Hotel Chocolat is to reopen up to five stores next week – for takeaways only – after restarting production at its UK factory to help top up dwindling supplies.

The specialist retailer and cafe operator said it will reopen first in Borough Market in London, serving hot chocolates, ice-creams and coffees, as it tests out new ways of working while protecting staff and customers from the spread of the coronavirus.

“It will help us to learn how to do things and control safe working,” said Angus Thirlwell, the chief executive and co-founder. Cafes are allowed to open for takeaways under the government’s high street lockdown rules but Thirlwell said the position of the retail areas in its chocolate shops was “a grey area” – because it is not strictly essential food – so that part of the business would be kept closed.

“We have decided to err on the side of caution, but it is important to get gradually open and get accessibility to chocolate increased,” he said.

He said the company had restarted production at its factory in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, last week. It has brought back from furlough about 80 staff, roughly a third of its factory workforce, to help resupply chocolate for the group as stocks had begun to run low. Thirlwell said the aim was to gradually bring back more staff over time, as long as social distancing measures such as perspex screens to divide staff on production lines and in the canteen continued to work well.

Hotel Chocolat closed all its stores and its factory last month, three weeks before Easter – the second biggest selling period for chocolate.

Since then sales have soared online – with analysts estimating trade has more than trebled. Overall trade is down significantly, however, as home deliveries have not been enough to offset the sales lost due to store closures.

Thirlwell said Hotel Chocolat had been able to sell the vast majority of its Easter stock online after a “chocolate version of Dunkirk” in which stock was collected from stores and sent to the warehouse to be sold online. Key workers were also offered a 50% discount on the luxury chocolates, and thousands of eggs were given away to NHS hospital staff, care homes and food banks as the group’s warehouse could not handle the volume.

Since shops closed, tens of thousands of new shoppers have signed up to Hotel Chocolat’s online service.

Thirlwell said Hotel Chocolat’s 125 stores and cafes remained important and he hoped to agree rent reductions with landlords and reopen them fully when allowed by the government. “We are talking to landlords to work out a mutually satisfying way of making them sustainable,” he said.

While no new stores are expected to open for a year, Thirlwell said: “People came back to mingle with each other even after thebubonic plague and we hope people will come back [now]. The purpose of our retail locations is about leisure: hot chocolate or ice-cream or chocolates you weren’t planning to buy. That’s not well replicated online.”