Missing Bean Chocolate - Costa Rica 85%

Yes. We make every bar ourselves from raw cacao beans at our roastery in East Oxford: sorting, roasting, cracking, winnowing, grinding, tempering and moulding. We never buy in ready-made chocolate to remelt.

We hand-sort each batch of beans, then roast them for around 20 minutes in our repurposed Giesen coffee roaster. A cracking and winnowing machine separates the husks from the nibs. Next, the nibs go into our melangeur, where two stone wheels grind them for 24 hours into cacao liquor. We then add British beet sugar and refine for a further 24 hours. Finally, we sieve and temper the chocolate, and set it in moulds at around 13°C.

Our pure bars contain just two ingredients: cacao and British beet sugar. There’s no added cocoa butter, emulsifiers or vanilla. The only fat is the cacao’s own natural cocoa butter, which is released during grinding.

Grinding and refining alone takes around 48 hours in the melangeur. After that, the chocolate is sieved, tempered, moulded and left to set before every bar is inspected, weighed and wrapped.

Roasting shapes flavour and aroma in cacao just as it does in coffee. That’s why we use the same Giesen roaster and roasting know-how behind our coffee, giving each origin its own profile.

It depends on the recipe. Some go into the melangeur so their flavour runs through the whole bar, like the coffee in our Coffee & Walnut bar. Others are set into the top of the bar for crunch, like the blanched walnuts on the same bar.

Orders placed by 11am, Monday–Friday are dispatched from the Roastery the same day.

Free Local & Standard Delivery on all orders of £33 and over, or 1–2kg.

£2.40 for Eco-Friendly Local Delivery (Oxford postcodes OX1–OX4). £3.95 for Standard UK Delivery. £6.55 for Next Working Day Delivery. See our delivery page for full details.