Real life Willy Wonka Steve Russell is a chocolate scientist and an expert in all things cocoa, with 20 years of chocolate development experience. He’s created chocolates like Cadbury Dark Milk and the Green and Blacks Velvet range and worked for famous household brands Mars, Cadbury, Green and Blacks and Godiva, where he met his business partner, Giles Atwell.
Together with Giles, Steve founded emerging British chocolate brand Russell and Atwell, producing fresh chilled chocolates loved for their incredible flavours and famous ‘double crack’ bite sensation. It’s a chocolate match made in heaven and a pioneering partnership that’s determined to change the way we eat chocolate: always fresh, never long life.
We sat down with Steve to find out a little more about his chocolate journey and what sets Russell and Atwell apart in a competitive market.
How did your career in chocolate start?
Funny story, but Helen Sharman who worked at Mars Confectionery had left to become the first British astronaut and, having trained in food science, I saw an advert in a newspaper to join Mars in their chocolate department and spent over a decade there, leaving to join Cadbury!
Why are you drawn to chocolate?
Well, there’s nothing quite like it, is there?! It’s such a magical product to work on – it’s our ultimate happy food!
Tell us some of your career highlights/successes…
I’ve developed a lot of different products, so it’s always difficult to choose, but probably the launch of Cadbury Dark Milk and the Green and Black’s Velvet range and of course, the launch of Russell and Atwell!
How did Russell and Atwell come to be?
Giles and I met while working together at Godiva, we immediately gelled and realised we both had a dream to start a chocolate business making the chocolate that we ourselves loved – so much better than the mass-market mainstream brands. We realised then, we’d have to leave our sensible corporate jobs to really make it work. After literally hundreds of prototypes, we launched in October 2020 and became the number one ‘Food Startup’ on Kickstarter in our first 48 hours – the rest is history!
What ambitions do Russell and Atwell have?
This is very easy to answer – fresh pasta and fresh juice is about 30-50 per cent of their respective categories – we’d love to achieve 10 per cent of chocolate to be fresh – in a £100bn global category, that’s a £10bn market.
Why is fresh chocolate best?
Mass-market chocolate uses odourless, tasteless palm oil typically from South East Asia to give your mouth and brain the illusion of creaminess. We use fresh organic double cream and fresh organic butter – that’s the real deal! The difference in taste, in flavour and in overall eating experience is a transformation! You should try it!
What is the key to creating the best tasting chocolates?
Goodness, that’s difficult, without wanting to give away trade-secrets, so I’ll answer it carefully… I think it’s about paring back to just a few amazing quality elements and then mess with them as little as possible – like Italian cooking. We know our ingredient suppliers personally and have hand selected them – sustainable cocoa from Columbia, organic fresh cream from Cotswold Dairy, wildflower honey from Wainwrights Honey, Dorset Sea Salt – all as fresh and locally sourced as we can (except the cocoa that has to come from near the Equator!)
What inspires you when it comes to new flavours?
We really want to avoid fancy schmancy flavours like Himalian Goji Berries that most people won’t enjoy – at R&A we love to make ridiculously good ‘fresh’ versions of classics – so our ‘Cracking Hazelnut’ is inspired by a certain Italian chocolate brand, our ‘Creamy Milk’ by a certain Swiss red ball… that’s at the heart of our business. For new flavours and ideas, we often create micro-batches to experiment and find the edges of our brand, but often also celebrate British ingredients – like ‘Strawberries and Cream’ or most recently ‘Toffee Apple’ – this is my playground where I can really have fun – they typically sell-out in an hour and if they go down well, we look to make a bigger batch next time!
What is your dream chocolate flavour? Or have you already made it?
Oooh, that’s really hard – I work with chocolate all day. I think what happens is that I go through phases of loving a certain flavour – earlier in the year, I was loving our ‘Hazelnut’, but I’m now massively into our ‘Dirty Blond’.
