Hello Next Batchers,
Here we are in June, with three months of crafting left before Pumpkin Spice Chocolate Season 2024, which, as we’ve seen from the past three years, is the kick-off to fall product lines and the holidays. Don’t blame me, I’m just the one keeping track of when the big craft makers start launching their bars each year.
TBH, I’m planning on a fall and holiday bar drops, but they are in the “what do I want to make?” stage. Just tiny seeds of ideas. To get us all started (just in case), here’s my task list.
In my case for Map, I’ll be gone part of August (teaching in-person Cacao Roasting and a Bean to Bar 101 Camp), so that’s something I’ll need to factor in. For you, this might be a vacation/time off.
By crafting, this means:
designing our bar/product ideas for fall and the holidays and how many different bars/products
test-batching
calculating how many bars/the number of each product needed
figuring out the amounts of the ingredients needed
ordering ingredients
designing and calculating the amount of packaging needed for the products
ordering the packaging
batchcrafting the products
creating a tempering/final steps of production plan for the products
When you are small or starting out this can be daunting; know you are in good company. It often sparks a notion of growth: more bars? what about more equipment? more moulds? more space? more of everything, except of course, the work it requires.
Chocolate biz growing pains start with an honest conversation about a sticky subject that is, I believe, actually one question hiding another: makers are asking me “How can I make money/make my craft business sustainable/grow my chocolate biz.” I’m hearing this a lot lately, more so than ever.
These questions come up often in my one-one mentoring sessions, which is exactly why I started offering them a few years ago. Each chocolate maker and their business is different.
This is the same question a sock knitting business or ice cream shop or house plant curator or dog-walking side-gig or bio-tech firm might ask.
In the way that those businesses are as unique as their founders, there’s not one answer. I also don’t think the answer that we makers in small batch chocolate hope exists (thinking we just haven’t found it yet) actually exists. It’s not as simple as we’d like it to be: it’s not a matter of which size melanger, how our kitchen is arranged, what packaging we choose, if we TikTok or YouTube or FB, if we go all plant-based or which origins we use.
It’s not even about creating a brand or telling our story.
You wear clothes, shoes, maybe a hat when it’s sunny or cold. You eat food and might even cook it, grow it yourself, or drive up and order it. You watch movies, read books or scroll an hour each night; maybe you have a pet or a dozen. You are team pineapple on pizza or team fruit only if it’s a skittle. You have dreams, quirks, shoes ten years old you still wear, a pile of laundry 24/7, a pristine cat fur-free apartment. You are 100% you, and that is to say, I, and all the rest of us making chocolate, are 100% us and not you.
The answer to “how do I make my chocolate successful” is no different than the sum of all your parts because the sum of who we are can’t really be untangled: it’s a big wonky ball of many different threads. And knots. And short strings we thought might lead somewhere, plus colors we’re embarrassed we ever thought we looked good wearing to our high school reunion.
HOW we tend our business is that same big ol ball. That ball determines our happiness which defines our idea of success. I am sure you have been there: you crafted ten bars and every single one sold out. It’s a beautiful feeling. It is also the same exact feeling in making 2000 bars and they all sold out. The exact same beautiful feeling. The difference isn’t just what happened between zero bars and ten or zero bars and 2000, i.e, how fast or slow we got there and what machines we used, but why we were there at zero in the first place.
If you are asking How can I make money/make my craft chocolate business sustainable/grow my chocolate biz and wondering if the answer will be found in the answer to the question “how many bars do I need to make” the answer is not there. How many bars we make is not why we are at zero: zero is why we’ve chosen to be making chocolate. The questions “how many bars do I need to make” is just basic math. Even it doesn’t start with 1000 bars x $14 = $14,000.
It all starts at zero: no bars. Zero is the place where we’ve had some crazy idea that chocolate is what we want or should or might do. We might not be sure why, or we might have a story that we tell that says why. “I saw cocoa beans and fell in love.” I was on vacation and saw a cacao tree and it changed my life.”
Still: that’s ground zero. We have a seed, but we haven’t planted it yet.
Ground zero is the most important place we will ever be but we often just step through the door and never give it much thought.
How do we know what we want? Some makers might say I want to pay the bills and pay myself. Others might say I want to quit my job at the engineering firm. There’s nothing wrong with wanting or needing chocolate to make money, it’s just that on paper it costs more to make it than the money that it brings in, so there’s that.
It helps to be clear about what we don’t want. If we look at the potted plants every day and dread watering them, we need to ask ourself why we have the potted plants. It’s really this simple.
What I’m getting at is that not every aspect of crafting chocolate flows as beautifully as we might hope. At zero we have no idea.
As small makers the expectation bar is set high. Unlike big batch craft with it's large staffs and dedicated idea teams, a small batch maker wears every hat: we're the innovators, the makers, the get-it-done'ers. When it's all flowing it is a beautiful thing, and even mistakes, equipment glitches, or those unforeseen wtf's can be bumps we clear easily, and just keep going.
Remember at the start when I said “one question hiding another”? In my experience (and yes, it’s IMHO) when craft chocolate makers begin to dwell solely on the How can I make money/make my craft business sustainable/grow my chocolate biz question, it’s because they have dug themselves into a creativity slump. They might, in truth, have been there from the get-go: just because someone has the equipment and the beans and is making bean to bar doesn’t mean they can or will create a sustainable business. It just means they are in business.
Money, as in having access to it, can and does, prop up many not-so-great businesses. This isn’t to say money is bad: it takes it to make it, plain and simple. But thinking a successful/sustainable/long-lived/joyful livelihood (however you define it) is based 100% on the money aspect is just not so.
Creativity is the oxygen of a thriving business. The other part of the thriving equation is luck, something we have absolutely no control or say-so over.
This is why hitting the creativity wall or having an idea fall flat is such a jolt. More than disappointing or merely time-consuming, these can make us want to throw in the towel, or worse, question what we have to offer. We think “I need to figure out how to do this business” when really, at ground zero we had no clue, just a creative thought “I’ll be a chocolate maker.”
At Map Chocolate I hit that wall with 300 pounds of Vietnam Tien Giang. Tien Giang is possibly the most viscous chocolate on the planet due to it's fiber/fat composition. Molding it was is a nightmare. But I loved the flavor, and so I after a few zillion frustrating attempts (repeating the same behavior and expecting a different result) I literally sat at my desk and cried. It was 2016, and craft chocolate meant mainly one thing: two-ingredient single origin dark.
It was not yet a time of exciting inclusion bars. What existed was pretty limited: nibs, salt, maybe a few nuts if the maker went really wild.
I had piles of delicious, albeit bubbly-backed bars. I despised those "defects" but could see no way forward. I was a failure! I sucked at chocolate! I couldn’t do what everyone else seemed to be doing! And then I asked myself: If I could make any bar in the world what would it be like?
Right back to zero: I’d never made that bar. I was free, free! to take a new step.
In my case, the answer was shortbread. The bar of my dreams would be creamy chocolate and with a side of shortbread. What that "side" would be required more thinking, mainly of the, wait, what? did I just think that? kind.
And then an inking of an idea appeared. It wouldn't be just any shortbread, but pink shortbread. And for some reason I thought it needed candied lemon (which I adore) and also dried plums. Say what?? a sticky as heck bar with handcrafted vegan shortbread, handcrafted candied lemon, and hand chopped plums (from my orchard that required drying) became a next level nightmare.
More crying. And a bit of fear about doing this my way, because, didn't that mean as wild or unique as I dreamed?
Yes, and no.
The bar I created became called Love Shack, and was my breakthrough bar: not only did I upset the chocolate "this is how it's done" apple cart with my inspired inclusions (in the final iteration I ditched the plums and went with just the pink shortbread and candied lemon) but I realized I really could (and should) do this my way.
As long as I gave myself that permission, and decided exactly what "my way" was going to mean.
There is only one rule for dealing with a creativity roadblock, and that is to reframe it.
Look at it in a new light, get up close and as personal as you dare (go forth small batch maker), and slather it with the chocolate you dream of making, not the chocolate you "think" you should be making.
An exercise:
(1) Make a list of ten bars you make or have made.
(2) after you have the list, choose 1.
(3) next to that bar design write down the opposite of that bar--a bar as far away from the original version as you can imagine. It still has to be a bar you'd want to eat, just focus on doing it wildly different.
(4) now make a list of the wild/crazy/out there ingredients or techniques and look at each one thoughtfully.
Then ask:
(5) What if I made this bar?
As Seth Godin writes,
"You can either turn your operation into a cross between McDonald's and Disney, selling the regular kind, pandering to the middle, putting everything in exactly the category they hoped for and challenging no expectations...
Or you can do the incredibly hard work of transgressing genres, challenging expectations and seeking out the few people who want to experience something that matters, instead of something that's merely safe."
We need to heed, and welcome, that inner Why do I keep watering these potted plants I never wanted wake up call. It’s pointing us to go back to zero, where it all began.
From that point, anything we dream for our chocolate business is possible.
Happy chocolate making,
Mackenzie
On today's new moon in Gemini, it's time to set intentions, and this article is a fantastic place to begin setting new chocolate bar intentions. Ever grateful for your words of wisdom Mackenzie.