Kent chocolate business Cocoba unveils UK’s largest Easter egg
The Cocoba team prepare what is believed to be the UK's largest Easter Egg. Pic: Cocoba
An ambitious charity project from Kent-based confectionery business Cocoba has succeeded in what is believed to be the largest British Easter egg ever created, reports Neill Barston.
The business is well used to crafting oversized product ranges for customers around the county and further afield, but as its team explained, they wanted to get their teeth stuck into something that they could give back to the community.
Step forward its “Good Egg” project, with the company’s chocolatiers spending a total of five days forging the 7ft creation, weighing in at a heavyweight 300kg. It has which has a diameter of 4ft, and a chocolate shell of around 6cm thick.
As the team explained, just after Easter, it is set to be melted down to forge limited edition chocolate bars, with a portion of proceeds going towards local charities.
Notably, the team wanted to do something for communities at a time of challenging conditions amid heightened cost of living for many consumers – who will now have the chance to buy their very own piece of the mega egg once it is melted down into 3,000 bars.
According to the company, the five-day project involved five chocolatiers, and included some notable challenges, including cracking chocolate on its first attempt.
Consequently, the second time the egg was assembled into four pieces to ensure it would not break. Molten tempered chocolate was then used to seal them together. The egg was coated 7 times over, and then left for 24 hours to solidify
Cocoba is already the expert in creating giant Easter Eggs, famed its mega 2kg and 4kg Giant Easter Egg bestsellers. However, The Good Egg started with a yolk joke between colleagues whereby a product review challenged Cocoba to go heavier for 2025. Upon seeing the review, founder Darren Litton joked that the chocolatiers needed to start thinking bigger.
Darren Litton, founder of Cocoba, originally hails from Australia. He had been inspired to set up the business after recalling how impressive his grandfather’s home made hot chocolates were. In a bid to recreate them on moving to the UK, he went a step further in establishing an independent and innovation-focused confectionery company in 2012, which is now based at the Bluewater shopping centre.
He explained: “We are an independent, family run British business an are dedicated to innovation and challenging ourselves.
“We don’t take ourselves too seriously and as the experts in creating giant chocolate eggs, we all had great fun in bringing this 300kg mega egg to life.
“We are also passionate about making premium chocolate products with a difference, and it’s nice to be able to give something back to community by donating some of our profits. Particularly as we are aware of ongoing cost of living challenges and the rising price of chocolate”.
Sharing his enthusiasm for the project, Head chocolate engineer Lukasz Zajac relayed just how challenging the team’s feat had been this month.
Reflecting on the project, he added: “Air pressure, temperature and humidity, which varies from day to day, can all have an effect on the outcome when you’re working with chocolate. Chocolate also shrinks when it cools down and it was almost impossible to predict just how much when working with such a large quantity. It was quite technical. Once we had the giant mould, we then had to work out how to: bind the two halves together, stand the egg upright and lift the egg halves without creating any cracks. It took up to 5 of us at a time to carry the egg and to prop it up, we ended up using six, 2kg chocolate stands.
It’s definitely one of my biggest achievements as a chocolate engineer. Darren might think twice next time, before challenging us to go bigger and better for Easter!”
