Four Chocolate Trends Worth Gifting: Cocoa Pods, Easter Eggs, Salami and Tasting Boxes

Introduction

Chocolate is one of those categories where the same supermarket shelf can hide wildly different experiences. This roundup looks at four very different takes on chocolate that each tap into a broader trend: knowing where your chocolate comes from, reducing plastic, breaking out of the usual shapes, and treating tasting as a proper experience rather than a quick snack.

All of these were bought independently for this roundup, and the verdicts are honest: some are playful novelties that genuinely deliver on quality, and one is a surprisingly affordable education in what cocoa really tastes like.

The Whole-Pod Experience: Knowing Where Chocolate Comes From

The first item is not really a product so much as an experience: a whole fresh cocoa pod, one from Ecuador and one from Saint Lucia, ready to open and taste. Research suggests two thirds of consumers want to know more about where their chocolate comes from and what it actually is, and cracking open a real pod answers that question in the most direct way possible.

The flesh around the beans is the surprise here. It is spongy with a hard edge underneath, almost furry like the skin of a peach, and delivers a tropical fruit pop of freshness before you hit the incredibly bitter raw bean underneath. It tastes very little like the chocolate most of us know. The raw cocoa butter alongside it, meanwhile, is just fat, nothing like white chocolate.

Only a few places in London can supply fresh pods, which makes this a rare experience gift rather than an everyday purchase. The flesh itself is increasingly being used to sweeten chocolate naturally, so some makers now add cacao sweetness instead of cane sugar.

Chococo Dark Chocolate Ocean Egg

Chococo is an artisanal husband-and-wife team that has been handcrafting chocolate for around 20 years, with a hundred national and international awards to their name. Their Dark Chocolate Ocean Egg is a 72% dark egg studded with little turtles and starfish, leaning into a Jurassic Coast theme.

The packaging story matters as much as the egg. There is no plastic anywhere, just paper, and even their gift box selection uses paper separations. One of the founders sailed around the world and saw the impact on the oceans firsthand, and every ocean egg sold triggers a donation to the Ocean Giants Programme, a charity helping to clean up and protect the seas. It is purpose-led in a way that clearly started long before it was fashionable.

Tastewise, the consensus was blunt: the best Easter egg eaten in this roundup, and a rare case where novelty and real quality are married together rather than traded off. The giant egg costs 27.50, which initially sounds steep but sits in line with what artisan chocolate should cost. Smaller versions are available too.

Chococo Milk Chocolate Dinosaur Egg

The Milk Chocolate Dinosaur Egg is the softer sibling: a milk-chocolate style mix studded with mini chocolate dinosaurs and ammonites, cracking open like an oversized Kinder egg to reveal a fossil-themed interior. It hits the same plastic-free, handcrafted, ocean-donation story as its dark sibling.

This is the pick for households with children, or for anyone who wants the playful Easter moment without dropping down to supermarket-egg quality. The same verdict applies: novelty delivered with class, and well worth the price of admission.

Cocoa Chemistry Chocolate Salami

Cocoa Chemistry makes chocolate salami: a dark chocolate outer coating around a milk-chocolatey interior packed with walnuts and dates, hanging on strings just like an artisan market stall of salami. The founders started life as chemists before leaving corporate life for chocolate making, and they bring that scientific rigour to the product.

The shape is pure novelty aimed squarely at the gift market, specifically the person known for loving actual salami and chorizo, and the gag lands exactly as intended. More importantly, the taste holds up: the verdict was simply that it tastes great, like a very good chocolate truffle in a playful format.

The salami comes in a range of flavours; the three bought for this roundup were 10 each, which is reasonable for the weight of truffle-quality chocolate you get. One taster would honestly prefer the same flavours in a ball, which is fair, but as a gift it delivers on both the joke and the quality.

Willie’s Cacao Discovery Box

Willie’s Cacao has one of the great chocolate backstories: the founder fell in love with a cocoa hacienda in Venezuela while on holiday, sold his London flat, bought a cocoa farm, and has been winning awards for chocolate and packaging ever since. The Discovery Box takes that story and turns it into a guided tasting: ten 50g bars, tasting notes, a flavour wheel and a map, sourced responsibly from around the world including his own farm.

The point of the box is that chocolate can be as specific as wine. Two bars from the same bean, both 72% cacao and from the same country, can taste dramatically different depending on the estate. The 100% cacao Pure Gold bar is intensely bitter and drying but silky and nutty as it melts, while the Las Trincheras and Rio Caribe 72% bars show creamy, nutty, coffee-layered contrasts.

You are unlikely to finish all ten bars in one sitting, but that is the point: you dip back in over weeks, following the map to see where each bar takes you. At 22.99 for the box, the consensus was that it feels remarkably cheap for the quality and the learning experience bundled in. Individual boxes are available, and there is also a subscription option.

Buying Advice

If you want an Easter showstopper, the Chococo eggs are the standout: real chocolate quality, genuinely plastic-free packaging, and a donation to ocean conservation baked in. Pick the Ocean Egg for dark chocolate fans and the Dinosaur Egg for families. The chocolate salami is the best gag-gift of the four and still tastes excellent. And if you or the person you are buying for actually wants to learn about chocolate, the Discovery Box at 22.99 is arguably the best value of the lot.

Conclusion

All four picks share a common thread: they treat chocolate as something worth understanding, whether that is tasting a fresh pod, trusting a handcrafted egg, gifting a novelty that does not compromise on quality, or working through a map of single estates. Any of them makes a thoughtful gift, and none of them is just another bar.