A Message to Our Valued Customers

Dear Valued Customers,

We want to extend our heartfelt thanks for your custom and support over the last six years. It has been a pleasure to serve you and to be part of the St Marychurch business community.

It is with immense sadness that we confirm the rumours circulating regarding our closure. Our last day of trading will be Saturday, January 10th, before the lease expires at the end of January. We will have a stock sale in the weeks running up to this (please check Google for opening times).

I take tremendous pride in the fact that, against the backdrop of a moribund economy and falling retail sales, we actually increased our annual sales every year of trading, including exponential growth in our online revenue. I am also proud of the quality of our product, our near-5-star rating on Trustpilot and Google, our efforts to minimise plastic use, and our ethical sourcing of cocoa.

However, like many small businesses, we have been struggling with our cost base. Wages (30% higher), packaging costs (50% higher), energy costs (double), and non-cocoa ingredient costs (50% higher). We could have absorbed/passed on some of these costs on their own, but the biggest shock has been cocoa prices, which you may have seen in the news. To illustrate the magnitude of this, I have pasted a graph onto this note.

When we launched the business, cocoa traded at around $2,500 per tonne on the international markets, a level sustained for many years. In 2025, this peaked at $12,241 – a 500% increase. Although prices have fallen from these historic highs, this is only beginning to feed through to wholesale prices, which remain three times the level they were 18 months ago and are likely to remain elevated for an extended period, making the business unviable.

Thank you all again for your valued custom. We are heartened by the loyalty and kindness of our customers and wish you all the very best for 2026.