Anyone who sees him today, and his team, producing handmade chocolates and selling them in central points of Funchal, both in the store in the Mercado dos Lavradores and in the first store he had and still keeps, near the Cathedral, will not guess that it all started in the kitchen of a traditional restaurant called “A Estrela”, ten years ago.
Parque Empresarial da Ribeira Brava, Pavilhão 17
9350-104 Boa Morte
+351 291 644 620 /
uaucacau.chocolate@gmail.com
www.uaucacau.com
Stores in Funchal
Rua da Queimada de Baixo, 11
Mercado dos Lavradores, Loja 19
Introduced by
Júlio Pereira, Kampo
Texto de Tiago Pais
Fotografias de Tiago Pais
If some took advantage of the pandemic to learn how to bake bread or play an instrument, Tony Fernandes — like Willy Wonka — took the opportunity to design a chocolate factory tailored to his needs. And not only did he design it, but saw it born in a few months: at the end of 2020, he moved to his company's new premises, in the Parque Empresarial da Ribeira Brava.
Anyone who sees him today, and his team, producing handmade chocolates and selling them in central points of Funchal, both in the store in the Mercado dos Lavradores and in the first store he had and still keeps, near the Cathedral, will not guess that it all started in the kitchen of a traditional restaurant called “A Estrela”, ten years ago.
“I had been working with the master chocolatier Carlos Valente for about four years, but he was fed up. I grabbed my wife and I thought it was now or never, so we took the restaurant”, he says. Problem: the chocolates were successful but the rest of the offer not really. "I started getting into debt, I had to close the restaurant."
He asked for a year to pay his debts and transferred the chocolate workshop home. He looked for local partners to add value to the bonbons — Madeira wine, agricultural rum, local fruit pulp — and the business grew. One day, a local businessman and entrepreneur, Maurício Marques, offered to help Tony make a project to ask for non-refundable support and thus expand the business. So it was, Tony got this support and opened his first store, on Rua da Queimada.
Since then, it has been, the reference chocolatier in Madeira. Without letting himself sleep in the shadow of this recognition. “I'm always training. I've done about 12, between Spain, Belgium and Italy”, he says.
In the new factory, Tony works with employees who had no specific training. They are his bets, some with complicated life histories, but which have become, however, indispensable. “They are machines”, he praises, as they reproduce some of the more than 50 references of bonbons that are part of the Uau Cacau portfolio. One of them, the passion fruit, won the gold medal at the 2014 National Chocolate Contest.
