Chocolate isn’t just a treat; it’s a craft, an art form, and for Steve Russell and Giles Atwell, it’s a lifelong passion. As the founders of Russell & Atwell, a company dedicated to making fresh, luxury chocolates, they’ve spent years perfecting recipes that challenge the status quo. But their latest venture brings them to Weston-super-Mare. At Food Works South West, a state-of-the-art food innovation centre, they’ve found the missing link between small-scale artistry and large-scale production.
For Steve Russell, chocolate has always been a part of his life—even before he knew it. Born in Keynsham, overlooking the old Cadbury factory, and raised in Ashton Gate, Bristol, he developed an early fascination with food, taste, and texture. “As a kid, both my parents worked on Saturday mornings, and I’d have a babysitter. I had 50p to spend at the shop, and I worked my way through the chocolate counter. I became a chocolate snob by the age of seven,” he says.
But it wasn’t chocolate that first shaped Steve’s career. A trained scientist, he spent ten years at the University of Bristol’s Langford campus, researching environmentally friendly refrigeration before stumbling across a job advert that would change his life. “It was a three-month-old ad in New Scientist for a chocolate scientist at Mars. I was sitting in a dingy lab surrounded by turbine blades, and I thought, ‘I want to try that.’”
His first day at Mars in Slough was an eye-opener. “They dragged me into the tank farm—17 tanks, 70 tonnes of chocolate each—and said we needed to test samples. I pulled out a sample from the first tank, tasted it, and it was Galaxy. It was the loveliest thing I’d ever eaten. That was it—I was in.”
Meanwhile, Giles Atwell was living and breathing chocolate from the very start. His family had been in the chocolate business since 1921, when his grandfather founded Lesme, a company that played a major role in British confectionery history. “You won’t have heard of the name, but you’ve almost certainly eaten the chocolate,” Giles says.
Lesme was behind some of the UK’s most iconic chocolate treats, from the first Choc Ice in the 1920s to the launch of Maryland Cookies in 1956. The business grew into one of the largest bulk chocolate producers in the UK, supplying brands like Walls Ice Cream and Thorntons before being acquired by Barry Callebaut, the world’s biggest chocolate company.
While Steve was experimenting in chocolate labs, Giles was carving his own path in the industry. He joined Cadbury in 2002, working across commercial roles in Brazil, Singapore, and the UK, eventually becoming marketing director of a £500 million chocolate business.
It wasn’t until the two met at Godiva in Belgium that they decided to embark on their own journey. “We’d always made these incredible fresh chocolates in the lab, but every time we presented them to the business teams, we were told, ‘You can’t sell that because chocolate isn’t kept in the fridge.’ But it tasted incredible. So we thought—why don’t we just do it ourselves?”
Before launching Russell & Atwell, both Steve and Giles had front-row seats to one of the biggest shake-ups in British chocolate history—the 2010 Kraft takeover of Cadbury. The £11.5 billion deal was met with public outcry, with many fearing that the heritage and quality of Cadbury’s chocolate would be compromised under American ownership.
Giles, who had spent eight years at Cadbury before the takeover and six years in the newly merged business, had a unique perspective. “It’s a bit of a myth that the chocolate suddenly changed overnight. There were always small tweaks happening under the radar. But what Kraft didn’t manage well was the PR—they made promises, like keeping the Keynsham factory open, when there was never a chance of that happening. That really damaged trust.”
Steve, meanwhile, played a direct role in shaping one of the company’s most famous products: Cadbury Dairy Milk. “Not many people know this, but when I joined Cadbury, I didn’t actually like Dairy Milk—I was a Galaxy guy. The texture wasn’t quite right. If you get texture wrong, it doesn’t matter how good the taste is.”
His solution? A subtle but significant tweak. “We did blind taste tests with UK consumers, and they overwhelmingly preferred smoother chocolate. So I adjusted the particle size slightly, making Dairy Milk a bit softer. And it worked—people loved it. So under the radar, I changed it.”
These experiences reinforced their belief in quality over cost-cutting. As Giles puts it, “The cocoa price has gone through the roof, and big companies are always looking to optimise costs. But we wanted to do the opposite—bring quality back into chocolate.”
When launching Russell & Atwell, they faced a challenge: how to scale up without compromising quality. That’s where Food Works South West in Weston-super-Mare came in.
“For us, this place is perfect,” Steve says. “Most chocolate businesses either start too small, making batches in a home kitchen, or too big, needing a huge factory. Food Works bridges that gap—it has all the equipment of a professional food facility but lets us stay hands-on.”
Here, they can test new recipes, produce microbatches, and gather real-time customer feedback before committing to full-scale production. “We sell 100 pouches, see what people think, and if they love it, we go bigger,” Steve explains.
Simon Gregory, director of Food Works South West, sees their success as a testament to the facility’s value. “We designed Food Works to support innovation, and it’s fantastic to see businesses like Russell & Atwell thrive here. The fact that they’re coming from Birmingham shows how unique this place is.”
Russell & Atwell’s mission is simple: chocolate made properly, with fresh ingredients and no shortcuts. They use cream from the Cotswolds, honey from Salisbury Plain, and real fruit from Gloucester’s Artisan Kitchen. Unlike mass-market brands, they refuse to use palm oil, artificial flavours, or preservatives.
“We want people to taste the difference,” Giles says. “Chocolate should be about indulgence, not excess. You shouldn’t need a whole bar to feel satisfied—just two or three pieces of really good chocolate should be enough.”
With 90% of their business online, they’re tapping into a growing trend: foodies seeking high-quality, responsibly made treats. “Chocolate consumption in the UK has stayed the same—around 10–12kg per person per year—but people are making different choices. There’s a shift towards better-quality chocolate in smaller quantities.”
For Steve and Giles, Food Works South West is more than just a production space—it’s the launchpad for a chocolate revolution. “There’s nowhere else like it, especially in the chocolate world,” Steve says. “It’s helping us bring real chocolate, made the right way, to more people.”
And with their expertise, passion, and a little help from the South West, Russell & Atwell might just change the way we think about chocolate—one fresh, creamy bite at a time.
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