New and approved

8/Feb/2012

Chocolatier Hayleigh Bazelya recalls her emotions on being welcomed into the Borough Market family.

Hayleigh Bazelya’s first act upon discovering that her application to bring Chocolicious to Borough Market had been successful was to call her husband and yelp down the phone. “I was so emotional,” she says, with a big grin still plastered over her face. “It was the best feeling.”

Hayleigh’s story is one of a happy accident followed by a remarkable demonstration of drive and self-sacrifice. It began when she stumbled into a temporary job covering maternity leave for a chocolate manufacturer. After the company went out of business she floated around other industries for a while, but found the call of cocoa too strong to resist. “I had never made chocolate, but I had sold it, and that’s half the battle – knowing what your customer wants and being able to talk about it. I just didn’t know how to make it, but I thought I must be able to learn,” she says. After persuading some of the top chocolatiers in the country to let her train with them, she began the arduous process of perfecting her own creations in the kitchen. Chocolicious was born.

As a Londoner, Hayleigh’s big dream was to open at Borough Market. “I already knew the market very well,” she says, “and I knew people who traded here.” Her first step, as for all aspiring traders, was to complete an application form. This form lays bare not just the nuts and bolts of an applicant’s business, but also their understanding of what the market stands for. “They want to know that you understand the place and that you know what good food is,” says Hayleigh. “They want to know that you appreciate quality.”

The market looks to identify a number of important traits in an applicant’s offering: quality, traceability, authenticity, seasonality, specialisation, honesty, hygiene, environmental responsibility and value for money. The latter of these is of particular importance, especially in the current economic climate. Borough Market exists to offer up the most inspirational fresh food you could hope to find, but it is also meant to be inclusive – a place that suits the requirements of its local community as well as cosmopolitan shoppers. As a result, there is a major emphasis within the application process on ensuring that potential stallholders are offering fair and inclusive pricing models.

“I try to make things that have a range of prices,” says Hayleigh. “If you’re feeling extravagant and you want loads of the very finest chocolate truffles, you can have that, but if you just want to buy some top quality raw chocolate and try making some truffles of your own, I can happily help you do that.”

This kind of expertise is an amazing resource for shoppers who are looking to economise – traders like Hayleigh are full of tips for how to create great things from very simple, raw ingredients. They can help customers understand how to use their products economically, or when to buy them at their best. By asking questions and shopping around, the clever cooks among Borough Market’s customers can become even cleverer shoppers.

For any potential new trader applying for a stall, the proof of the pudding is very much in the eating. This is where the Food Quality Panel enters the fray. The panel, which meets at Borough to taste the wares of aspiring traders – or of existing traders hoping to introduce new products – is drawn from among the finest chefs in the country, although their identity is shrouded in secrecy. “We don’t know who they are, so we can’t even bribe them in any way,” laughs Hayleigh.

Every truffle, every selection box and every chocolate bar was scrutinised. This was the first time that Hayleigh’s skills had ever been opened up to such a thorough critical appraisal, so she was delighted when the panel’s report was published passing all of her products. The next step involved health and safety checks at the Chocolicious kitchens in Wimbledon to ensure that all of the claims in her application could be fully verified. “They want to see where you’re working,” says Hayleigh. “They go through all your paperwork, your certificates, your kitchen. They check everything.”

For Hayleigh the fact that her work had been placed under such close scrutiny made the acceptance of her application especially sweet. “It was like getting five gold stars,” she beams. “They’re saying that you’re good enough for Borough Market, and if you’re good enough for them then you really are good. I knew that even if I never actually managed to sell anything and I had to leave after a month, I had gained the approval of Borough Market. That was enough for me, that on its own.

“Some markets, if you’re willing and you can pay the money you can pretty much just show up – they just want the rent. But when you buy from here, you know that you’re getting the finest ingredients sold by people who know what they’re doing.”