The Joys of Being an Artisan Food Crafter: Hello Seasonal, Small Batch

When you get a bee in your bonnet to make something that represents the season and your values and your creative inspiration, well, you want to be able to take action.

I had the good fortune to tour the Theo Chocolate factory and learn where one of my favorite bean-to-bar chocolates gets made.

Most interestingly, their candy kitchen is truly tiny. More like the mom-and-pop candy factory I worked at during high school than what you’d expect from a popular nationwide chocolate bar maker.

Learn From This Theo Seasonal Collection

Theo Chocolate’s Honey Bee Confection Collection pretty much epitomizes the benefits of manufacturing food yourself. This gorgeous candy assortment, made in collaboration with the Urban Bee Company for Mother’s Day 2015, is so limited it’s not even on the Theo website. At the moment anyway!

With a co-packer, or contract manufacturer, the time and the cost of making a small run would, in many cases, make the whole seasonal, small batch idea impractical.

Why?

You’re usually tied to a co-packer’s schedule, their capacity and their manufacturing and packaging equipment.

You need to get them the packaging, run through the recipes and train the folks producing the foods (who, by the way, might be small batch artisans in their own right).

You could be bound to using certain ingredients.

Working from your home kitchen, a shared commercial kitchen or a production kitchen like Theo, and so many candy makers, have—your production possibilities are as broad as your imagination.

About this packaging: The beautiful colored box is actually a cardstock wrapper glued around a brown kraft box.

In other words, an efficient way to buy kraft boxes in large quantities while printing the small batch, seasonal flavors at lower quantities.

It’s the bees knees!

You can’t make small, limited batches like this with a co-packer (usually).

Need to decide how to manufacture your food or want to learn more? Get Good Food, Great Business or invest in a strategy session to help you set goals and take action.