A chocolate trader who started making his own.

Camille Bloch began in Bern. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland says its founder, Camille Bloch (1891–1970), trained in commerce at Chocolat Tobler, worked as a sales representative and from 1926 traded chocolate on his own account. In 1929 he founded a company with its own production in Bern, taking over workers and machines from the dissolved firm of August and Walter Lindt, the dictionary says. The company dates its founding to the same year, under the name “Chocolats et Bonbons fins Camille Bloch.”

The start was hard. Bloch ignored the industry’s price agreements and, according to the dictionary, was the first to sell chocolate bars wrapped in cellophane to department stores; the Depression then forced him to stop production until 1932. In 1935 he moved to Courtelary, in the Bernese Jura, where the crisis in the watch industry had left workers available, and the business became Chocolats Camille Bloch SA. Its chocolate has been made there ever since.

The company’s timeline records an expansion of production between 1961 and 1964 and, in 1971, a crèche for employees’ children on site. The firm has also documented itself: the dictionary cites a company publication of 1974, and English Wikipedia notes a book marking its 75th anniversary in 2004.

Ragusa, Torino and a hazelnut habit.

The brand rests on two products. Ragusa came in 1942, when cocoa was scarce in wartime: the company says Bloch made a paste of ground hazelnuts, added whole nuts, poured it into flat moulds, coated it on both sides with a thin layer of chocolate and cut it into 50-gram bars. He named it after Ragusa, the old name of Dubrovnik in Croatia, where he had spent a holiday, partly because the name worked in all of Switzerland’s languages, the company says. English Wikipedia quotes the chief executive as saying Ragusa accounts for more than half of sales.

Torino, a bar with an almond and hazelnut praline filling, followed as a tablet in 1948 and as a 50-gram bar in the 1950s, according to the company’s timeline, which also lists a kirsch liqueur chocolate in 1955. Later variations include Torino Noir in 2003, Ragusa Noir in 2008, and Ragusa Blond and Torino Blond in 2014. Ragusa is poured into moulds and Torino is extruded, the company explains.

The company publishes its own account of where its ingredients come from. It says its cocoa beans come from Peru, traceable to the farmer, and travel by ship to Amsterdam and then by road to Courtelary, where they are roasted, ground and conched. It uses about 600 tonnes of hazelnuts a year — almost as much as cocoa — mostly from Turkey, with almonds from the United States, and in 2021 it began planting its own hazelnut trees in Georgia. Its website gives annual output as 3,500 tonnes on one page and 3,700 on another, of which about a fifth is exported, and a staff of 180.

The range has widened beyond the two bars. The company says it made the first “Mousse” chocolate, an airy filling in a crisp shell, in 2005, and English Wikipedia says it has sold sugar-coated hazelnuts and almonds under the So Nuts name since 2020. It describes itself as a member of the Swiss Platform for Sustainable Cocoa and says the Courtelary plant uses regional wood-chip heating, solar panels and certified hydroelectric power.

Swiss chocolate and its makers.

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.

Three generations in Courtelary.

Camille Bloch is still a family company. After the founder’s death in 1970 his son Rolf Bloch ran it; Rolf’s son Daniel Bloch took over operations in 1997, the company says — 1998 in the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland — and succeeded his father as chairman of the board in 2005. The company website presents Daniel Bloch as chief executive in the third generation, and English Wikipedia names his brother Stéphane Bloch as a board member. The company remains registered in Courtelary.

In October 2017 it opened new production and logistics space alongside a visitor centre with a 4D cinema, tours and workshops; English Wikipedia reports more than 100,000 visitors in the first year, citing Daniel Bloch. Ragusa’s advertising has long leaned on Swiss sport: the company lists sponsorship of the Biel ice-hockey club from 1980, of the skier Lara Gut from 2011 and, most recently, of the downhill racer Franjo von Allmen; it also names the Olympic champion Heini Hemmi as a partner in the 1970s. The same timeline counts television spots from 1965, a first colour spot in 1970, a Ragusa hot-air balloon in 1988 and an “Unverbesserlich” (incorrigible) campaign in 2018 — a word that returns in the visitor centre, where the 4D film casts the viewer as an incorrigible hazelnut. Its Ragusa timeline records packaging redesigns in 1945, 1960, 1989, 2007 and 2015. No logo designer, typeface or official colour is documented.

For a design guide, Camille Bloch shows how a single wartime bar can carry a family company for generations. Compare Felchlin, another long-established Swiss chocolate house, and Läderach, a family-owned Swiss chocolatier. For this guide we use roast brown, cocoa ink and praline cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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