About Gatos Chocolate

We started Gatos Chocolate after struggling to find good tasty chocolate at a sensible price.

There are many chocolate bars on the market, from very cheap to very expensive. Most of the popular makes seemed to fail in taste and texture more often than succeed. It seemed like it was acceptable to tolerate poor quality as that was all that was easily obtainable. There are also some excellent bars available, but usually at a cost.

Over sweet, over bitter, little chocolate taste, bland in general, oily textures, that claggy feeling after eating a few pieces leaving you feel like you'd actually eaten flavoured wall paper paste. Any of these ring a bell?

We also felt that so many manufacturers added all sorts of sometimes odd flavours to try and make up for their not so good base chocolate recipe, after all, if you can't taste it, it can't be that bad? 

Frustration at the lack of decent white chocolate in particular triggered a quest to try and make our own. This uncovered a whole world of chocolate which we didn't know about or understand, and turned our interest into a very long and steep learning curve, which in turn created Gatos Chocolate.

After many many failed attempts at simple chocolate making, we had a breakthrough, producing our first bars of what we could consider edible and quite nice tasting chocolate!

That was it! We learned more about removing the grainy texture and blending ingredients, followed by the black art of tempering to give the bars that satisfying 'snap'.

We started giving a few bars to friends and family to test, and were surprised to get good feedback in return! The recipes were altered based on this, and we suddenly realised one day that we might actually have something viable to sell here, products that tasted how chocolate should taste, and at an affordable price so everyone could enjoy it.

Gatos Chocolate was born, with a primary goal of producing good quality and tasty chocolate bars, at an affordable price and in three basic types; Dark, Milk and White. We also wanted our products to be Ethically sourced and Eco Friendly. Attention was paid to ensuring where possible that all ingredients and packaging fitted this ideology.

Why Gatos and why the design you ask?
Well, we have a passion for not only chocolate, but also cats! 

We wanted our brand to stand out, have a simple and easy to remember name, have bright vibrant packaging and be different enough to be a talking point.

The idea came to us one day on the M25 while travelling to visit family; why don't we combine all our passions together! This also incidentally includes us both learning Spanish during lockdown, Gatos is Spanish for Cats. 

After a lot of thought and research, we came up with the basic designs and layouts which eventually came together to make the designs you see in our products. The theme of bright vibrant Cacao trees and pods, along with a similar style for the cats was created.

On our basic Classic range, the cat colour designates the chocolate type. Dark is our little black cat Shadow, Milk is Zathras who is one of our brown tabbies and White is Cali, who is a calico.

The Feral range is a bit of everything. Based mainly on Peruvian Cacao (the ancient home of Cacao) we start to have fun with what you can do with chocolate, introducing various textures and tastes. This now also includes Dairy Free bars, and Goat Milk based bars.

The Pedigree range is our top end single origin/single estate bars of very unique and great tasting chocolate from around the world.