A Belgian couple starts again on the plateau north of Aix.

The Chocolaterie de Puyricard takes its name from a village on the plateau north of Aix-en-Provence, part of the city’s commune, and it still makes its chocolates there. Its founders were a Belgian couple, Marie-Anne and Jan-Guy Roelandts. In the company’s own account, they married in the Belgian Congo in 1958, and Jan-Guy asked his wife to learn the chocolate trade so the family would have the means to leave a country whose situation was growing unstable. The company says Marie-Anne soon moved away from the Belgian recipes she had been taught towards chocolates that were less fat and less sweet, and that in the 1960s her boxes became a gift diplomats gave their visitors.

Sources differ by a year on when the business began in France. The company dates its arrival in Puyricard to 1967, when, it says, the couple were forced to leave the Congo and turned an old building-materials factory on the plateau into their first workshop and first shop; it celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2017, and Le Journal des Entreprises also gave 1967 in 2023. Le Figaro reported in 2014 that the firm was founded in 1968 by Tanguy Roelandts’s parents on their return from the Congo, and French Wikipedia, citing La Provence’s 2008 report on the firm’s fortieth birthday, also gives 1968. We give both.

The company says the business grew through shops: a second in Marseille in 1970, one in Paris in 1978 and one in Aix-en-Provence in 1979. In 1975, it says, Marie-Anne added calissons, the almond-and-candied-melon sweet that is Aix’s emblem, to the range, along with chocolate truffles, and worked with her supplier Callebaut on a new couverture for a less sweet range. In 1988 Jan-Guy moved production to a larger unit at La Plantation, a landscaped park of several hectares in Puyricard, where the company says its workshops remain.

A family firm with an outside investor and a third generation.

Puyricard has stayed in the family. The company says Tanguy Roelandts, Marie-Anne and Jan-Guy’s son and a master chocolatier, took over the management in 1995. Le Figaro reported in December 2014 that in 2002 he and one of his sisters had bought 67% of the business from their parents in a leveraged buyout, and that in 2014, when that sister wanted to leave, he also bought out his brother’s small holding, leaving another sister with 5%. In the same move CM-CIC Capital Finance, the private-equity arm of the Crédit Mutuel-CIC group, put in €2 million in shares and convertible bonds for 20% of the capital, with its exit planned after seven years. The newspaper put revenue at €9.6 million for the year to August 2014, with exports at 2% of sales, and counted eighteen shops, three of them in Paris and the rest in the south between Menton and Toulouse.

The firm has also bought. La Provence reported in October 2013 that Puyricard had acquired, at the Marseille commercial court, the assets of the liquidated Aix pâtissier Riederer, including its brand, recipes and production site, saying it wanted to move into pastry and biscuits.

The third generation now leads it. Le Journal des Entreprises reported in October 2022 that Solène Roelandts, Tanguy’s daughter, had officially become president, succeeding her father after 27 years at the head of the company; it said she had joined as a seasonal worker and risen through sales and the shop network to managing director, and put the firm at 130 staff and €12.2 million of revenue in 2021, with plans that included a new presence in South Korea. In 2023 the same paper described a family business of 130 employees making about 120 tonnes of chocolate a year. The company says father and daughter now run it together, and its website counts 21 shops. The sources we checked do not report on CM-CIC’s stake since 2014.

The chocolate is shaped in Puyricard, but the company is open that it mostly buys its chocolate in. In a 2019 article on its website it said it “works chocolate” rather than making it, receiving it mainly in 5 kg blocks; that house blends such as one made by Barry Callebaut only for Puyricard are built to Tanguy Roelandts’s specification; and that its Pure Origine bars are made to his recipe from selected beans by the Drôme maker Morin or by Bonnat, with only small limited batches made bean-to-bar in house. It names Valrhona, Cémoi and Domori among its other suppliers.

Paris houses and a Provençal maker.

The seven brands in this group are all French chocolatiers: La Maison du Chocolat, Patrick Roger, Jean-Paul Hévin, Debauve & Gallais, Chapon, Richart and Puyricard. Most are names people meet first in a shop window rather than on a supermarket shelf, and their identities are built as much from boutiques, boxes and ribbons as from the chocolate inside.

France’s chocolate trade has a vocabulary of its own. A chocolatier is not always a chocolate maker: many houses buy couverture from specialist producers and put their craft into ganaches, pralinés and moulded or enrobed bonbons, while a growing number roast their own beans and make bars from bean to bar. Paris has long been the trade’s shop window, and the title Meilleur Ouvrier de France, awarded after a national competition, is one of the distinctions a chocolatier can carry on the door. Regional houses, often family-run, sell their own specialities alongside the chocolate.

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

Hand-made, and branded by a village.

Puyricard’s identity rests on the place and on the hand. The company says all its chocolates are made by hand at La Plantation, where it describes separate workshops for moulding, enrobing, truffles, fillings, ice cream, gold-leafed palets d’or and confectionery, and says about 70% of its chocolates are moulded and that it refuses automation for shelling. It says its calisson paste is prepared by hand rather than ground smooth by machine, and that the diamond-shaped sweets go in the oven only for about ten minutes, to set the royal icing. The firm joins the annual Bénédiction des calissons in Aix, and holds the French state’s Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant label, confirmed by Le Figaro in 2014; the company says it first received it in 2010, was renewed in 2015 and 2022, and was the first food company to be given it.

The look of the brand was redrawn for the fiftieth anniversary. The company says Solène Roelandts led the creation of a new visual identity for Puyricard for that occasion, and that the shop in Puyricard village, rebuilt in 2017 on the site of the first workshop, was the first to follow the new design and the new “charte Puyricard”. The sources we checked do not name a designer or describe the colours or typeface.

For a design guide, Puyricard shows how a regional chocolatier can make a village name and a local sweet carry a national brand, with the family’s story doing the rest. Compare Bonnat, the family maker in Voiron that makes chocolate for Puyricard’s single-origin bars, and Valrhona, the Rhône Valley couverture maker it names as a supplier. For this guide we use dark chocolate, lavender and almond with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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