Anyone with a heart and soul loves chocolate, but you might have to go some way to find someone who loves it quite as much as Derek Shaw.

The self-titled “sweetie man” is an absolute addict, having spent decades in the chocolate business and still finding the time in his retirement to travel the globe advising some of the world’s biggest brands on how best to concoct their assortments of chocolate bars, fudge cubes, selection boxes and Easter eggs.

His business card states that he is a chocolate consultant, which sounds like an absolute dream job.

The 69-year-old’s chocolate empire started in Gravesend with a stall in the old Borough Market Hall, which is finally set to reopen on Saturday, December 3 after more than a year of refurbishment.

It is there where he met his wife Gloria, now 70, in the 1950s, whose love affair with sugary treats began even earlier.

She said: “I was born and bred in a sweet shop, Margerum’s of Canterbury. Then my parents moved to Gravesend.

“When we got married, mum and dad had a shop in Chatham, so we lived above it and ran the shop, or at least I did.”

It was then that Derek started working at his father-in-law’s chocolate factory in Stratford, east London, where he continued to work when he and Gloria moved back to Gravesend to raise their two children — James, 49, and Priscilla, 46.

They lived in Riverview Park and then Istead Rise before moving up to Liff, near Dundee, which is where they still live today.

Every year they come back to Gravesend to see friends and family and their latest visit saw them given a behind-the-scenes tour of the new market, which Derek is convinced will be a huge success. He said: “The best thing about it as an entrepreneur is that it’s going to give all these young businesses and start-up companies a chance and the wonderful open space they’re going to have in the middle.

“It’s weather-proof, so they can put on whatever they want without worrying about whether it’s going to rain, so it becomes not just a summer thing, but a 12 months of the year thing. I pray that it’s a big success.”

If any of the stall-holders who have secured a place in the new market enjoy anything close to the success Derek and Gloria did, they’ll have done very well indeed. Gloria’s family started in the market in 1879 and their sweet stall was a constant feature for more than 100 years.

“Great-grandad had the stall in the market and it was passed on to my grandad Charles and then my dad George, and eventually passed on to my brother, John,” said Gloria.

“Sweets were the last thing to come off ration in the 1950s, so people used to queue up for them. The stall was open for well over 100 years, until John died in 2005. I worked there from when I was eight until my second child was born in 1970.

“I left the family business altogether to bring the children up and then a tea stall became available. It was a dream I’d always had as a little girl to own what we called in those days a milk bar, or a tea stall, and the one in the market came up because the gentleman had died and the wife wanted to get rid of it. At the time my dad was still running the sweet stall and there were always arguments between us over KitKats, about whether they were a sweet or a biscuit.

“My dad said I shouldn’t be selling KitKats and there was a hell of a row between us. The market attendant couldn’t believe we were rowing over KitKats, but I wouldn’t give in and carried on selling them. My dad didn’t talk to me for weeks.”

Gloria ran the tea stall for 13 years, giving it up in 1981 ahead of the move to Scotland the following year. “It broke my heart to say goodbye to it,” she said.

The move came about after Derek was made an offer he could not refuse. Having started working for Gloria’s father, helping to make the sweets and subsequently pursuing a successful career in the industry in the capital, he was handed the chance to run the Keiller sweet factory in Dundee.

He said: “It was one of the biggest factories in Europe. We had sweets, marmalade and, butterscotch. It was a big step and we had to put a lot of thought into it. The family had to agree. We did chocolates, boiled sweets, toffees, we had 1,000 staff. I had a machine that would turn out 150 tonnes of wine gums a week. I had butterscotch machines that ran all year. It was a massive business. We used to brag that we provided every country in the world apart from Russia. It was just amazing.”

The factory shut down two decades ago but Derek has kept busy in his new role as a chocolate consultant. That said, he and Gloria, who will celebrate their golden wedding next year, still find time to come back to Gravesend — a town they still absolutely adore.

Derek said: “We love coming back to Gravesend. Even just walking down the high street everyone still knows us. We can’t walk along the main street without bumping into someone and talking.

"We love coming back to Gravesend. Even just walking down the high street everyone still knows us. We can’t walk along the main street without bumping into someone and talking" Derek Shaw

“I brag to my pals in Scotland that when I grew up one of my mates was Sikh, one was Hindu, one was Muslim, one was Jewish — I grew up in a multi-racial society way back in the 1950s.”

The Shaws’ view of Gravesend has become more positive as time has passed. Derek said: “In the ‘good old days’ you earned £4.50 a week, you couldn’t even afford to go out for a coffee. People see it with rose-tinted glasses.”

Gloria added: “The town seems more full. The bottom end of the high street always used to be empty. There were shops there but nobody in them, but we had a walk round town and all of the shops are working away. Gravesend’s got a lot of restaurants and coffee shops now and it brings people into town.”

With recent additions to the town centre’s line-up of shops and the impending arrival of the new market hall, the list of attractions is still growing longer. Let’s hope that by the time the Shaws return next year for their annual stay at the Clarendon Hotel, they’ll be just round the corner from one of the county’s most bustling markets.