sites that the chocolate is made at those sites.

How we checked

We began with 512 names. We opened each business's own website and read what it says about its chocolate. Businesses with only a social media page, or whose site we could not open, are not on the map, because we could not confirm them. That will have left out some real makers. If you make chocolate in England and are not here, or your details are wrong, tell us and we will fix the page: hello@madeinengland.com

Sources: each maker's own website; public chocolate directories for the starting list of names; ONS UK Business Counts via Nomis (SIC 10.82, local units, 2026); HMRC overseas trade in goods (2025); Defra Family Food, household purchases (2024/25); Cocoa Runners (UK Chocolate Week dates); London Craft Chocolate Fair. Map boundaries: Office for National Statistics, Open Government Licence v3.0.