Angus thirlwell family
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Meet the REAL Willy Wonka, Angus Thirlwell ! £100m Hotel Chocolat tycoon gave away free chocolate for five years, gave customers tours of his lab and has chocolate on his eggs for breakfast EVERY DAY (and his dad was Mr Whippy!)
The eccentric life of Willy Wonka, with his fantastical outfits and sweet tooth generosity, has long captivated the minds of millions of children, with many wishing his giant chocolate factory existed outside of their imagination.
While there are no winding rivers of chocolate, Golden Tickets, and certainly no Oompa-Loompas, the day-to-day life of chocolatier Angus Thirlwell, the owner of Hotel Chocolat, is not too different to Roald Dahl's most popular character.
The chocolate tycoon is now set to bump his huge multi-million-pound fortune after selling off his beloved company to Mars in a staggering £534 million cash deal, it was revealed today.
Thirlwell, who founded the luxury British chocolate brand two decades ago, admitted he had always been a 'chocolate fiend' since he was a child and to this day he remains a chocaholic.
Each morning he spri
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To say that Angus Thirlwell is passionate about chocolate is an understatement. As he willingly admits, it’s more of an obsession. Together with his business partner, Peter Harris, he founded Hotel Chocolat in 2004 with two specific aims for their chocolate: for it to excite the senses and for it to be widely available.
Angus religiously eats chocolate every day, tastes and approves every single recipe the company produces, and is as much at home in the development kitchen – affectionately known as the ‘inventing room’ – as he is in the boardroom or among the cocoa trees. It was a bold move to become a cocoa grower, a point underlined by the fact that Hotel Chocolat is one of very few to do so, but it was all a natural progression of Angus’ passion for chocolate.
Fittingly for a company whose Tasting Club has seen customers having their say in its development from the beginning, Angus was inspired to guide Hotel Chocolat towards growing its own cocoa by another customer, who sent him a book she had found while tidying her husband’s study. The 1920 edition of Cocoa & Chocola Entrepreneurialism has been instilled in Angus Thirlwell from a young age. Coming from a successful, innovative family, he has very much come into his own as the co-founder of the UK’s premier chocolate brand. He’s experienced it all in business, including a well-documented IP battle with a supermarket chain, enroute to an appearance, this year in the prestigious Sunday Times Rich List. Understandably, he has a massive passion for chocolate; developing Hotel Chocolat with business partner, Peter Harris, while in the midst of the ‘great renaissance of chocolate’, in 2004. “A lot of people think that it (chocolate) makes you fat, makes you spotty and is something only for special occasions, but what we want to do is make everybody realise that you can enjoy chocolate as part of a sustainable and healthy lifestyle every day. Sometimes three times a day, if necessary. “I have a passion for chocolate; it is such a creative area to work in. You can change the shape of it, the flavour or make it into a gift. It has the ability to excite pe
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My Story: Angus Thirlwell, Hotel Chocolat
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