Tommaso Grollero is the 2026 World Chocolate Master. In Antwerp, the 30-year-old chocolatier from Mondovì—who heads up production in the chocolate department at Da Vittorio—won the world title as well as the Best Taste and Best Design awards.
Behind him were China’s Lyu Haoran, who took silver and won the Best Bonbon and Best Share awards, and Japan’s Keita Koshimizu, who took bronze. The Best You award went to Canada’s Jérémy Monsel. We met him during the finals, and when talking about his sculpture, he told us: “I like the idea that it conveys simplicity and doesn’t seem too complex, even though there’s actually a lot going on behind the scenes.” This is Italy’s second victory in eight editions since 2005. The first came in 2013 with Davide Comaschi, one of the masters Grollero mentioned when we asked him how his approach to working with chocolate had changed. The competition, organized by Callebaut, brought together fifteen regional champions at the Handelsbeurs, the historic stock exchange of the Belgian city, on October 26 and 27, with a jury led by Amaury Guichon and the theme “Play & Taste.” There were four challenges: chocolates, a sculpture made entirely of chocolate weighing less than thirty kilograms, a dessert inspired by Antwerp, and a gift idea to share.
For Grollero, the starting point is engaging the person who tastes the dessert. “The most important part for me is the connection with the person eating the dessert. I enjoy making it, but I enjoy even more seeing the expressions on people’s faces when they discover it.” At the national competition, which he won at Sigep, he chose the labyrinth as his theme—a concept he partially revisited at the world championship as well. In Antwerp, however, the focus of the story was “the interplay between what you see and what you taste”. His sculpture, “The Invisible,” translates this idea into an optical illusion that changes depending on the viewing angle: a seemingly orderly figure breaks down into shapes and movement as you move around it, just like the perception of taste, which not everyone interprets in the same way. The work consists of forty-five elements, created using molds and then reworked by hand. To apply the spray paint and give the piece a sense of continuity, Grollero had to reassemble them and then separate them again, so as to reach even the surfaces that remained hidden.
The same principle is reflected in the chocolate, crafted using cocoa products processed in different ways. These include a cocoa wafer and a cremino made by infusing cocoa beans for two weeks to extract even their most bitter and astringent components. The fresh component features a chocolate ganache with a cocoa pulp jelly and a reduction of the same pulp, used to bring out its more acetic notes. Behind this choice lies a journey during which he visited a small plantation and tasted fresh cocoa beans “with flavors ranging from mango to banana to lime.” Bringing those flavors into a chocolate means making a part of the raw material—one that consumers know little about—perceptible. On the spread of chocolate culture, he observes: “In Italy, there are places that do a great job of showcasing it, but the cultural aspect is sorely lacking. It’s a process that’s changing, but it hasn’t yet reached the levels seen in many other countries.”
His professional career began with an internship at Selmi, continued with his meeting with Davide Comaschi, and led him to Da Vittorio, the Cerea family’s three-star restaurant, where Comaschi has been in charge of the chocolate production in the pastry kitchen since 2022. To prepare for the competition, Grollero worked for nine months alongside his team. In a workshop in Dalmine, he had the Antwerp competition station faithfully recreated, training with days that began shortly after 6:00 a.m. and ended in the evening, without a single day off. We asked him what he hoped to carry over from the competition to his daily work, and he spoke to us about the value of simplicity—a lesson to pass on to the young people who are still learning:“It’s an environment where people often try to complicate things because it seems to make them seem more important.”He, on the other hand, likes to understand and explain what lies behind the ingredients.
In explaining the reasons for the victory, Guichon highlighted the consistency, the balance of flavors, the technical precision, and the distinctive style—the very qualities that Grollero attributes to his mentors. His initial reaction to the verdict was that of someone who hadn’t expected it: “I still can’t believe it. Just being among the finalists was an extraordinary achievement in itself.”
