Sue and Holly Newland, chocolatiers of Coco, Southsea, Marmion Road, Hampshire.

Sue and Holly Newland, a mother-daughter team of chocolatier-restaurateurs were accountants in their native Portsmouth ‘doing the books for restaurants, pubs’ and other businesses in the area. Now, the proud owners of Southsea’s Coco since April, 2006, they sell a vast array of hand-made chocolates, cakes, tarts, croissants (‘we start making them at 6.30 am’), the daytime café-shop taking off from day one.

‘We had queues of people out the door,’ Holly recalls, the novice chocolatiers handrolling truffles by the trayload in the kitchen to keep up with the demand. After a chocolate vision, they signed a deal on their Marmion Road premises, called it Coco, bought some stunning black chandeliers and attended a Barry Callebaut [the world’s top supplier of industrial chocolate] Swiss chocolate academy in London to ‘learn tempering, moulding’ and other skills attached to the art of chocolate-making.