We were just too busy,’ Rimi says. ‘But in 2017 we were approached again and thought, why not? I passed the audition and before I knew it was sent a date to go on air. It was very tense. You don’t meet the Dragons beforehand and I was standing there for over an hour fighting for my business and explaining what we do and trying to get some investment.’

Rich, oozing caramel cream filling. Delicious, crunchy wafer. Silky smooth caramel. Each bite of this bar is better than the last, it's that simple. If you’ve been looking for a top-tier vegan treat, then you can consider the search officially over. The M:lk® Choc Cre&m® Wafer Bar is a crunchy vegan wafer filled with a layer of fluffy hazelnut cream topped with our legendary M:lk® chocolate. Our Salted Caramel Cre&m® Wafer is a delicious crisp wafer with a layer of salted caramel cre&m® filling, covered in a caramel coating. I had never had any plans, or even thought, about upscaling,’ she says. ‘I really enjoyed actually meeting the people buying my product, and sharing the message myself. Then one day a friend asked: who would be your absolute ideal retailer? My answer was immediate – WholeFoods, in London. They represent everything that we’re about and we share their ethics.’ Caramel Flavour Filling (47,5%) (Sugar, Almond, Vegetable Fat: Sunflower, Caramelised Sugar, Cocoa Liquor, Dried Glucose Syrup, Emulsifier: Sunflower Lecithin, Natural Flavouring), Sugar, Vegetable Fat (Coconut Oil, Cocoa Butter, Sunflower Oil), Dried Glucose Syrup, Wheat Flour, Corn Starch, Caramelised Sugar, Defatted Cocoa Powder, Cocoa Liquor, Emulsifier (Sunflower Lecithin, Soya Lecithin), Potato Starch, Wheat Fibre, Salt, Natural Vanilla Flavouring, Colouring (Carrot Concentrate), Raising Agent: Sodium Bicarbonate. Rimi laughs, ‘Healthy is such a subjective word. All we do is claim vegan, we don’t claim healthy. We try not to be preachy; we just advocate what we do and show how you can still treat yourself within a vegan lifestyle.’The White Choc Cre&m® Wafer Bar is a crunchy vegan wafer loaded with a layer of hazelnut & almond cre&m® smothered in our epic vegan white chocolate and finished with a drizzle of our iconic M:lk® chocolate. Our Salted Caramel Cre&m® Wafer is a delicious crisp wafer with a layer of salted caramel cre&m® filling, covered in a caramel coating. We like to say we make our vegan chocolate bars for unvegan vegans – which means we don’t compromise on taste and texture and we make sure our vegan chocolate bars are decadent, indulgent, and irresistibly delicious. Essentially, the best out there!

Deborah Meaden offered to invest, but Rimi felt that the percentage of her business that Deborah wanted in return was simply too high. In 2019 Rimi moved away from her original offering and was focussing her efforts on a more luxurious product – chocolate. And vegan chocolate at that. The M:lk® Choc Cre&m® Wafer Bar is made of two crispy vegan wafers filled with a layer of fluffy vegan hazelnut cream topped with our legendary chocolate. Our White Choc Cre&m® Wafer Bar is a crunchy vegan wafer loaded with a layer of hazelnut & almond cre&m® smothered in our epic vegan white chocolate and finished with a drizzle of our iconic m:lk® chocolate.

The verdict: LoveRaw

We’ll admit, we did actually wonder, for a moment, whether the LoveRaw chocolate would in fact be raw, which we think is a fair assumption. If you were wondering too, the chocolate isn’t raw but it doesn’t have any artificial ingredients and preservatives in it, which we think is worth noting, if this is something you look for in your chocolate.

Having enjoyed more than a few of Rimi’s tasty treats, I can say the word vegan doesn’t really even need to come into it – they taste great and immediately satisfy a need to indulge, and while it’s a bonus to know they aren’t full of rubbish, that’s most definitely not the only reason to buy. Hazelnut and cocoa filling (50%) [ hazelnuts (47%), sugar, cocoa butter, emulsifier: sunflower lecithin, salt], sugar, vegetable fat (coconut), defatted cocoa powder, wheat flour, cocoa liquor, emulsifier: sunflower lecithin, corn starch, vegetable fibre, salt, raising agent: Sodium bicarbonate, malt barley extract, emulsifier: soya lecithin, vanillin. We have a mini kitchen in our offices in Altrincham and we do constant recipe development. First and foremost, it’s always about taste. To get the creamy, luxuriant taste and feel of milk chocolate, without the milk, we use nut butters – cashew nut, hazelnut, etc. We also really carefully source the cocoa that we use.’ I went immediately to 18-hour days,’ she says. ‘It was crazy; I had my mum join me, and my in-laws, we had pallets of ingredients being delivered outside the house – the neighbours must have wondered what on earth we were doing.’When it comes to variety, there’s a choice of chocolate bars, cream wafer bars, nutty chocolate balls and peanut butter cups. As we’ve mentioned, they do look very similar to a variety of already popular chocolate treats. And, if our taste buds (and memory, as we haven’t eaten milk chocolate in a while) aren’t deceiving us, they taste quite similar too. We went through quite a product evolution. We started with cold pressed raw bars, which in 2013 was really innovative, but the barriers to entry were too low and competitors started to enter the market. I felt that there was a real gap in the market for something luxurious, indulgent – and still vegan. We wanted to create a chocolate that was decadently enjoyable, where you felt like you were eating something naughty, and yet was vegan. I was thinking about all those 18-hour days I had spent making the bars and making so many sacrifices for the business and it just didn’t feel right, intuitively, to give away that percentage, even though probably we did need investment at that point.’