Summerbird

Why it is renowned

The Copenhagen Tourism souvenir guide names Summerbird, with Anthon Berg and Peter Beier, among the Danish chocolate to take home.¹ A writer for The Chocolate Life, a site on fine chocolate, visited its counter in the Magasin food hall and noted the organic range, the bars up to 71 percent and the licorice chocolates.²

The house roasts its own cacao beans on Funen, on three restored roasting machines close to a hundred years old found in Italy, and has been wholly organic since 2014.³⁴ It won the diploma of the Danish Gastronomic Academy in 1996.⁴

The story

Summerbird began in 1986 with Lene and Sven Grønlykke, the restaurateurs behind Falsled Kro and Kong Hans, and their son Mikael, a trained chef.⁴ Unhappy with the marzipan they could buy, they made their own from Valencia almonds and a little sugar, and coated it in dark chocolate from a small French maker south of Lyon: the first Summerbird butterflies.⁴

The plain white boxes came in 1991.⁴ In 2000 the company outgrew the family's old dairy in Hårby and built on a hilltop in Assens above the Little Belt; in 2001 it opened a chocolate shop in Copenhagen, and in 2002 it launched its Grand Cru flødebolle on a marzipan base.⁴ The cacao roastery was finished in 2014, the year the company became Summerbird Organic, and the golden Amber chocolate followed in 2015.⁴ Summerbird has eleven shops of its own in Denmark.⁵

What to know it by

• Pure Amande⁴1986Marzipan butterflies coated in dark chocolate
• Grand Cru⁴2002Flødebolle on a marzipan base, coated in chocolate
• Raspberry Red⁴2005Roasted Spanish almonds in milk chocolate with raspberry
• Amber⁴2015Golden chocolate, neither white nor dark, in three versions