York, a city in the north of England is a bucket list stop for many people, but has a special place in my heart due to my strong family connection here. Every time I come home I would make the trip to York to visit two people: my nan, and Sophie Jewett. Not necessarily in that order, although my nan would have insisted otherwise. York is my second home; my mum is from here, and my nan continued to live here until very recently, passing away at 97. So whenever I’m back in the UK I always feel a strong pull back to the city. The ancient walls, the winding snickelways, the Minster looming above it all, the memories, and on certain days, if the wind is right, the faint, unmistakable scent of chocolate drifting through the streets. York has been a chocolate city for centuries. It’s in the stones, quite possibly in the walls too. And Sophie Jewett, one of the most inspiring women in the modern British chocolate industry, understands that deeply.
It’s an October afternoon in 2025 and I’m sitting in the Chocolate House, a small building directly opposite Number 10 Castlegate, York Cocoa Works; Sophie’s chocolate manufactory, visitor centre and learning space. The walls around us are lined with learning materials and process diagrams about what happens across the road. There are two hot chocolates in front of us. Proper, thick, rich hot chocolate, not the powdered stuff. Their vapours of hot cocoay steam rising up into the room as Sophie is perched opposite, talking with the kind of quiet intensity that I’ve come to know well over the years. She doesn’t do small talk when it comes to chocolate. She never has.
But before we get into the chocolate, we first need to talk about this building. Because this little room we’re currently in, two women sitting, sipping our hot chocolate and discussing the cocoa industry as it is today, carries more history for chocolate (and women in the chocolate industry for that matter) in its walls than most people would ever guess. It was here, in the 1750s, that the Tuke family grocery business moved to Castlegate. The Tukes were Quakers – Mary Tuke had founded the shop on Walmgate back in 1725, fighting a protracted legal battle with the Merchant Adventurers of York for the right to trade as a woman, and a Quaker. Her nephew William inherited the business and continued to build it, and by 1785, the Tukes had begun roasting cocoa beans and grinding them into a paste right here in Castlegate, making it the first chocolate roastery in York, and only the second in the entire country, after Fry’s in Bristol.
It was in this very building, that a young Henry Isaac Rowntree came to do his apprenticeship. He became manager of the cocoa, chocolate and chicory department. Buying the business in 1862, he ran it here for a couple of years, before heading off to build his own chocolate factory – Rowntree’s. The rest, as they say, is a very chocolate-filled history; think KitKat, Smarties, Aero, Black Magic (basically all the newsagent chocolate bars of a Millenial and Gen X childhood) traceable back to this unassuming little building on Castlegate.
Sophie still finds it almost haunting, and I feel it too, but in a good comforting sort of way, to imagine cocoa being roasted here nearly two hundred and fifty years ago. ‘These things [the incredibly ancient buildings just dripping in history] really are everywhere in York,’ she says, ‘but moving into this place has been really quite inspiring. To remember where all these little seeds came from and what they became.’
The Chocolate House is a recent addition to Sophie’s operation, a companion space to the York Cocoa Works manufactory across the road. But Sophie’s own journey into chocolate stretches back much further than her time in either building here.
Sophie grew up on the Isle of Wight, on a farm. Her father had studied and worked with the ocean, boatbuilding specifically, before buying a farm in the eighties to go and live the good life, as he put it. They had a pet pig called Daisy, and chickens, and you had to wait for the chickens to lay before you could make breakfast or bake a cake. Summer holidays and weekends were spent baking and making things, always with people coming and going, always with willing tasters for Sophie’s creations. They never quite had the right ingredients in (and often not enough eggs), so there was constant improvisation. Swapping one thing for another, learning about food science through hands-on trial and error and the help of century-old Mrs Beeton recipe books. No YouTube, Instagram or TikTok to bail you out here!
Chocolate was an early obsession for Sophie, and as a child she admits she was shamelessly devoted to Cadbury’s. Studying the company as part of a school project when she was twelve, she was fascinated not just by the chocolate, but by their roots as Quakers and the philanthropic side of what the Cadbury brothers built. She was already making chocolate gifts for people at Christmas, although her early attempts at tempering were thwarted by what she later realised was the fundamental issue of trying to temper Cadbury’s and ScotBloc (a compound chocolate that doesn’t temper at all). ‘I was reading all these instructions,’ she says with a laugh, ‘and not working with any of the right ingredients to do it. I got very frustrated. But then I learnt that even if everything goes wrong, you just melt it down and pour it over a cake or ice cream’.
It was chocolate, partly, that brought Sophie to York. When she was choosing universities, the fact that York had this established chocolate industry steeped in history, and that the whole city smelled of chocolate, was genuinely one of the reasons she chose it. She studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics, so not technically that much to do with food directly in those three subject. But food, and more specifically the science and impact of what we consume, became deeply personal during her time at university for reasons that had started in childhood.
At fifteen, Sophie had been diagnosed with a condition that by her early twenties, when she arrived in York, was so severe that she spent two years unable to eat. During that time, she took it upon herself to study nutrition intensively. Understanding the impact of different foodstuffs on her body in a way most of us never have to consider. What struck her most though, even through the difficulty, was not the food itself but what she was missing about it. The way food was a connector, it brought people together. So she continued making things for others, even though she couldn’t eat any of her creations herself. People thought it was strange at first, she admits, but she told them she was getting all her therapy from the act of making and sharing, and that gave her some of the same enjoyment that eating otherwise would have. When she was finally able to eat again, her palate was, in her words, insanely adventurous. ‘I just wanted to taste everything, everywhere, all the time after that. It was a bit of a rebirth of my tastebuds.’
After university, Sophie found herself working in the regional food industry in Yorkshire; tourism experiences, fine dining, cultural and agricultural events; and watching the growing demand from people wanting to know where their food came from. She kept asking questions about York and chocolate, about the narrative and the heritage, and she wasn’t getting very good answers. She could feel that something was missing. With her farming background and her deeply personal understanding of food and nutrition, the idea that we had become so distanced from the sources of what we consumed felt like a problem worth solving. Transparency wasn’t just a buzzword for Sophie; it was a necessity, and a way of being. ‘When I started out on this journey,’ she tells me, ‘it wasn’t even essential to tell people what was in their foods, let alone where it came from. There is still an awful lot that is very opaque in the food industry, even today.’
In 2010, she left her job in tourism and started making chocolate in her own kitchen. A year later, she opened York Cocoa House on Blake Street – a chocolate shop, café and workshop that quickly became a favourite of locals and tourists alike. But even then, Sophie had a bigger vision simmering away. She wanted to build a chocolate factory. An actual chocolate manufactory, and build it in the centre of York, bringing chocolate making back to a city that had been synonymous with it for three hundred years. The problem was, she felt too embarrassed to say it out loud.
‘There were so many reasons why people would laugh and dismiss and belittle the vision I had at that time,’ she says. I can hear that this is something she’s thought about deeply, and it resonates strongly with me. ‘But to build a chocolate factory starts by saying “I’m building a chocolate factory”. You have to put that out into the universe, so to speak. If you don’t, it will end up manifesting itself anyway, but it will be a lot easier and a lot more successful if you can articulate it, to yourself and to others.’
She pauses. ‘I think a lot of people hide their light under a bushel because they don’t feel that they are entitled to try and shine. If that’s what you want to do, then to manifest it you have to align everything you are doing in that direction. There is no need to be ashamed of it.’
In 2018, York Cocoa Works opened on Castlegate – a three-thousand-square-foot chocolate production centre, academy and visitor experience, in a former Job Centre Plus office almost directly opposite the spot where the Mary Tuke had first roasted cocoa beans over two centuries earlier. It was the first time since the 1960s (when Craven’s Ebor Confectionery Works on Coppergate closed) that cocoa beans were being roasted and ground here, in the heart of York. And it was right next door to the Quaker meeting house, one of the first in the world, gifted to the community by the Tuke family themselves.
Sophie refers to the space as a manufactory, and the word choice is deliberate. The term dates from the industrial revolution, describing the transition from pure artisan handcraft to handcraft at scale, the moment when machinery entered the picture but human judgement and skill still remained central to every step. ‘Calling it the manufactory helps illustrate that it’s about people and process,’ Sophie explains. ‘It’s not just about things being made in factories behind closed doors.’
One of the things that surprised Sophie most, as she peeled back the layers of the chocolate industry, was the discovery that there was no all-knowing authority waiting to tell her she was wrong. She’d always imagined that somewhere out there was a world-leading expert, a professional body that knew everything about chocolate, someone who was going to shoot her down for her wild ideas, or for doing things the wrong way. But the further she went, the more she realised that nobody in this industry really does know it all. A very kind mentor – a former head of technology at one of the big factories, and someone who had written textbooks on chocolate – came to help her learn about cocoa beans, and assist with the design of the manufactory in the early days. Sophie kept waiting for the moment he’d say she was mad. It never came. ‘The confidence he shared, that it’s actually all just a bit of an adventure and we’re all making it up as we go along, was really reassuring,’ she says. ‘That was one of the biggest unveilings of my preconceptions.’
What she wishes people knew about chocolate, at its absolute simplest, is that there is so much more to it than just white, milk and dark. That there are dimensions of flavour and process and origin that most consumers have never even considered, and most don’t even know about. ‘It would be great to see more of us showcasing different things we’ve done with the same vintages of beans,’ she says, ‘or showcasing different roasting profiles, or different conching techniques. There is still so much opportunity for cocoa and chocolate to engage audiences in a really exciting and dynamic way.’
The proudest moments, she tells me, aren’t the grand milestones, big openings or fanfare. It’s the little things. Watching a young child on their bean to bar programme go from genuine disgust at the flavour of raw, un-roasted cocoa beans, to walking away at the end of the day with a chocolate bar they’ve made all by themselves. Seeing a staff member grow in confidence and skill. Supporting a visitor or a learner on their own chocolate journey. ‘That wasn’t necessarily what I thought it was going to be when I started out,’ she admits. ‘I initially had this big goal to bring chocolate making back to York, and then once you’ve achieved that, you’re thinking “Ok, what are we actually doing next?”’
The challenges however, have been considerable. Sophie wanted to create an open factory, and she still believes that openness and sharing has led and can lead to far more innovation and collaboration than closed doors ever could. But navigating the realities of running a business that isn’t purely driven by profit, in a world that expects exactly that, has required some real single-mindedness on her part. Something she admits she has struggled with. And then there was Covid, which she describes with a kind of measured understatement that I know masks a great deal of pain. The world of specialty cocoa and craft chocolate had been gaining real momentum right when the pandemic hit. The industry at the time was in its stride, both here in the UK and overseas. Dynamic, independent, full of exciting characters. And then two of Sophie’s main supporters and collaborators on that journey lost their lives to Covid. The grief hit hard for Sophie. Loosing two friends and mentors is devastating enough as it is. But in the middle of such a turbulent unknown as a global pandemic, the resulting fragmentation, turmoil and exhaustion of simply trying to keep going through it all definitely took its toll, resulting in much soul-searching.
But there were moments, especially in the early days of COVID, barely half a week into it, that really captured something essential about who Sophie Jewett is. One of those moments, after the initial shock of lockdown, and the long unknown path to the future that lay ahead, she said to herself: ‘Come on, pull yourself together. You’ve got a chocolate factory you can go and play in. What’s the worst that can happen right now?’
Now we all find ourselves in that post-COVID future. Five years on. Sophie’s recently returned from Papua New Guinea, she’d been back in the UK barely two days when we catch up. Fresh and enlightened from visiting cocoa-growing communities, and the experience is clearly still vivid. The farmers there were proud and pleased to be growing cocoa, getting a good return for their work. But Sophie is realistic about the complexities; the quality market has suffered in some cocoa regions around the world, where farmers are now receiving decent prices without necessarily having to maintain the standards they once did. The question she keeps coming back to now, is how the industry ensures that this moment of better returns doesn’t simply snap back to the old normal, but instead becomes the foundation for a genuinely viable, sustainable farming economy. ‘That requires consumers, retailers, and chocolate makers to all play a part,’ she says. ‘In Papua New Guinea, people had so much pride and a real sense of accomplishment. They wanted to work in partnership with us as chocolate makers, to have that direct relationship. And that’s something that has not been historically the way chocolate has been made.’
She’s equally concerned about what she sees as a troubling trend in the wider industry – the rise of alternative, non-cocoa initiatives from companies who, in her view, have taken everything they wanted from the supply chain and are now turning their backs on it. ‘A whole industry has taken everything it wanted from its supply chain, and is now simply spitting it out,’ she says, her frustration clear. ‘An awful lot of what we are doing at York Cocoa Works is going against the grain of commerciality. But I believe it is what we set out to work towards.’
Before I leave, I take one more look around the Chocolate House – the learning materials on the walls, the light coming through the old windows, the sense of history and chocolate connections, past and present wrapping me in a warm embrace. Across the road, the manufactory hums along, cocoa being transformed into chocolate by people who care deeply about every step of that transformation. Next door is the Quaker meeting house. Down the road is where the first girls’ school in York once stood. Mary Tuke once owned most of this street, and the land across where the Cocoa Works now sits. The threads of history, of chocolate history here are extraordinary, tangled and beautiful, stretching from a remarkable Quaker woman’s grocery shop in 1725 all the way to the extraordinary Sophie Jewett standing in her manufactory in 2025, three hundred years later, still asking the same essential question: How do we make chocolate honestly, transparently, and well?
I finish my hot chocolate, promising Sophie I’ll be back soon (which she knows I will be, because I always am) and step out onto Castlegate. The autumn air carries the faintest trace of something sweet and roasted. It could be the city itself remembering what it once was. Or it could just be the manufactory humming away across the road, making more chocolate.
Either way, York still smells of chocolate. And that, as Sophie would say, is what keeps us all going in this crazy world.
