Hello and good day!
Over the last three years, the most common complaint we've received is that our big, 1.1 pound bars of chocolate are hard to cut up and eat.
As you may be aware, we sell our chocolate in that format because it allows us to offer our absolute best price. The chocolate comes like that from our manufacturer in Switzerland.
We sold it in that exact format to restaurants and pastry chefs all over the world for more than a decade. If we don't have to remold and repackage the chocolate, we can give you a very excellent price.
And I have been fanatical about giving the best price.
However, our retail shops allow us to test things and see what people prefer. We can do something in a small run and see what happens. Whatever we do online necessarily requires planning for a much larger volume.
In the shops, we only have to service the small town of Issaquah, WA.
Online we have to be prepared to service the entire country. This makes the shops ideal for testing before we plan something on a larger scale.
Anyhow, several months back, we started testing out the idea of offering all three of our base chocolates, our 68% dark chocolate, and our two milk chocolates, a 36% and a 47%, in mini squares.
Check out the photo to see what that looks like.
This keeps you from having to hack away at a big 1.1 pound block. As an aside, the best way to eat the big blocks is to score and snap.Scrape a groove in the bar and then snap off a piece along the groove. That will keep you from having a lot of shavings that might go to waste.
At this time, we don't have any machines to help us with molding these mini-squares. We do it by hand and it is labor intensive. To charge for the labor, we sell a smaller quantity for the same price. Before I go any further, it just occurred to me that I am about to give the world's worst sales pitch.
Without further ado.
The big 1.1 pound block costs $19.95 on our website. With these mini-squares, you get 7 ounces for $9.95. This comes out to about 20% more expensive.
I bet everybody that this product would be dead on arrival in our shops. Why would anybody take the more expensive option?
I've never been more wrong.
These dark chocolate mini-squares are the second most popular item in our shops, and far, far more popular than the 1.1 pound blocks. They are fun and easy to eat and convenient.
And apparently people are willing to pay a premium for that. Good to know. 15 years in the business, and we're still learning. We'll be putting up mini-squares of the other chocolates online soon as well.
If you'd like to see the details of the dark chocolate mini-squares, they are online now. Just click through on the link below.
Thank you so much for your time. I hope that you have a truly blessed day!
