Our History

Our chocolate company is named after Sir Hans Sloane who was a remarkable man of his time, friends with Samuel Pepys and Sir Christopher Wren he was the first man to bring chocolate to the UK in 1687.
Sir Hans Sloane was born on 16 April 1660 at Killyleagh in County Down, Northern Ireland.
As a youth he collected objects of natural history and other curiosities. This led him to the study of medicine, which he went to London to pursue, directing his attention to botany, materia medica, and pharmacy.
In 1687, he became fellow of the College of Physicians, and went to Jamaica. Sloane encountered cocoa while he was in Jamaica, where the locals drank it mixed with water, and he is reported to have found it nauseating. However, he devised a means of mixing it with milk to make it more pleasant. When he returned to England, he brought his chocolate recipe back with him.
Initially, it was manufactured and sold by apothecaries as a medicine; though, by the nineteenth century, the Cadbury Brothers sold tins of Sloane's drinking chocolate.
 His purchase of the manor of Chelsea, London in 1712, provided the grounds for the Chelsea Physic Garden as well as perpetuating his memory in the name of a "place," a street and a square.

 Bust by Michael Rysbrack of Hans Sloane in the main foyer at the British Library.
 A significant proportion of this collection was later to become the foundation for the Natural History Museum.