These are the top ten best websites of Craft Chocolate Makers. The websites are judged on the best for information, speed, design, mobile (cellular) experience and online ordering. Customer experience is key, this alters where companies are ranked, or not ranked.
What needs highlighting here, is this list happens to contain really great Craft Chocolate Makers, but this list is NOT judging solely on that criteria – for example how many awards they have won for their chocolate is not taken into consideration, we have other lists for that. To make it on to this top 10 list they have to be very good at what they do, but the ranking is also based on the WEBSITE EXPERIENCE, as detailed below.
Tested on both Mobile (Cellular) and Desktop.
| Rank | Maker | Design | UX | Info | Shop | Content | Identity | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dandelion Chocolate | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★½ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ |
| 2 | MayHawk | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★½ | ★★★★★ |
| 3 | Askinosie Chocolate | ★★★★½ | ★★★★ | ★★★★½ | ★★★★ | ★★★★ | ★★★★½ | ★★★★½ |
| 4 | Original Beans | ★★★★ | ★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★½ | ★★★★½ |
| 5 | Pump Street Chocolate | ★★★★ | ★★★★ | ★★★½ | ★★★★ | ★★★★ | ★★★★ | ★★★★ |
| 6 | Fossa Chocolate | ★★★★ | ★★★★ | ★★★ | ★★★★½ | ★★★½ | ★★★★½ | ★★★★ |
| 7 | LAND Chocolate | ★★★★ | ★★★★ | ★★★ | ★★★★ | ★★★ | ★★★★½ | ★★★★ |
| 8 | Ritual Chocolate | ★★★½ | ★★★★½ | ★★★ | ★★★★½ | ★★★ | ★★★½ | ★★★½ |
| 9 | Friis-Holm | ★★★½ | ★★★½ | ★★★★ | ★★★½ | ★★★★ | ★★½ | ★★★½ |
| 10 | Omnom Chocolate | ★★★ | ★★★½ | ★★½ | ★★★★ | ★★½ | ★★★★ | ★★★ |
The Top 10 List
1. Dandelion Chocolate
Dandelion remains one of the strongest external benchmarks for Craft Chocolate Makers because it has built an entire digital world around chocolate, connecting making, origins, producers, shops, experiences, education, gifting and commerce. Yes, it is a Shopify template, but its website gives the customer multiple reasons to explore beyond the immediate purchase, while still making the actual buying journey exceptionally clear and the website fast and responsive. Online ordering, the product pages and the photography are all excellent, with a professional polish. Over the years Dandelion has diversified its product range considerably, but the products are well categorised, and you don’t feel lost amongst it all. Dandelion Chocolate, along with MayHawk and Askinoise, is the closest example of a craft chocolate maker where the website itself has become part of the product experience. The Dandelion website blog is not updated as often as it once was, but when it does update with a new article it is often easy to read and it always gives an interesting take or a real company insight that shows their expertise. You get a real feel for the people and the products behind Dandelion when you read these articles.
2. MayHawk
MayHawk has a complete knowledge, discovery and commerce environment, rather than a conventional chocolate shop with supporting content. Its combination of detailed product information, reference material, FAQs, glossary, sourcing and ethics, detailed gifting guides and an expanding body of Insights gives customers substantially more to discover than the normal craft chocolate website. The website design and online ordering system is fast and intuitive, with express checkout options — just based on customer experience they are one of the best on this list, and it also has one of the best mobile (cellular) experiences. MayHawk seem to be the Apple of Chocolate Makers in terms of website design and functionality. The photography and videography is clear and professional and well optimised. There is an unusually deep body of original thinking about chocolate on the website, under the Insights page articles, making MayHawk increasingly difficult to compare directly with conventional maker sites as it seeks to document its own experiments, and to discuss a wide range of connected topics.
3. Askinosie Chocolate
Askinosie stands out because education and transparency are not secondary content added around the shop; they are fundamental parts of the website. Its information architecture takes customers from cocoa origins and Direct Trade through transparency reporting and chocolate making, while its Chocolate University extends the educational proposition considerably further. The website demonstrates a genuine willingness to explain how the business works and what it has learned, giving customers considerably more substance than the usual origin story and tasting notes. Its commercial experience is good, online ordering is functional, fast and logical, and the site has a strong sense of purpose, although its visual design and full e-commerce execution are not quite at the level of the two leaders. The website is serious, commercial and expressive — it also does one thing very well, the USP of Askinosie comes across loud and clear at all times, enhancing the brand’s authoritativeness in the Craft Chocolate space. Other brand’s never achieve the clarity of Askinosie’s mission statement in website form, and that should be recognised.
4. Original Beans
Original Beans is particularly strong in information architecture and purpose, especially around cacao origins, growers, regeneration and environmental impact. It successfully turns those subjects into things customers can explore rather than simply making sustainability claims, and its rare-origin and regenerative positioning gives the site a strong organising idea. The connection between individual chocolates, cacao origins, producers and environmental outcomes gives customers a reason to investigate beyond the product itself. Original Beans has one of the better, more accomplished blogs on this list, with a good range of topics covered. Visually it is somewhat busier than the leading sites, but the depth of information and the way that information connects to the products makes it one of the most substantial craft chocolate websites available.
5. Pump Street Chocolate
Pump Street has an exceptionally convincing website because it reflects a real, multifaceted business — bakery, chocolate maker, shop, ingredients, physical location and online commerce all reinforce one another. Its provenance and sourcing information is meaningful, while the site remains commercially straightforward as a standard e-commerce site, using a theme which does not feel unique, but the professional photography, website speed, and clear online ordering hierarchy, elevate it above many others on this list. The wider bakery and food business also gives the website an authenticity that is difficult to manufacture through conventional brand storytelling. It is a very good example of a well-executed commercial website, even if the underlying digital framework is relatively familiar.
6. Fossa Chocolate
Fossa’s great strength is that its product creativity becomes its brand personality, particularly through its use of Asian ingredients and flavours. The site is visually confident, easy to shop and particularly strong for gifts and discovery. Its product range gives customers an immediate reason to browse, with unusual combinations and collaborations creating considerably more curiosity than a conventional collection of origin bars. It doesn’t have the informational depth of the top five, but it succeeds very well at making browsing enjoyable and giving the brand a distinctive identity.
7. LAND Chocolate
LAND is one of the best examples of restrained contemporary chocolate design, with a clear proposition and a very uncomplicated route into its products. Its emphasis on natural flavour, origin and alternative sourcing gives the visual restraint some substance rather than leaving it as pure aesthetics. The site is particularly successful at communicating its proposition quickly, with strong photography, clean product presentation and a straightforward shopping experience. The limitation is simply that there is considerably less depth to explore than on MayHawk, Askinosie or Original Beans, making it stronger as a focused brand and shop than as a wider chocolate resource.
8. Ritual Chocolate
Ritual is particularly strong from a pure e-commerce perspective, with excellent product discovery, bundles, mini bars, subscriptions and gifting. The customer journey is extremely easy to understand and the site removes much of the friction that smaller craft makers leave in their shops. It has a polished commercial structure and makes it easy for a customer to move between individual products, collections and gifting options without becoming lost. Its weakness is that the informational and editorial experience doesn’t reach the same level as the leaders, so the website feels more like a very good chocolate shop than a deep resource about chocolate.
9. Friis-Holm
Friis-Holm deserves its place because it communicates knowledge of chocolate making itself, rather than relying principally on the usual craft-chocolate vocabulary. Its technical perspective gives the customer access to a maker’s expertise and makes the chocolate feel considered rather than merely artisanal. There is considerably more substance here than the site’s visual execution initially suggests, particularly for anyone interested in fermentation, cacao and the technical aspects of chocolate making. Without it Friis-Holm would not make this list. The website weakness is the overall digital presentation: the website looks a bit dated, and comes across as unpolished in places. In summary, the knowledge is stronger than the UX, visual execution and commercial experience.
10. Omnom Chocolate
Omnom has one of the most immediately recognisable identities in the sector, combining Icelandic culture with surreal, playful and highly distinctive packaging and product design. Its website provides a competent commercial experience, it is fast, good on mobile, with a wide range of products easily explored — there are gifts and factory-related experiences, and the brand puts across its story very well. The USP of making chocolate in Iceland is well documented and detailed, making it an enjoyable read. However, when judged against the criteria used for this list, its strength lies much more in commercial presentation and product branding than in information, editorial depth or customer education. It is therefore a good branded e-commerce site, with a fast customer shopping experience, but sits well below the genuinely information-rich and experience-led websites at the top of the ranking.
To make it into the top 10 list a Craft Chocolate Brand needed to avoid the following.
Faults and Criticisms of Craft Chocolate Websites.
- Everything looks the same. The same hero → category tiles → products → reviews → Instagram → newsletter structure. Bland, sameness, no uniqueness.
- Template-driven rather than brand-driven. The technology dictates the experience rather than the business having a distinctive point of view. The brand is forced into a standard Shopify template that makes it rigidly follow the same style and design as everyone else.
- Too much friction. Slow pages, excessive scripts, pop-ups, cookie notices, intrusive offers, complicated navigation and checkout. Current testing still finds very poor performance across many Craft Chocolate Websites. Pop Ups for subscription, or 10% off offers, within seconds of landing on the home page: this is the scourge of modern online shopping, and many aggressive CRO suggestions should be ignored on a premium website experience. As a brand owner you need to think, what annoys ME when I am online shopping, and remove it from your own website.
- Product pages are treated as catalogues rather than sales arguments. They provide specifications, photographs and a button, but don’t necessarily answer why this particular thing should matter to me. Or the Craft Chocolate company hasn’t taken the time to give anything other than the most basic information. Often much of the nutritional data is missing on a Craft Chocolate website, or you’re expected to read it off a photograph taken of the back of a bar. This is just lazy, and it should be penalised in search results.
- Generic photography. Sometimes the product images are beautiful enough, if taken professionally, but they are all interchangeable between brands, professional freelance photographers have got a system and a style, and many over-lap. Or worse, they are badly taken photos by the founder, using a phone without proper lighting. Images uploaded at full resolution and file size, slow the website down.
- Generic copy. “Premium”, “quality”, “beautifully crafted”, “sustainable”, “luxury”, “made with passion”, “delicious”, “terroir”, and overused wine language — language that could belong to 500 competitors, and none of it meaningful.
- Too much choice, insufficient guidance. The customer is given products but not necessarily a way of understanding which one is right for them. Product discovery remains a significant source of frustration. A massive choice in product SKUs shouts, “as a brand, we have no focus”, particularly if there is no filtering of the products into categories.
- The site ends when the transaction ends. There is little sense that the company has anything further to say or teach.
- Content treadmill. A company starts a blog, publishes eight articles, then abandons it.
- Brand claims without evidence. The site tells you that the company is ethical, sustainable, premium, artisanal, innovative, etc., without showing you enough to make the claim meaningful.
Craft Chocolate Websites tend to overly rely on the same templates, mainly Shopify, repeatedly, and it is noticeable to visitors who are becoming numb to the sameness.
The problem with virtue and expertise
Craft chocolate has become remarkably good at talking about virtue, but considerably less accomplished at talking about the wider subjects that make chocolate genuinely interesting. Websites frequently focus on ethical sourcing, sustainability, transparency, natural ingredients and responsible production. These are important considerations, but when almost every maker presents the same values, they cease to distinguish one brand from another. The result is a category that can become very good at demonstrating that it is good, without necessarily giving people a reason to become interested in what the maker actually thinks.
This is particularly noticeable in the way makers present their expertise. A serious chocolate maker may understand roasting, particle size, conching, crystallisation, formulation, fermentation, cacao genetics, sensory perception, sourcing, machinery and food regulation in considerable depth. Yet a website may reduce all of that knowledge to a statement such as “We carefully roast and grind our beans to create delicious chocolate.”
The result is that many craft chocolate websites tell us what a maker does, but not necessarily what the maker knows, believes, questions or has discovered.
The problem with the abandoned blog
The same weakness appears in the editorial content of many e-commerce Craft Chocolate sites. A brand launches a journal or blog with enthusiasm, publishes a handful of predictable articles — perhaps an introduction to the company, a piece about the origins of cacao and something about the health benefits of dark chocolate — and then stops publishing.
This creates an unfortunate impression.
The strongest chocolate websites should not need to manufacture things to write about. They should have things they cannot stop thinking about.