Pluto is not in this box. It was demoted in 2006 and Martin's Chocolatier has chosen not to revisit that decision.
What you get instead is the Sun — generously reclassified as a bonus, so nobody feels cheated — plus every planet from Mercury to Neptune, each one a handmade Belgian truffle, each with its own filling, arranged in order of distance from whatever star your desk lamp is standing in for today.
Nine truffles, nine fillings
The flavor assignments are, on paper, arbitrary. In practice, someone thought about them. Mercury gets Chilli Cherry Ganache — the planet closest to a star, scorched and volatile, naturally. Mars, ruddy and slightly inhospitable, is Caramel Salt. Neptune, the farthest, the coldest, the one that takes 165 years to complete a single orbit: Toffee Caramel, slow and dark and stubborn. Whether Philip — the Westminster-trained chef who founded the company — consciously matched temperament to taste, or whether this is all pattern recognition working overtime on a box of chocolate, is unclear. The result is the same either way.
Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. It is also the largest chocolate in the box. Some details are not overthought.
The chocolates are made with 100% Belgian chocolate and finished by hand in Nottinghamshire. Chocolate, when treated as a serious material, always ends up hand-finished. The box arranges them in orbital order, which means you eat Mercury first or you eat Neptune first, depending on how you feel about narrative structure. There is a correct answer to this question but it isn't the kind of thing worth arguing about. What is worth noting: the Uranus truffle is Blueberry Ganache, and this has been quietly funny to everyone who has read the product description since at least 2019.
As a gift, this requires almost no explanation — you hand someone a scale model of the solar system made of chocolate and the thing speaks for itself. It works for the science teacher, the space obsessive, the person who owns a telescope they never use, and the child who spent three months memorizing planet facts and still brings up Pluto at dinner. It works equally well for anyone who simply likes a good truffle and doesn't need an astronomical reason to eat one.
Nine chocolates. Nine planets. Zero Pluto. One box that is, against all reasonable expectation, a completely sensible object to exist in the world. The solar system has always been stranger than a diagram lets on — which is exactly why it keeps showing up in unexpected places.
In short
A scale model of the solar system you can eat. Order well in advance of summer — Jupiter and Saturn have a documented tendency to merge in warm weather.
Martin's Chocolatier Luxury Chocolate Planets
Martin's Chocolatier · Nottinghamshire, UK · 107 g · abakcus.com