A French chocolatier on South Molton Street.

Prestat was founded in London in 1902 by Antoine Dufour, a French chocolatier, whose first shop was on South Molton Street in Mayfair, according to Wikipedia and the company. The company tells a family origin story for its speciality: it says that in Chambéry, in December 1895, the brothers Louis and Antoine Dufour, short of ingredients for their Christmas desserts, mixed cream, vanilla and cocoa powder, dipped the mixture in melted chocolate and dusted it with cocoa — the chocolate truffle, in its account. Wikipedia repeats that the Dufour family created the truffle in Chambéry and says Antoine brought it to England with the first Prestat shop.

The name is not Dufour’s own. Wikipedia says he named the business after Pierre Prestat, his wife’s first cousin, and that some early packaging read “P. Prestat”; the company’s history page describes a 2007 letter from Pierre Prestat’s son Bernard, enclosing a family tree, and calls Pierre “a faraway cousin.” Dufour added shops at 405 Oxford Street and on St Swithin’s Lane in the City of London, Wikipedia says, and the difficulties of trading during the Second World War led to their closure. Antoine passed the business to his son Tony, who ran it until the late 1950s.

The company still sells what it describes as original recipes, among them a Napoleon III truffle that it says is named after the French emperor who lived in exile in England.

A playwright, warrants and a novel.

In 1959, the company says, Tony Dufour sold Prestat to the playwright Neville Croft and his wife Elizabeth, with financial backing from Neville’s older brother Maxwell; Wikipedia describes the buyers as the brothers Neville and Maxwell Croft. Under the Crofts, the company says, the shop became a favourite of actors and writers. The best-known is Roald Dahl, who made Prestat truffles central to the plot of his 1979 novel My Uncle Oswald.

Royal warrants followed, though sources differ on the details. Wikipedia says Prestat received warrants as purveyors of chocolates to Queen Elizabeth II in 1975 and to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother in 1999; the company’s own history attributes both the 1975 and the 1999 warrants to the Queen Mother. The company also says it has been granted a Royal Warrant of Appointment by King Charles III.

In 1980, the company says, Prestat was bought by Stanley S. Cohen, and it left South Molton Street for Princes Arcade in Piccadilly, still its flagship. In October 1998 it was bought by Bill Keeling and Nick Crean, the company says; Companies House records the two as persons with significant control of the holding company until March 2019. Wikipedia says The Economist named Prestat one of the world’s top three chocolate shops in 2003, and that it opened in the Chocolate Hall at Harrods in March 2009.

London’s chocolate houses.

The seven brands in this group are all British chocolate names: Thorntons, Green & Black’s, Montezuma’s, Divine Chocolate, Charbonnel et Walker, Prestat and Rococo Chocolates. Between them they cover most of the ways chocolate is sold in Britain, from the high street and the supermarket shelf to the small shop with a box tied in ribbon.

Some are high-street makers, known for shops in town centres and for the boxes people buy as presents at Easter and Christmas. Some built their names on ethics, putting organic farming, fair trade or the cocoa growers themselves at the centre of the story told on the wrapper. Others are London houses whose identity rests on age, address and patronage: shops in Mayfair and the West End, hand-finished truffles, and, in some cases, the royal warrant that allows a firm to display the royal arms on its packaging.

British chocolate brands have also changed hands often, and several of the best-known names now belong to larger groups at home or abroad. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now, where its cocoa comes from and where its chocolate is made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Kitty Arden’s colours, and new owners.

Prestat’s look is better documented than most. Wikipedia credits its packaging range to the designer and artist Kitty Arden, who in 2000 worked with the handbag designer Lulu Guinness on a limited-edition bag in the design of the Prestat shop; the company says Keeling and Crean brought her in, and that the red curtains of the Royal Box at the London Coliseum inspired her designs. The company describes its boxes as “vibrantly designed.”

Ownership has changed twice since 2019. In March of that year the Italian chocolate maker Domori, part of Riccardo Illy’s food group, bought Prestat, Reuters reported; Companies House records Domori as controlling the holding company from 13 March 2019. Under Domori, Prestat said its milk and dark chocolate was made with single-origin cacao from Côte d’Ivoire, sourced by “our sister company Domori,” and turned into truffles in “our London Chocolate Factory.” Then, on 6 February 2026, Prestat Group Ltd and Prestat Limited entered administration. The administrators’ report, filed at Companies House, cites three years of “sustained financial pressure arising from significant increases in the cost of high-quality cacao,” and says a sale of the shareholdings in the four group companies had been pursued through 2025. It describes the holding company as keeping brand management, product development and creative direction, with manufacturing carried out by a connected operating company. It records a pre-packaged sale of the business and assets on 9 February 2026 to L’Artisan du Chocolat Limited, whose registered office is a production site in Ashford, Kent. Prestat’s website was still trading in October 2026; where its chocolates are made after the sale is not stated in the sources we checked, and the website still describes the London factory and the Domori link.

For a design guide, Prestat shows how a packaging artist can give a heritage name a second identity: the warrants and the 1902 date supply the history, and the colour supplies the personality. Compare the Domori guide, the Italian maker that owned it from 2019 until the 2026 sale, and the Charbonnel et Walker guide, an older Bond Street house. For this guide we use royal purple, turquoise, shocking pink and cocoa with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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