Given its high margins and compact size, craft chocolate, which also happens to be recession-proof, offers opportunities for specialty retailers, said Matt Caputo, an importer and distributor of over 60 craft chocolate brands for A Priori Specialty Foods, as well as the president and CEO of Caputo’s Market & Deli in Salt Lake City, Utah, yesterday at the Fancy Food Show. He presented the session Fine Chocolate Trends and Marketing Strategies for Specialty Food Retailers, held in partnership with the Fine Chocolate Industry Association.
“I came to chocolate through cheese,” Caputo said. “We do a good volume of cheese and charcuterie. We crack into a new wheel of parmesan almost daily, but we have days when chocolate sales are neck and neck with cheese.”
Caputo’s Market and Deli approaches chocolate sampling similarly to the way it offers samples of cheese, Caputo said. It sells 500 types of chocolate bars, some priced in the $20 range, and 200 bars are available for tasting.
“We need to be able to access them super quickly so we have our chocolate file alphabetized," he said, noting that it would ruin the moment if you offered someone a sample and then kept them waiting for five minutes while you searched for the bar in a back room.
“Handing someone a chocolate sample is a great way to open them up and get them talking,” he said. “We don’t care if they buy or not...it’s about creating an irreplaceable experience.”
Temperature is another consideration when merchandising and/or shipping chocolate, he said, as a temperature that is below 76 degrees must be maintained. Caputo shared that when his store’s air conditioning went out, over 10,000 of its chocolates “bloomed” from the heat.
Sampling offers a great way to share the stories of chocolate makers, many of whom go beyond the country or region where the cacao is sourced to reflect a sense of place that is connected to other ingredients that aren’t necessarily sourced from where the cacao comes from. He cited as an example the Naïve Forager Collection, which combines Lithuanian ingredients such as porcini mushrooms with chocolate.
"Brands that are tapping into sense of place are trending as outliers in the chocolate world,” he said.
In recognition of the trend, Harmon’s, a 19-store grocery chain located in Utah, has begun merchandising chocolate from the same area where it sells cheese, Caputo said. The retailer has even sent its cheese mongers to get educated on chocolate and things like terroir, taste of place, and good agriculture, so that they can speak knowledgably about them to shoppers.
"You can’t sell wine by just saying it’s from France, and the same is true of chocolate," he said.
Related: Valentine’s Day to Benefit From Record-Setting Confectionery Growth; Category Spotlight: Sweet Escape.
Photo: Loop Seven