Back in Black

Back in Black

Chocolatier Norman Love kept a lid on expansion

during the boom years, preferring to spend his energies creating new products instead. It's paying off today.

The mood of the country is black, but Norman Love's latest dark-chocolate creations are anything but.

The Fort Myers chocolatier shelved plans to open lavish chocolate tasting rooms, choosing instead to focus on creating new mouth-watering sensations. His latest is called Black, dark-chocolate creations using single-origin cocoa beans from exotic locales such as Madagascar and Ecuador.

Love is hoping the higher-priced Black chocolates will help boost sales that are now running just 2% above last year. "I'm so nervous about the economy," says Love, who started the business nearly 10 years ago.

He has postponed opening chocolate-tasting salons in places such as Naples and Sarasota that would have cost $1 million each to open. Signs of the economic downturn last year made him cautious, despite an army of devoted fans. "We've worked so hard to build the business, why do we want to expose ourselves?" he says. "We decided to wait."

The temptation certainly was there. "We were in full gear to do new salons," he says. Currently, Norman Love Confections' tiny 700-square-foot store in a corner of his chocolate facility near the Fort Myers airport grosses $1.6 million annually (he declines to reveal the company's total revenues).

In retrospect, holding back was smart. There's evidence makers of luxury products are starting to feel the effect of lower consumer spending. And the sweet part is that Norman Love Confections is headed into a recession with zero debt.

Instead, Love poured his energy into creating new mouth-watering sensations. The former pastry chef for the Ritz-Carlton hotels has always prized quality over growth. "We won't cut quality; we'll work harder," Love says. "I don't want to be a monster chocolate manufacturer."

But Norman Love Confections isn't exactly a little pastry shop. Annually, the company churns out 1.5 million pieces of chocolate for Godiva, 500,000 pieces for Wegmans, the upscale grocery store, and 700,000 pieces through distributor Swiss Chalet.

Love is lining up new customers, too. Macy's will carry Norman Love chocolates this holiday season and so will Manhattan's upscale Food Emporium stores and inside New York's famous Pierre hotel. Love says his booth was mobbed at this year's Fancy Food Show in New York City. He's also close to signing a deal with a catalog company that will drop 5 million copies this winter.

All of this new business should help boost sales. And, Love says, "we haven't changed our prices in three years." That's despite the fact that commodity prices such as dairy products have risen substantially (don't even ask about hazelnuts) and FedEx tacked on a 30% fuel surcharge on every order. It now costs $36 to ship a $20 box of chocolates.

But Love will charge about 13% more for the Black chocolates he's just created. He's banking on two trends.

The first is the growing number of scientific studies that show health benefits of dark chocolates such as lowering blood pressure. In addition, each of five different flavors in the Black line is made with a cocoa bean that comes from a specific area of the world. This "single origin" trend is already prevalent in coffee and wines.

New products based on black chocolate are on the way, including hot-chocolate mix (throw out that old Swiss Miss), chocolate bars and Love Bites, tiny chocolates that will come in a small Altoid-like tin.

Despite the fact that he could double production to 10 million pieces at his current facility in Fort Myers, Love says he's still careful about growing too fast. "Employees are not machines," he says. "The size of this is controllable."

He used to shut down his Web site when orders overwhelmed him during the holidays, but he's improved the system so he doesn't have to do that. "It's our time to be busy," he says. "We beef up the staff."

-Jean Gruss