Gabriella Cugno

About

Gabriella Cugno

Official Chocolatier for Wonka, Gabriella is a young award-winning Chocolatier with a huge passion for chocolate, creativity, and incredible flavour.

Gabriella has been a Pastry chef and Chocolatier for 15 years working at high end restaurants, patisseries, chocolateries, and world renowned five-star-hotels. 

Gabriella has won various prestigious awards including UK & Ireland ‘Junior Chocolate Master’ and The Royal Academy of Culinary Arts ‘Young Pastry Chef of The Year’, which she now judges. 

Her work has taken her across the globe, from Europe, to the Far East, and the Caribbean where she teaches masterclasses, consults, caters for events, and has worked directly with cocoa farmers and cocoa producers to develop new chocolate recipes.

Most recently, Gabriella’s work has taken her to the Warner Bros Studios UK to be the Official Chocolatier for WONKA, where she designed and made all of the chocolates for the movie. 

Gabriella combines her artistic background with her work, to create intricate chocolates, sculptures, and incredible paintings made entirely out of chocolate. 

Her TV appearances include: BBC1’s Saturday Kitchen, James Martin’s Saturday Morning, US chat show The Drew Barrymore Show, Channel 5’s The Wonderful World of Chocolate, and has a feature on the “making of” section of the Wonka DVD.

Gabriella has also featured on multiple radio shows for BBC Radio Wales and BBC Radio 4 and has had articles / features written about her globally in various magazines including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Total Film, Entertainment Weekly, The Telegraph, Observer Magazine, ElleDecor, Radio Times, and OK! Magazine, to name a few.

As an entrepreneur, Gabriella runs her own successful high-end chocolate business where she makes chocolates seasonally, often selling out in a matter of hours. 

In between making chocolates for her business, Gabriella makes time to work on new creative projects with chocolate, previous examples include: travelling to India to make afternoon tea for a wedding where Beyonce performed; working with cocoa farmers and producers in Trinidad & Tobago; collaborating with Selfridges and WWF to design and make a 4-foot chocolate Easter egg, on which she hand-painted a Rainforest scene entirely of chocolate; hosting a baking event at Soho Farmhouse for WeWork; teaching a chocolate masterclass at Soho Farmhouse Food Fest; creating chocolates to pair with a new Moet Hennessy Tequila for its launch; and multiple masterclasses for the Wonka Movie’s publicity week with Warner Bros, plus many more.

Although Gabriella has a vast profile of intricate work, a passion of Gabriella’s is to showcase chocolate in a way that is approachable to everyone and inspire many people including young children, to work with and make chocolate.