Yahoo News County Durham's very own handmade chocolate shop gearing up for their busiest Christmas yet
County Durham's very own chocolate factory is gearing up for the festive season after having their busiest and most successful year to date.
La Chocolatrice in Coxhoe was founded in 2019 by Zoe Rutter. Zoe lived in France, in a town which she described as "very traditional, like the town in the film Chocolat." She said there was a chocolate shop where the chocolate was made by hand. She said: "Seeing chocolate being made by hand in France and seeing the care, quality and the artistry that goes into it too, I wanted to bring that magic back to the UK and put that into our chocolate. And I think that is something that, in every decision I make, I keep in mind. 'Is it magical? Is it special?'"
After five years, La Chocolatrice is gearing up for what is expected to be their busiest Christmas to date, off the back of their biggest and most successful year to date. "Christmas is traditionally our busiest time, but this year has been outrageous. Last year we had a really quiet summer, and then it built towards Christmas. This year we went viral in February and it’s just been so busy, but it’s great. As a business owner that’s what you want so it’s been good, but it meant I came into Christmas like 'oh my god we’re here!'"
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The growth of the business is evident across social media over the past year, with Zoe saying the business' combined followers across all social media platforms rose from 15,000 to 80,000 this year. The company has also had a number of videos go viral this year, further helping with the growth.
Zoe started La Chocolatrice four months before the first lockdown with the idea to teach chocolate-making workshops. Those four months could not have gone any better: "I opened in Newcastle city centre, luckily we had the best four months in business that any new business could have hoped for. We were fully booked for workshops and we’d sold hundreds of gift vouchers and then when lockdown happened we were forced to close."
But Zoe found great success in the first lockdown. "We couldn’t teach chocolate-making anymore so I started selling chocolate online. I was a trained chocolatier, but until this point it had been a focus on the chocolate-making workshops. I started selling chocolate online, having no expectation. I set up an online shop quickly. The first week I made 60 bars of chocolate in my kitchen at home and bundled them into 20 treat boxes, and I wrote on Facebook that I would be opening an online shop Friday at seven o'clock. Within five minutes all 20 boxes had sold.
"So the following week I thought ‘right I’ve got nothing else to do I’ll make as much chocolate as I can.’ That week I made 240 bars, 80 boxes of chocolates, popped it online on Friday at seven o’clock, again with no expectation. I thought my 20 customers had shopped, and it sold out in three minutes. And it was like that for the rest of lockdown. We were making so much chocolate, it would sell out, it was just me in the business so my mum started packing the postal orders with me. I’d make all the chocolate, she’d pack all of the orders and it just got so, so busy. By the end of lockdown I’d gone from making ten bars of chocolate a week to 300 bars a day, all in my kitchen at home and that’s when I started to think 'what is the future of the business?'"
Zoe and her team of four, her mum who works "unofficially", two who are from Coxhoe and another who lives five minutes outside Coxhoe, now make 60 bars at a time, but in small batches. "Everything is handmade and that makes it really special. So it varies week to week how much we make. We use high quality ingredients, everything is handmade, we use traditional methods. Because it’s handmade, it means it goes through really intense quality control measures."
And by making 60 bars at a time, it allows Zoe and her team to make sure every bar is perfect. Zoe and her team try to source ingredients locally, and have collaborated with small businesses as Zoe believes supporting small and local businesses is extremely important, as they bring something magical that other big brands cannot. "The peanut butter we use in our peanut butter bar comes from a small business. It’s down in Devon but the woman makes the best peanut butter I’ve ever tasted, so we work really closely with her.
"The packaging, looks like plastic but it’s actually biodegradable and home compostable which is a really important focus for me. We’ve tried to eliminate as much single-use plastic as possible, which in the chocolate business is a challenge, but it’s really been a focus for me, so it’s been nice being able to do that. You can shop with bigger brands, huge brands and they haven’t done that, so the fact we can do that is a big achievement."
The business ships chocolate all over the UK, and have many customers in Edinburgh and London. Zoe also said people have come from different parts of the country and world to buy chocolate. "We had a lady drive from Berkshire recently to buy the chocolate from the shop, because she wanted to come in person. Another lady had flown over from Los Angeles to visit family down south, and she made a trip up here to buy our chocolate."
And although Zoe is constantly getting requests to ship abroad to other countries, she is reluctant to open that door currently. "I’m trying to manage the growth so we can keep up. One thing that is important to me is that when you order our chocolate, we try as much as we can to get it out the next day. We want it to be with you quickly, and it’s in great condition and it’s delicious. I don't want to compromise any of that, so I think we’ve grown quite a lot this year but we’re managing that growth which is nice."
The business now solely resides in Coxhoe, with the chocolate factory and shop in one location, and the chocolate-making workshop a small walk over the road. This was not the original plan, but Zoe said that changed after the first day of opening the shop. "As soon as we put the shop in Coxhoe there was a queue out of the door. We had the best opening Christmas and the support has really been there. I think people are quite proud to have it here. We’re the only hand-made chocolate company in the Durham area that does this."
Zoe believes that the two different aspects of the business make it an extremely interesting one. "The workshops just keep us busy. I’ve managed the workshops this year, there’s a little availability in the runup to Christmas, but I’m only releasing dates when I feel we can do them. I’ve put a lot of dates on for January, and people are booking them as Christmas presents, and it is a really lovely Christmas present. We do kids birthday parties so they make their own chocolate bar in like a Willy Wonka kind of experience. They decorate the packaging and then have hot chocolate. And then we make chocolate flakes with them and line the flakes up and say ‘3, 2, 1.' The kids run and then scoff chocolate! It’s really fun.
"We are doing seasonal workshops so at the moment we’re in the middle of advent calendar making, which is really fun. The guests will make 24 chocolates for their advent calendar."
And it is in these workshops that Zoe wants to show that chocolate and chocolate-making is special, and magical.
