Twelve years ago the high street of the ancient East Sussex “Cinque Ports” town of Rye had a few charity shops, pet shops, cafes selling beans on toast, three actual banks, a library, a second-hand jewellery store, a toy soldiers shop and dress agencies… places that reflected and serviced a slow-moving retirement age population.
And then a hot chocolate shop called Knoops arrived a few doors up from Landgate, the hulking 14th-century stone castellated gateway to the town. It’s appearance felt as incongruous as an electric LimeBike arriving in a Roman battlefield.
Knoops really was quite peculiar. The white walls were covered in clipboards presenting the different percentage strengths of chocolate on offer. The 20% is for beginners – the 100% is wincingly strong. At the back was a device like a tuba, which presumably ground the chocolate. It was as if a hipster food scientist had crossed a laboratory with a minimalist coffee shop.
The staff were young, local and full of new business zeal, and they would offer you little cups of chocolate buttons to taste. The combination of this personal approach, the unusual name (“canoe” crossed with “oops”) and the great chocolate turned out to be very effective.
And then in 2019 this incongruous shop in a medieval tourist town suddenly launched another outlet in Clapham and just as I was wondering whether it could manage two outlets, its owner, Jens Knoops, sort of revealed himself.
A confident, healthy looking 40-something German with a love of chocolate, who originally came to the UK to study photography, he saw out the pandemic developing Knoops as an online retailer. When lockdown ended, he took off like a commercial thoroughbred.
There are now 15 Knoops across the UK, including Bath, Brighton, Cambridge, Chester and Edinburgh, each with the same sort of periodic table wall charts – which Knoops attributes to the German in him – covered in chocolate percentages, the drinks served up by bright young staff selling the cocoa bean dream.
It feels a little like the start of Naked smoothies all those years ago before the graduate founders sold their fun health drinks company to Coca Cola. Presumably with the rate of growth Knoops are enjoying, a sell-off to Starbucks or some other conglomerate will eventually come.
Jens Knoops hasn’t done this on his own though. As with many of the best Europe-wide, pre-Brexit startups, it’s been a combination of British and European minds. One day, his corporate guru simply walked into his shop. William Gordon-Harris, a serial entrepreneur, was in the Rye outlet one day pondering the uniqueness of the brand and realised he could use his corporate skills to make the hot chocolate business even hotter.
Rye now has a magazine called The Ryezine which has featured Knoops alongside profiles of artists, architects, and local vineyards. Some of the more unusual outlets, like Soldiers of Rye, a shop specialising in militaria, have been replaced by outlets selling pricey French workwear jackets and vintage French furniture. The 14th-century French raiders who often harassed Rye would no doubt have been pleased with this development.
The success of Knoops has another, darker irony. Just round the coast in Dover, Brexit has made trade heading in and out of the UK that much harder.
A short drive from Rye is the Sevington Inland Border Facility, a vast, horrendous lorry park, where goods are checked as they enter and leave the country. Meanwhile, a fully-fledged European is racing across the country creating a groundbreaking new drinks business, and leaving hordes of satisfied customers in his wake.
Pleasingly, the original Knoops is still there. It’s a very Anglo-European success – a German founder, Dutch name and British customers.
James Brown is an author and former magazine editor
