Meet the Wonka-backed hot chocolate shop proving a treat in London
There’s a new Wonka in town and it isn’t Timothée Chalamet.
London’s latest “master distiller” of cocoa goes by Jens Knoop, whose hot chocolate shop of the same name is stirring up a decadent storm in the capital and beyond.
Knoops, which serves just about every hot chocolate combo imaginable – three billion to be exact – currently has fifteen stores nationally, including seven in London.
In the South Kensington branch, the chief executive, William Gordon-Harris, explained how he discovered the original Knoops in the coastal town of Rye.
“My son was a customer and I think everyone in Rye was a customer,” he said, adding that he too was quickly converted by Knoops’ smokey 80 per cent Ugandan chocolate brew, now his favourite.
The loquacious Gordon-Harris, who also describes the founder as a chocolate sommelier, said his first meeting with the Knoops turned out to be “one of the most formative” of his life.
“A billion dollar light bulb moment,” he added.
Knoops is a way off the billion dollar mark just yet but it is seeing growth that Willy Wonka himself would envy.
For its full year ended March, total revenue grew 67 per cent to £4.4m, up from £2.6m in 2022.
More recently, in the six months ended September, revenue soared 90 per cent to £3.3m, up from £1.7m in the first half of 2022.
Retail sales have rocketed 119 percent in the most recent half year, with 87 percent of this attributed to Knoops’ chocolate flakes.
But this is just the start of it, according to Gordon-Harris, who has ambitions of the global kind.
Under current expansion plans, Knoops has set its sights on 20 stores opened nationally by spring 2024, and then a further 20 by the following year. It expects to hit 200 in the “medium-term” across the UK.
The company is yet to encounter a site without year-on-year growth. And by 2030, Knoops reckons it can hit 3,000 stores worldwide.
Despite the zealous plans, Gordon-Harris believes the appetite is there.
“The addressable market is enormous,” he explained, “and scalability is incredibly easy for us now we’re putting all systems into place.
“The model has been proven through a series of shots in different locations, with different customer bases, proving the robustness and improving year on year growth.”
Knoops is already attracting overseas attention. Recently, Warner Brothers reached out to the company for a collaboration off the back of the new Wonka movie, starring Chalamet and Hugh Grant.
For this partnership, Knoops invented the ‘Wonka warmer’ and introduced it to all their stores and a pop up truck in Westfield shopping centre, which has been “hugely successful”.
Last month, Knoops closed an £8.3min equity fundraise, which Gordon-Harris put down to the fact that the liquid chocolate market is an untapped one.
“The coffee business is all about finding a new niche within the coffee business and it’s completely saturated.
“Whereas we can open up next to a coffee shop and we can be as successful as if there was no coffee shop in sight. It makes no difference to us,” he said.
Knoops is capturing a crowd of post-theatre goers, starved chocoholics and an ever-growing number of non-boozers, clamouring for barista-crafted drinks over the instant-powder kind.
It might be just the golden ticket to a chocolate revolution on Britain’s high streets.