Chocolate, an "adult pleasure"?

In 1881, La Vila Joiosa was a quiet, seafaring, and agricultural town on the Alicante coast: nearly 5,000 people lived there, and tourism had not yet transformed the area. But among the low houses, the fields, and the port's activity, there was an industry that was beginning to make itself known. It was that of chocolate. The bars that came out of it had very little in common with those that fill supermarket shelves today: it was homemade workshop chocolate, made in the back of houses, with grinding stones, rolling pins, small stoves, and the help of the whole family. Many chocolatiers combined that trade with farm work and sold the product by order or on trade routes that soon began to extend towards the southeastern peninsula and La Mancha. By the mid-19th century, the townspeople had discovered that chocolate could provide them with very interesting complementary income.One of these neighbors was Valeriano López Lloret. In 1881, he had also decided to set up his own workshop. He had named it Xocolates Valor. Today, more than 140 years later, that small family business has become one of the major Spanish brands in the sector: it has a turnover of over 220 million euros, exports to some sixty countries and is one of the benchmarks in the dark chocolate segment. But how did Valeriano López Lloret and his descendants manage to lead it to the 21st century?From the stone to the mill and the cart

At the end of the 19th century, Valeriano López Lloret started with a small, family-run, artisanal structure, in a context where chocolate was still produced on stone. With the succession of his son, Vicente López Soler, the business began to change scale: the mechanical mill gradually replaced the grinding stone and, later, the systems moved by animal traction gave way to diesel engines. That mechanization allowed for greater production and a finer, more regular chocolate.The change was also noticeable in distribution. The López family's chocolate no longer stayed only near Vila Joiosa: it reached towns in Cuenca and Toledo, such as El Pedernoso, Belmonte, Osa de la Vega, or Quintanar de la Orden. First it came by cart; then, with a Chevrolet van capable of carrying about 1,500 kilos. The business continued to be family-run, but it was beginning to resemble a small factory more than a domestic workshop.Electricity finally pushed this leap forward. In 1935, Valor already employed several workers, but the Civil War and the post-war period slowed the sector down: factories were subjected to production caps, raw material shortages, and government controls. Nevertheless, chocolate continued to gain weight in the local economy: according to the study The chocolate industry in Villajoyosa, in 1948 there were more than twenty companies linked to chocolate production, while other traditional industries, such as rope making, lost prominence.The assault on supermarkets

In the sixties, Valor made its first major industrial leap. It rented a plant in Torre del Pla and, shortly after, opened a new factory in Villajoyosa, where in 1964 it moved the machinery it had in its first premises. The new plant allowed it to produce more, modernize, and expand its range. It was also then that it began to differentiate itself by cocoa: at the end of the sixties, it launched Chocolate Puro, made without vegetable fats as a substitute for cocoa butter. With mass distribution gaining ground, Valor expanded its management team, created a network of representatives, and began to compete for a place on supermarket shelves.In the eighties and nineties, Valor began to go beyond tiles: it sold chocolates, opened its first chocolate shop, took its first steps in exporting, and in 1995, inaugurated a 22,000 square meter expansion to directly process cocoa beans. From the 2000s onwards, the big change was in the narrative: it modernized the logo, packaging, and advertising. With campaigns like Puro placer or Placer adulto, the brand tried to detach chocolate from children's consumption and present it as a more adult, intense, and everyday pleasure. It was a way of bringing a century-old brand into a market that no longer just bought chocolate for snacks, but also for gifts, for cooking, for self-care, or simply to treat oneself to a moment of pleasure.