When The Chocolate Delicacy sells gift baskets to corporate customers and other clients, the owners still insist on designing and assembling them themselves for the sake of quality.
The chocolatier, located on Main Street in East Greenwich, also creates and manufactures the sweets, including truffles, buttercrunch toffee, licorice and chocolate-dipped strawberries, that fill those baskets.
“I have some helpers who help create the components that go in them, but for quality-control I like to make sure everything is perfect,” said Marie Schaller, who has been in business with her husband, David, for 15 years.
Much of the gift-basket business comes from smaller local companies – mostly in East Greenwich, Warwick, Cranston and North Kingstown. But larger Providence businesses, and even a few from Massachusetts, add large orders, too, she said.
Perhaps it’s the care and precision in arranging those baskets that has led to an annual sales growth of about 5 percent – although now is a difficult time for all retailers, Marie said.
Much of the pair’s success can be attributed to the years they have spent honing their chocolate-making abilities, including building proprietary equipment.
In the early 1980s, Marie and David Schaller were working as business brokers in Boston, after attending Vassar College, when they decided to buy a Medford, Mass., ice cream store.
“There were a few things that we didn’t know then,” she said, “like how much location matters and how much capital you need even to open a small store.”
It was the “ice-cream chocolates” that most intrigued the Schallers. That led David Schaller to take a course at Rhode Island School of Design in candy making, so he “could maybe figure out how to make the chocolate stick to the ice cream,” Marie said.
From there, after the store closed, they moved back to East Greenwich, where they had grown up. They practiced in their kitchen – trying out their ideas with neighborhood taste tests – and eventually decided to ditch the ice cream and stick with chocolate.
At the time, leases on East Greenwich’s Main Street were cheap – and their building, with a leaky roof and crumbling façade, had an especially low rent – so they moved their business from their home during 1992. The street hadn’t become the high-end niche market that it is now, Schaller said. Then, it was “more gritty,” she said.
“When we opened, we really just wanted to do wholesale. We really didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into,” Marie said. “But I said, ‘If we’re on Main Street, they’re not going to like it if we’re just a manufacturer.’ ”
When it was opened in front of the candy-making backroom during 1992, the Schallers’ retail store almost immediately offered a more-promising future than their small wholesale store, because, Schaller said, “if you have a small wholesale operation, your margins aren’t that good.”
About five years ago they moved to a new location just down the street – 219 Main St. – in a building that they renovated. Of the approximately 2,500 square feet of space, about two-thirds is dedicated to manufacturing.
The store might be new, but much of the candy-making equipment has been in use for as long as 80 years. “They’re cast iron, and they work just great, there’s not a thing that goes wrong,” she said.
For their sweets, the Schallers have always used Merckens Chocolate, made in Mansfield, Mass.
“It’s a confectioners-quality chocolate,” Schaller said. “A lot of people don’t know Merckens, it’s not as widely known as Valrhona or Callebaut, but it’s very good chocolate.”
An emerging market for The Chocolate Delicacy is custom-molded chocolate. For about $250, a mold – from a few ounces to a few pounds – can be ordered through the company for most any design. There’s a Rhode Island mold, which Schaller designed, that makes a 1.5-pound chocolate bar that costs $20.
“People really like that. We’ve done some pretty successful ones for some big companies,” Schaller said. “I think it’s a real ‘wow’ piece that makes people really look when businesses give that nice piece of chocolate as a gift.”
During the busy Christmas holiday season, about 50 percent of Chocolate Delicacy’s business comes from shipping molds and gift baskets around the country. March, with Easter Sunday, is one of the shop’s busiest in-store retail periods. •
company profile
The Chocolate Delicacy
OWNERS: Marie and David Schaller
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Chocolatier
LOCATION: 219 Main St.
EMPLOYEES: 7
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 1992
ANNUAL SALES: WND
