Meet Shropshire's chocolate champ

There may well be 151 days to Christmas, but Bridgnorth chocolatier Louis Barnett is already making plans.

And who can blame him. After all, in the past week London toy store Hamleys announced its festive lines. Louis doesn't see why he shouldn't plan ahead. "If you want to compete with the best, you have to be the best," he says.

Louis is one of the county's most enterprising and hard-working individuals. He runs his own company, Chokolit Ltd, from a business unit at Faraday Drive.

His mum and dad, Mary and Phil, are among his employees. He's received awards at the House of Lords, been appointed an ambassador for a national charity, is heavily involved in conservation work and has been given a lifelong scholarship by the world's biggest chocolate company.

He supplies Sainsbury's, delis and many independent stores with hundreds of thousands of chocolate bars and is in demand among Shropshire restaurateurs looking to dazzle customers with astounding petits fours.

Not bad, considering he's 17.

Louis is the classic example of triumph over adversity. He's a singularly driven individual, spurred on by the insidious effects of dyslexia and dyspraxia. Louis's formative years were bleak and he will forever by scarred by them. He was misunderstood by his contemporaries, chastened by his teachers and, at 11, Mary and Phil decided to take him out of school and teach him from home.

"I hated school," says Louis, the anger still burning in his eyes. After a gruelling round of SATS, and a couple of weeks of secondary school, Louis' hopes of a good education came to an end.

Mary and Phil instead sought a vocational education for him. "I've only ever loved two things," explains Louis: "Animals and chocolate."

His parents found him work at a falconry centre at the age of 11. He was expected to muck out the raptors each morning, from 6am. "It was hard work," he says, "but I loved it."

When Louis's mentor decided he'd mucked out for long enough, the feeling of achievement was transcendant. "That was a turning point for me," says Louis, who was instead asked to look after the centre's array of hawks, owls and other birds of prey. He observed them while nurturing them, forming close relationships. He also bought an owl of his own, Jewell, an African spotted eagle owl, which he owns to this day.

Louis's other passion was cooking. "I used to help my mum make mince pies," he says.

"He had a real talent for it, even back in those days," says Mary. His family encouraged his enthusiasm and his aunty asked him to bake her the best chocolate cake in the world, to celebrate her 50th birthday.

"I'd only ever made Victoria sponges using cocoa powder, up until then," says Louis. "I was daunted, but I did the job and from then, family and friends kept me inundated with orders."

Louis blossomed and came up with an innovative confectionary idea. "I started making individual chocolates but didn't have any packaging for them. So I decided to package them in individual boxes made from chocolate, which people could then eat. We got the name from my dad. Because of my dyslexia, I used to spell chocolate like this: Chokolit. My dad asked me what the word meant and I told him. So we decided it would be perfect as the name for the business."

The precocious 12-year-old took his chocolate box idea to Waitrose. He expected them to take months to assess it, but they called him straight back. His next port of call was Sainsbury's, who also loved the idea. Within months, Louis had committed himself to supplying a staggering 100,000 chocolate boxes to stores around the UK.

"We moved from the kitchen to the garage and, when that was too small, we moved to an industrial unit in Bridgnorth," he says. "I designed it all. I even got the mezzanine built. The best moment though, for me, was the day we delivered our first order to Waitrose. We pulled up outside the loading bay in our Peugeot, laden down with chocolates. Beside us were two HGVs. I knew, in that moment, that we'd be okay."

Louis went into overdrive. He upgraded his chocolate machinery to cope with ever-increasing demand. "I went from a 12-ounce machine, to a 15kg machine to a 200kg machine from Belgium." He secured a lifelong scholarship from Callebaut, the world's biggest chocolate company.

Orders continued to flood in and he expanded his range. He built on his passion for conservation and the natural world by launching his nine-product range of Bite Back bars, which generate funds for the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation, the National Georgraphic Society, the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, the Zoological Society of London and similar organisations. He also launched a campaign against palm oil, was among the first British businesses to eliminate hydrogenated fats from his products and was rewarded for his efforts with a Lord Carter Award for food excellence.

He was also nominated for a Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, was a finalist in the Enterprising Young Brits Awards and was appointed an ambassador for Shropshire Enterprise, the British Dyslexia Association and Make Your Mark, a British organisation that encourages entrepreneurship.

He met Gordon Brown and David Cameron last year at the Houses of Parliament, lecturing the present and likely future prime ministers on the problems caused by palm oil.

Though Louis endured a tortuous childhood, his adult years are set fair. If, 10 years from now, he's not overtaken companies like Green and Blacks and become a millionaire businessman, as well as a leading international conservationist, it will be a huge surprise.

But, for now, those things can wait. After all, Christmas is just around the corner.