How family fields in Ecuador inspired 'Britain's best food attraction'
Serial entrepreneur spills the beans on growing the Capital's award-winning Chocolatarium
There’s an old saying. Life happens, but chocolate helps. And in the case of one enterprising Edinburgh entrepreneur, it helped in more ways than the obvious one.
Jenny McLay, founder of the award-winning visitor attraction, micro-factory and retail business The Chocolatarium just off the Royal Mile, knows a good thing when she sees one. But even she could little have imagined the impact the not-so-humble cacao bean would have on her life when she saw them for the first time growing in Ecuador in the late noughties.
Ten years later the global coronavirus pandemic followed by Brexit’s impact on EU students coming to Edinburgh would spell the beginning of the end for the successful English language school Jenny, a qualified teacher, had built up over many years.
But like the astute businesswoman that she is, she had seen the problem coming and looked for another business opportunity. This one also close to her heart – and luckily for her close to the hearts of around 95% of the rest of the West’s population.
Our love affair with chocolate
She has just launched an improved online shop, where the hundreds of chocolate bars the delightful Chocolatarium store stocks can be bought, often by visitors to its tours and events who want to keep their love affair with a newly-acquired brand of chocolate alive.
Chocofact: Chocolate was first consumed for medicinal purposes more than 4,000 years ago in central America as a chocolate drink Xocoatl.
We do love our chocolate. Not perhaps as much as the Swiss, who eat more per capita than anywhere else (but then they do make very good chocolate), but we manage to average more than 16lbs of it per year. Ninety-five per cent of us like chocolate and 8 out of 10 of us nibble on it at least once a week.
As the comedian Jo Brand reminded us: “Anything is good if it’s made of chocolate.” This the woman, remember, who hosted a BBC Radio 4 programme called “Death by Chocolate.” She’s not alone in her appreciation of the sweet delicacy – this month alone there are seven chocolate appreciation days, from Chocolate Pudding Day on June 26 to National Chocolate Éclair Day tomorrow.
Jenny’s decision to feed the obsession has proven to be a winner, with The Chocolatarium winning a host of awards and plaudits and growing from just her and two others to a team now of around 25, with more growth planned. Among a clutch of awards, it has been named the world’s best “hidden gem” attraction by Wizz Air last year, the top Scottish attraction the same year in the Tripadvisor Travellers’ Choice Awards and the best food food experience in Britain by the TripAdvisor awards in 2022.
In particular, while the onsite shop in Cranston Street is packed with wonderful chocolate from around the world, including the work of several local high-end chocolatiers including the renowned Coco and The Chocolate Tree, Jenny wants to grow the online retail business.
She told the Inquirer: “We have a lot of visitors from all over the world, but from the US and England in particular, and when they go back home to Denver or Devon they can find it difficult to buy the chocolate they’ve bought here. So this means they can continue to enjoy the chocolate they discovered here, and it is definitely one area where we can diversify our business and the roles in it, and grow.”
Peak tourist times in the city see the venue booked out, but Jenny also wants to grow the appeal at quieter times, by attracting more schools to enjoy educational visits (the venue has activities linked to Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence) and by attracting more locals to hold events there, like staff parties and birthdays.
Chocofact: Aztecs and Mayans both revered the cacao bean to such an extent that it was used as currency in their ancient civilizations.
The idea to start up a chocolate-themed visitor attraction and shop was Jenny’s and the seed of her idea was planted years earlier. She said: “I used to be an English teacher and lived in Ecuador for a while. My son’s father is Ecuadorean and his family has cacao trees on its land. I have always loved chocolate, I have a very sweet tooth, and think lots of people do, and so I was really interested in how the bean was turned into chocolate and so on.”
Idea takes root
The seed sprouted more than a decade later, in 2019, when she decided to set up The Chocolatarium because of the growing difficulties posed by an impending Brexit for her existing business, an English Language School. “Brexit was a disaster for the English Language school market, especially us because we specialised in long-term part-time students, and they were really almost all young EU students.”
The new business has grown well over the years since it opened, despite setbacks and life events. Jenny said: “We’ve grown every year, but it has been gradual. We had just started when the Covid pandemic hit. We had lockdown, then opened back and then had lockdown again. I’ve also got a two-year-old so wasn’t able to be here full time all the time, so it doesn’t feel like six years have passed.”
Lockdown impacted her business, both the language school and the Chocolatarium, one much more adversely than the other. Jenny explained: “Visitor attractions got very strong support from UK government, certainly compared to a lot of other small businesses like hair salons” she said, before adding ruefully “and English language schools.”
“You can see that post-Covid very few visitor attractions went under, compared to what happened to many other small businesses including language schools. Another factor was that we are members of the Scottish Association of Visitor Attractions, who did a brilliant job of helping us navigate through that crisis.”
Chocofact: The world consumes over $100 billion dollars worth of chocolate each year. That’s a lot of Wonka wonga.
Jenny has brought her love for education into the activities at The Chocolatarium. “We have school parties because we run activities linked to the Curriculum for Excellence, but we try to provide really good information for all of our visitors. Not only do we show them how and where the beans are grown, we also take them through the process of turning them into chocolate, look at the different types of chocolate – dark, milk and white – and how they are made. We talk about the need for fair and ethical trading, and we go into all of the schemes that exist from fairtrade to direct buying from high-quality grower co-operatives.
“We like to think our visits are fun, but there is also a learning experience there that I think people appreciate. Most people really like their chocolate, and they are happy to learn more about it.”
Jenny herself is also keen to preach a “moderation” mantra. Dark chocolate is known to have significant potential health benefits, particularly around its anti-inflammatory properties and its ability to help promote heart health. “All things in moderation, that is what we tell people. Enjoy chocolate, but just don’t take too much and try to avoid chocolate with too much sugar and fat in it.”
But we’ll give a final, tongue-in-cheek word to US movie star Sandra Bullock, another chocaholic. “Chocolate is the ultimate luxury; it comes from the cocoa bean, which grows on a tree—it’s like a plant. Chocolate is the best vegetable ever.”