The Maidstone chocolate workshop putting three ingredients up against an entire industry

N2 Sweet Lab, run by Ned and Nina, is one of a rare breed of bean-to-bar chocolatiers: producers who take whole cocoa beans and work them all the way through to a finished bar, controlling every stage of the process themselves.

Most commercial chocolate starts with beans blended from multiple sources, over-roasted to mask variation, then supplemented with emulsifiers and flavouring to create a consistent result. N2 Sweet Lab takes the opposite approach. They source single-origin beans from farms in Costa Rica, Peru, Uganda, and Brazil, roast them carefully to bring out their natural character, and make their chocolate with just three ingredients: cocoa beans, cocoa butter, and sugar. Nothing more. The result is chocolate with genuine complexity - wine-like notes, fruit, depth - that changes entirely depending on where the beans came from.

"Costa Rica tastes different from Peru. Peru is different from Uganda. Same three ingredients, completely different stories," says Ned. It's this variety that keeps the pair excited about what they're making. Starting out during the Covid lockdowns and opening their King Street shop in 2023, the passion that started the business is very much still driving it.

The workshop is on King Street in central Maidstone and well worth a visit. Customers can see the production space, smell the chocolate being worked, and if timing is on their side, taste something straight from the batch. As a Produced in Kent member, N2 Sweet Lab is part of a growing community of Kent producers putting craft, provenance, and quality at the heart of everything they make.

Find N2 Sweet Lab online here: https://www.n2sweetlab.com/