Same recipes. New labels. Now living in the right kitchen.
Something a little unusual is happening at Chefs this month. Fifty flavour concentrates from DarkStar, a name a lot of you will already know, have moved across to the Chefs Flavours store. Same liquid, same award-winning recipes, mostly the same names on the front of the bottle. What’s changed is where they live and how they’re dressed.
We wanted to explain why, because the answer says something interesting about how our customers actually use flavour concentrates in 2026.
A quick recap on how we got here
Back in March, we announced that Chefs would begin supplying our flavour concentrates and blended proprietary flavours solely to the food, bakery and beverage markets - you can read about that here. In the weeks that followed, we removed the vape-related products from chefsflavours.co.uk, and those products found their proper home over at darkstar.co.uk, where they remain available today with the fulfilment, rewards and promotions that the DarkStar side of the family is set up to run.
Four months on, that transition has settled in nicely. Chefs has become what it was always drifting towards: a food, bakery and beverage flavour house, with the customer base, the product neighbours and the conversations to match. Which brings us neatly to what’s happening this month.
The quiet half of the mailbag
For years, a meaningful chunk of the orders leaving our York facility have had nothing to do with vaping. Bakers ordering Strawberry Kiwi Bubblegum for buttercream. Small-batch soda makers buying Red Energy by the case. Chocolatiers, ice cream vans, sweet shops, mixologists, homebrewers, cake decorators, protein shake formulators, gelato counters, milkshake bars, the person who runs a cocktail pop-up at the weekend.
They’ve been quietly buying the same concentrates as everyone else and putting them into buttercream, syrups, sponge batter, ganache, sorbet base, gelato, kombucha, protein shakes, sugar syrups for cocktails and pretty much anything else that benefits from a really precise, really concentrated flavour hit.
The recipes are food-style flavours. They were always going to end up in food.
Why Chefs is the right home for them
Chefs Flavours is a food, bakery and beverage flavour house. That’s the whole shop. The categories, the recipes on the blog, the customer service inbox, the complementary products sitting next to the flavour bottles are all pointed at people making things to eat and drink.
That matters for three practical reasons.
The first is that you can build a whole recipe in one basket. When you’re testing a new gelato flavour or dialling in a signature cocktail syrup, you don’t just need the concentrate. You need something to carry it, something to sweeten it, sometimes something to colour it. Chefs is building stock of the neighbouring ingredients that turn a concentrate into a finished product, along with the tools and the guidance to use them properly. Buying the range of flavours originally available from DarkStar on the same platform means one delivery, one account, and one set of recommendations from a team who talk about food all day.
The second is that the recipes get better product descriptions. A concentrate written up for a baker reads very differently to one written up for a mixer. Over the coming weeks you’ll see every one of the fifty new arrivals rewritten with usage notes that make sense in a bowl, a saucepan, a shaker or an ice cream churn, rather than lifted from a legacy datasheet.
The third is that the reviews and community grow in the right direction. When a soap maker leaves a review about how a flavour behaves in cold process, that review is useful to the next soap maker. When a baker writes about drop rates in a Swiss meringue buttercream, that review teaches the next baker something. On a store built for food and drink, the community teaches itself.
What’s actually changed
If you’ve been buying DarkStar concentrates from DarkStar for years, here’s the short version.
Same flavour. These are the exact same concentrates, produced in the UK, to the same standard. Nothing about the liquid has changed.
Mostly the same names. A handful have been renamed to fit the Chefs range. Athena is now Strawberry Kiwi Bubblegum, Code Red is Red Energy, Banana Man is Banana Milkshake, TRPM is Guava Energy Drink, and Tony the Tizer is Tizer. Most of the fifty keep the name they’ve always had.
New labels. Cleaner, food-first, in the Chefs house style. If you’re used to spotting Athena on a shelf, look for Strawberry Kiwi Bubblegum in the new red livery.
The recipes originated at the same flavour house they always did. Chefs has simply become their proper home.
A launch discount, because moving day deserves one
Every one of the fifty new arrivals is 25% off during the launch window. If there’s a flavour you’ve been meaning to reorder, or one you’ve been curious about but never picked up, now is the moment.
Questions
If you’re wondering whether your favourite has moved, whether it’s been renamed, or whether it behaves the way you expect in a specific application, whether that’s bakery, confectionery, cocktail syrup, ice cream or anything else, the team is on info@chefsflavours.co.uk and genuinely enjoys nerding out about this stuff.
Welcome to the new arrivals. We’re glad they’re finally on the right shelf.
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