Northern Ireland chocolatiers pioneer ethical chocolate making with unique local flavours

NearyNogs Stoneground Chocolate Makers is the only chocolate manufacturer in Northern Ireland that makes their own chocolate entirely from “bean to bar”.

The craft chocolate business was founded by Shane Neary, and his wife Dot 12 years ago, after their daughter became life threateningly ill and needed medical treatment in Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.

The couple had been making chocolate for friends and family, but undertook a more serious business venture to give them the flexibility to travel with their daughter for treatment.

Mr Neary said it quickly became a passion for them and their family.

“So we decided to have our own business as a way of being flexible, so we worked out how much chocolate we’d have to sell every month,” he said.

“We started a business, we needed some initial equipment at the start so we got a few credit cards,bought a few pieces of equipment to get us going, of course we racked up a bit of debt during that but we just had to get started.

“We said yes to every event that was going, we went to the Balmoral show, every local school hall, church hall, community event, but then we started talking to our customers more – markets are great for that- we started learning about how not everybody can eat chocolate as it is, some people are dairy free, some people don’t want soya in their chocolate, gluten-free,

“We started looking to source chocolate that didn’t have all this stuff already and it was very hard to find.”

It wasn’t until they began to learn more about the process of large-scale manufactured chocolate that they realised the potential there was to make a product that was completely unique.

Mr Neary said that name-brand manufactured chocolate aims to make a uniform taste regardless of where the cacao beans have been sourced from, causing the natural taste and quality of the bean to be stripped in the process.

“We also learned that mainstream chocolate is minus a lot of the health benefits that proper cacao has. Cacao is a fruit, it’s an amazing tree,” he said.

“So naturally, being a plant product there’s a lot of natural health benefits in cacao, but the way the modern chocolate is made destroys a lot of the natural health benefits.”

The factory just outside Newry, sources Cacao Beans from farms in Central America, South America, the Caribbean islands & West Africa.

The beans are then hand sorted before being roasted, ground and tempered all on site.

Mr Neary said they “wanted to make an ethical pure chocolate that people can eat anywhere.”

“We try to look after the farm where we source our cocoa beans, so we’ll pay the farmers five to ten euros a kilo or more,” he said.

“That gives them a living wage, helps sustain the chocolate industry and helps to bypass the risk of slavery and human trafficking which can happen on cocoa farms.”

Mr Neary said the ethical implications of cocoa farming were not as widely known when compared to other popular imported products such as coffee.

“There is a dark side to chocolate from a humanitarian point of view where if farmers aren’t getting paid on time or they aren’t getting paid enough, they can’t sustain their industry where they’re at, they can’t afford to hire workers and things like that,” he said.

“It is a risk in the chocolate industry, so to bypass that you just have to simply pay the farmers more money and it helps them afford to hire workers then, so they don’t basically have to conscript family members or people from elsewhere to come and work on their farm to get a quota fulfilled.

“So, the simple fix to the slave trade in chocolate or the human trafficking issue is to just pay the farmers enough money so they can hire people.”

Even though the beans come from across the world, NearyNogs has frequently experimented with unique flavour combinations inspired by their roots in Northern Ireland.

“We thought, what are we going to do in the UK/Ireland market to showcase our local cuisine without putting an Ulster fry or a potato in it?,” Mr Neary said.

“So we thought, well, we’re going to use stuff that maybe you wouldn’t realise is an ingredient. So we sourced gorse flowers, which is a yellow flower in the Mournes here, and in other mountainous areas.

“And it’s a very common flower, but when you dry it it has a coconut flavour if you put enough of it in your chocolate and we would also include that with another ingredient.

“It’s locally harvested seaweed, called bladderwrack, it’s like a sweet sea salt kind of flavour.

“My wife would harvest that from our local beach in Greencastle, we bring it to shore, dry it, turn it into a powder and then add that to the chocolates so it provides a sweet sea salt flavour to your chocolate as well.”

Mr Neary also said that in the past they have catered to unusual requests that have been surprisingly popular.

“A friend of ours had a birthday and his niece said, ‘Hey, listen, can we make him some Buckfast Truffles?’ Because of where he’s from,” Mr Neary said.

“So as a laugh, we made him some truffles made out of Buckfast and chocolate, he put it on social media, and then we got calls from shops in Lurgan saying ‘can I have that for our shops?’

“So we had guys coming down here spending 100 quid getting Buckfast truffles.”

NearyNogs also run regular tours of their factory in Newry where people can learn more about the chocolate making process.