British brand H!P has designed an oat milk chocolate based on the winning submission in a festive competition run by Amazon and The King’s Trust. The kicker is a surprise ingredient.
Chocolate-covered bacon may be a modern American speciality, but it’s not often that you hear of bacon-infused chocolate.
What’s even rarer is that it’s all vegan.
But that’s just what Brazilian illustrator Louise Coutinho came up with, winning the Raising The (Chocolate) Bar competition organised by Amazon and The King’s Trust.
Her idea was brought to life by London-based oat milk chocolate maker H!P, which developed the bar labelled Figs in Blankets. It combines a 41% cocoa base, complemented with chopped dates and figs and a salty, smoky vegan bacon flavouring – and went on sale on Amazon yesterday for £3.50 per 80g bar.
“While the prospect of mixing figs with plant-based bacon flavouring raised a few eyebrows initially, it was clear after the first taste test that we’d hit the sweet spot. I can’t wait to hear people’s reactions to the flavour combo,” said H!P owner James Cadbury, a descendent of the famous chocolate family, who was on the contest’s judging panel.
Inspired by a British Christmas classic
The King’s Trust (formerly The Prince’s Trust), supports people aged 11 to 30 with finding employment and setting up a business. Young people were invited by the charity to invent unique flavour combinations for the festive season, with entries judged by experts including Cadbury and Levi Roots, the celebrity chef behind Reggae Reggae Sauce.
“I wanted to come up with a Christmassy flavour, something fun and creative, the crazier the better,” explained Coutinho, who spent two years on the Trust’s enterprise programme. She drew inspiration from pigs in blankets, a British Christmas classic entailing cocktail sausages wrapped in bacon.
“I thought about Christmas in the UK and pigs in blankets came to mind – I was drawn to it because it has a little character. I love characters and could see the opportunity for the visual element of packaging the products,” she said.
“I am a visual artist and I am not in the food industry, so a chocolate competition was out of my comfort zone,” she continued. “I was very surprised when they went for my idea which was kind of out of the box – but they embraced it. Then they had to figure out how to bring it to reality.”
Since H!P is a plant-based brand, Coutinho wanted to challenge its team to create a savoury element with the vegan bacon flavouring. “There’s something intriguing about it,” she remarked.
Roots agreed: “As a lover of bold flavours, I was really impressed by the unique pairing of the salty bacon style flavouring with sweet, fragrant figs.”
Amazon to donate part of proceeds from vegan chocolate
Coutinho said winning the competition was a “dream come true”: “Not only was my chocolate bar creation selected by the judges as the winner, but I also got to attend a design tutorial with the H!P team, who decided to include my signature smiley face design on the packaging.”
The whimsical illustration puts a smile on the figs and bacon appearing on the front of the wrapper. “My style is to create upbeat themes and visuals about the things that make us happy and bring joy, best friends, pets, little characters,” she said.
There are a total of 7,500 limited-edition bars available, with Amazon donating at least 15% of proceeds from each chocolate sold in December to The King’s Trust.
H!P (which stands for Happiness in Plants) is one of the UK’s leading vegan chocolate brands, founded in 2021 and now available at Sainsbury’s, Whole Foods Market, Ocado, and Holland & Barrett, as well as Tesco Ireland. It has a six-strong lineup of bars, but also sells buttons, truffles (à la Lindor), and dragées.
Its chocolates have a 50% lower carbon footprint, and are encased in plastic-free recyclable packaging with an inner film made from compostable wood pulp.
The chocolate industry itself has been under the microscope this year, with cocoa prices reaching all-time highs amid supply strains induced by the climate crisis, which itself is exacerbated by chocolate production. Many food tech startups have been developing cocoa-free chocolate alternatives using more planet-friendly ingredients, while some are recreating bioidentical versions using cocoa cells.
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