A pâtissier who decided to make his own chocolate.

Bernachon is a family chocolatier and pâtissier in Lyon, and one of the few French chocolate shops that makes its chocolate from the cocoa bean. The company dates its story to 1953, when Maurice Bernachon opened his first shop in the city; a 2019 radio feature by Bernard Thomasson for franceinfo put it slightly differently, saying that in 1953 he bought the Lyon pâtisserie where he had been working. French and English Wikipedia describe him as the son of a railway signalman who began an apprenticeship with a pâtissier in Pont-de-Beauvoisin at the age of twelve.

What set him apart was a decision about raw material. Rather than buy ready-made couverture, Bernachon bought cocoa beans and roasted, crushed, blended and conched them himself. French Wikipedia calls him one of the rare French chocolatiers to do so, and franceinfo said in 2019 that the recipe, the machines and the shop’s location in Lyon had not changed in more than sixty years. The company today describes its chocolate as bean to bar.

Bernachon has stayed in the family for three generations. In 1969 Maurice’s son Jean-Jacques Bernachon married Françoise Bocuse, daughter of the Lyon chef Paul Bocuse; the company says Jean-Jacques had joined Bocuse’s kitchen brigade in 1968, after six months at the cocoa firm Bensdorp in Amsterdam. The company dates his takeover of the family business to 1990, while Wikipedia says Maurice retired in 1997, so we give both. The company says the third generation — Stéphanie, Philippe and Candice Bernachon, the children of Jean-Jacques and Françoise — took over in 2010, and Le Progrès reported in April 2021 that Philippe Bernachon ran the chocolaterie with his sisters Stéphanie and Candice. The sources we checked record no sale of the business and no outside owner.

A cake for the Élysée, a blend for the shop.

The house’s best-known creation is a cake. On 25 February 1975, President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing presented Paul Bocuse with the Légion d’honneur, and Bocuse cooked the lunch that followed at the Élysée Palace with other leading chefs of the day. French Wikipedia and the menu archive MenuStory credit Maurice Bernachon with the dessert, and Wikipedia says the chocolate cake was named the “Président” in honour of Giscard d’Estaing. The company says Bernachon and Bocuse wanted to arrive at the Élysée with something entirely original, and that the first Président, made for twenty people, weighed three kilograms.

Descriptions of the recipe vary between sources. Le Progrès wrote in 2021 that it includes a chocolate sponge, a gianduja ganache and white bigarreau cherries, and reported that spring that the cake was off sale until September because the house’s stock of the cherries, which are harvested only in mid-June, had run out. Philippe Bernachon told the paper it was only the second time that had happened since 1975. The company marked the cake’s fiftieth anniversary in 2025.

The chocolate itself is a blend. In 2019 franceinfo described it as a mix of South American beans from Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador. The company’s English homepage now lists origins including Madagascar, Grenada, Java, Peru, Jamaica, São Tomé, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela’s Chuao and Rio Caribe, and variously says it uses beans from ten countries and a blend of eleven varieties. It says the beans arrive in sacks of 60 to 90 kilograms and are roasted at 140 to 150°C for about thirty minutes, winnowed, mixed with sugar, Bourbon vanilla pods and cocoa butter, refined and then conched for around 48 hours, before being cast into large blocks of couverture from which its chocolatiers work. The company says its chocolates are made in Lyon, and it runs tours of the workshop.

Swiss and German houses, and a Lyon maker.

The seven brands in this group all make chocolate, and they come from three countries: Läderach, Sprüngli, Camille Bloch and Villars from Switzerland, Hachez and Rausch from Germany, and Bernachon from France. Six are Swiss and German chocolate houses; the seventh is a Lyon chocolatier that makes its chocolate from the bean in its own workshop.

Swiss and German chocolate brands tend to reach the public through the bar, the box and the shop window, and their identities are often built on a family name, a home town and a long list of dates. A bean-to-bar chocolatier works the other way round: it buys cocoa beans, roasts and grinds them itself and sells the result over its own counter, so its identity rests on the maker, the recipe and the place where the chocolate is made. Some firms combine the two, running shops while selling bars far beyond them.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now, where its beans come from and where its chocolate is made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Palets d’Or, a tea room and a Paris shop.

On the shop counter, Bernachon’s signature is the Palet d’Or, which the company lists among its specialities alongside 150-gram bars, chocolate bonbons and a spread called Bernachoc. In a tribute to Jean-Jacques Bernachon published by Lyon People in 2011, the writer and broadcaster Bernard Pivot recalled his first Bernachon palet d’or, and wrote that he had invited Maurice Bernachon onto his television programme Apostrophes on 20 December 1985 for La passion du chocolat, the book written by Maurice and Jean-Jacques Bernachon and published by Flammarion that year. A second book, Le chocolat selon Bernachon by Stéphane Deligeorges, followed from Glénat in 2009.

The company says it opened a restaurant and tea room, Bernachon Passion, beside the Lyon shop in 1989, and a chocolate-only shop in the 6th arrondissement of Paris on 22 October 2019; it says the Paris shop, of about thirty square metres, was fitted out by the Lyon agency Richard Bagur. It also says the Lyon shop was renovated in 2021, that the house received the French state’s Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant label in 2017, and that it has replaced the plastic film on its bars with bio-sourced, compostable cellulose film.

For a design guide, Bernachon shows how a brand can rest on a family name, a single shop and one famous cake rather than on a published visual system. Compare Pralus, a Roanne pâtissier who also makes his own chocolate, and Bonnat, another family chocolate maker in the Rhône-Alpes region. For this guide we use roasted-cocoa brown, palet gold and cream with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bernachon’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.