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Start Local is focused on helping businesses and non-profits in and around Chester County, Pennsylvania, connect and grow together. Our aim is to bring together the many folks that make up our wonderful community in greater Philadelphia to share and learn from each other.
The Start Local podcast features interviews with business and nonprofit leaders from in and around Chester County, Pennsylvania.
The Southern Chester County Chamber of Commerce partners with the Start Local podcast to promote trade, commerce, industry, and sustainable economic development while supporting a diverse, growing marketplace.
Learn more at the Southern Chester County Chamber of Commerce website, sccc.com.
Hey, hey, welcome to the Start Local Podcast. I'm Liam Dempsey, and I am here with Erik Gudmundson.
Erik, how are you today?
I am just rotating through the air like a rotisserie chicken, essentially, because I am loving the scent of where I am.
And where are you, good sir?
I am at Neuchatel Chocolates on the factory floor, loving every minute of it.
It is amazing. It smells wonderful here.
You can't hear him. You can't see him. But in the background is Joe Casabona making sure that we record this podcast today. He's doing all the work for us today. Here at the Start Local podcast, Joe's the one that helps us consistently create content that you folks are telling us you like. And Joe can certainly help you do the same for your business or nonprofit. So get in touch with Joe if you'd like some help from his expert guidance.
And I'm just grateful to have Joe here because he's looking after all the technical details while we're here munching on chocolate.
So it's wonderful.
Nom, nom, nom.
Yeah, we are already three or four pieces in and it's been fantastic.
We are so excited to welcome Albert Lauber to the Start Local podcast.
And in a sense, he's welcoming us because we are here at his chocolate factory.
Albert is a critically acclaimed chocolatier based here in Oxford, Pennsylvania.
He is the founder and owner of Neuchatel Chocolates from where we are recording today.
Albert's business involvement with chocolate flows beyond the Swiss chocolates he makes here at Neuchatel.
And we're going to get into all of that very shortly.
Albert, welcome to the show, and thank you for hosting us today.
Thank you.
Albert, it's such a pleasure to be here.
And I haven't spent my entire wallet full of money yet, but I will before the day is through.
Thank you.
Yeah, I feel like I should just go leave my credit card behind the shop window there and have them just charge us for when we leave.
This is amazing.
I'm pretty sure Albert has mine on file.
I'm a regular here.
So it's so good.
For folks out there listening, we are on the floor.
You might hear some noise in the background.
We wish you could smell the chocolate that we are smelling,
but there are wonderful chocolates all around us.
And if you hear any noise in the background,
that's just the business of making chocolate.
Albert, I'm going to jump into the first question here.
You're a chocolatier.
You make chocolate.
Your career and business are all about chocolate.
Setting aside our feelings of jealousy that you get to work with chocolate all day,
tell us about your workday or workweek.
What does it look like?
What keeps you busy all day long?
Well, usually in the morning, I prepare, make sure all the machines are full.
And if I didn't fill them the previous day, I then start preparing for fillings.
This morning, for example, I first was running cocoa beans, cleaning cocoa beans, ready to be roasted tonight.
And then during the day, the other thing I do today, I made the caramels.
I have this soft caramel, and yeah, that's all in the machine.
I already started to test it, so I'm running with it afterwards.
Yeah, we've already had some of those chocolates with caramel.
Those were delicious.
Well, part of this podcast is we're talking about business.
So we have to get a couple of business questions, you know, interspersed here between all the fun questions.
And my understanding is you have three companies or brands of chocolate through which you make or sell chocolate.
Neuchatel Chocolates is your Oxford-based Swiss chocolate shop.
You work with Stella, a chocolate maker in Switzerland.
And you have ChocoEve, where you make your own chocolate right here in Chester County.
So we'll explore each of these businesses and do course.
But to start, give us an overview of why and how you're involved with three different chocolate companies.
Well, so to start with Chocolat Stella, they are making my chocolate in Switzerland.
So basically, those buckets there, that's how I get my chocolate.
Milk, dark, bite I make myself because I like it better.
And I also distribute the Stella brand to stores.
Stella is a, right now, woman-owned company.
Even my dad did business with them.
And, yeah, I just mostly, I do the shows with them.
And I distribute their brand.
They do a lot of chocolate private label.
As a matter of fact, in Switzerland,
you're looking for Stella chocolate, you don't find it pretty much. Very rare because it's
all private label or mostly private label. And you might find a chocolate in somebody
else's assortment with their name on it, but it's still made by Stella.
And tell us about ChocoEve.
ChocoEve is that I started, well, my daughter's name is Eve, so that's how that came about.
I love it. I love it.
But that's really the cocoa beans from the Philippines that I process from the bean until the finished pour.
Wow.
Or, you know, the drops.
Right now I'm making those drops that have calamansi, which is the tiny little lemon that they have in the Philippines.
And that's been a total success.
I'm going to have to add that to my shopping list, Erik.
So let's start with Neuchatel.
It's where we are today.
You import Swiss chocolate in 25-kilogram blocks.
You just pointed to the buckets that we saw.
But then here, you work your magic to create your own truffles, which are amazing.
So the question is this.
How do you decide what flavors or ingredients to include in your truffles or other chocolate creation?
Is it more science? Is it more art?
Or you just follow whatever is selling over at the till?
Well, we have basic truffles that we make.
I'm not supposed to make more than 20, but I'm always at 25.
But we have basic truffles that are always available,
and that's like the plain milk, plain dark, and so on.
But when it comes to flavors, I look, I get all those science magazines,
food science and all that, and they always publish a list of flavors.
And that's how I kind of derive some ideas,
Because I appreciate the old people, but, you know, the young people, I got to get them too.
So I got to go with what the young people like.
So, for example, pepper, I mean, you know, chili pepper and like the calamansi, that's all flavors are the new flavors of the year, you know.
So I definitely go that direction too.
And you mentioned the ChocoEve brand earlier, where you import your beans from all over the world, including the Philippines, like you said, but also Tanzania, Togo, and South AmErika.
So then you roast the beans before you make them into the chocolate here.
To help us understand how beans grown in different regions of the world affect the flavor of the chocolate, because it seems like it'd be easier to just grab all the beans from one spot.
But since you're taking them from multiple locations, I'm curious why.
Well, that used to be that you just take whatever you can get.
And there is one thing we will not do if there is any risk of child labor,
we will not touch those beans.
So Ghana, for example, we don't use that anymore.
And all the places that we get beans from, we actually know where they're grown.
We know who is growing them.
So just to make sure.
And with the Philippines, you never have to worry about child labor.
I mean, it's family, yeah, maybe, but they don't have slaves.
And California is an issue because of the cardamom.
So any cocoa beans, especially Ghana, South AmErika, even Venezuela,
they're going to have cardamom.
Stella's Chocolate is a business that you mentioned and you're involved with.
And they, I was reading, they date back to 1928.
So they're coming up on 100 years of making chocolate.
And you shared with us earlier in this conversation that you buy your chocolate from them.
And you do quite a bit of work with them around importing their chocolates and the like.
But I wonder if you could walk us through that in a little bit more detail.
How are you supporting their business?
And how are they supporting yours?
Yeah, originally, when I started here, I used to buy the chocolate from the Geneva company.
Chocolat Favager, just because I was familiar with them and they were friends.
But then, unfortunately, the son at 64, he was not doing well.
Died shortly off and the father was still running the factory.
And then they switched owners and we did not feel that was a good situation.
So we went to Stella because we knew them.
The father, we already know him.
And my parents, well, my father used to deal with them.
And so, yeah, I went to their office and we started talking.
And over the years, because they make my chocolate the way I want it, my recipe.
And, you know, they're good about it.
And we know them well.
It's now woman-owned, and they're very progressive as far as, you know, clean beans and clean, you know, we do organic and all that.
But I don't label myself organic because I would need to be certified here, and I don't need to spend 5,000 bucks for that.
Well, we appreciate that your chocolate factory here is indeed just that, a factory for making chocolate.
And so looking around, I see machines built generations ago in Switzerland. I see cocoa bean roasters. I see enormous liquid chocolate mixers. And the smell, the aroma here is just one that I can't even begin to describe. I don't have the words that are sufficiently magnificent.
But how about you tell us a little bit more, walk us around the factory floor.
Tell us about some of the more unique machines that are have to make these artisan bites of chocolate.
Yeah, the one machine that produces our chocolate covered potato chips,
those are machines that are modified so that they can run the chips.
And they're pretty good.
Oh, they're more than pretty good.
They're excellent.
Yeah, those machines are modified.
And then I have other ones that are from,
I've got three Swiss machines in here
that just are the workhorses.
And they're still the old quality Swiss machine
that I had for 30 years.
They're still running better than the new one.
But we can produce a lot of chocolate.
If we have to, we can do a little.
I have a friend who was in despair,
and he called me at 6 o'clock,
and he says, Albert, I have to have 30,000 chocolates by tomorrow.
Can you do that for me?
My machine isn't working,
and I'm like, tomorrow night, I'll be good.
And we produce them and we wrap them within 24 hours.
So that's what we can do if we have to.
30,000 chocolates.
There's a number to get your head around.
I'm just imagining like an I Love Lucy type scene, Liam,
where you and I are standing at the end of that assembly line
trying to keep up with 30,000 chocolates.
And that would give me a run for my money.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm suddenly feeling very bad for all our listeners who are not here eating this chocolate and smelling it.
Yeah, the thing is, I'm not afraid of, you know, machines.
I have a machine that was built in Japan right after World War II.
And that thing runs 400, he wraps 400 truffles per minute, if I have to.
I don't run it that fast.
And, you know, it's all mechanical.
It's unbelievable.
Since I got that machine, I never had to touch it.
It just runs.
It's great.
Wow.
Wow.
Albert, you shared with us that you import cocoa beans from the Philippines,
and you've talked a little bit why.
But in my pre-conversation before we started recording today,
you made it clear that your relationship with the Philippine cocoa farmers
goes deeper than just customer and vendor kind of thing.
You regularly travel to the Philippines to deliver education and training about growing cocoa beans.
So the question is, how did you first get interested even in Philippine cocoa farmers?
And how do you work with them? How do you support them?
Well, I have a group of farmers which are on one island that we pretty much tell them,
whatever cocoa beans you grow, I will buy them.
So we're going to go in November quickly on a buying mission.
We have told the farmers that we're coming,
and we pay them more than the normal price because they need to live.
Because the cocoa being commercially sold,
they go for the cheapest, you know,
they give them whatever they feel like, pretty much.
With old Wall Street being involved in the cocoa trade,
the farmers still don't get more.
And that's why the Africans are saying, okay, let the Chinese get the gold and we give out the cocoa because they still don't get paid properly.
So we don't want that to happen there.
And yeah, we support them however we can.
Well, your truffles here are some of the best that we have ever tasted.
In fact, I'm going to go and say they are the best I've ever tasted, period.
I agree.
Tell us about some of the flavors that might stretch customers or take them in new directions.
And I want to kind of go in a different direction than the question that Liam asked earlier.
So maybe what flavors can you only get here at Neuschatel?
Actually, I don't know.
There's always somebody out there that makes something.
But we did Honeysuckle last year.
We do seasonal now because I can't have, really, more than 30 is too much.
I heard you say 20 earlier.
25, 30.
We're up to 30.
It ends up on the upper end.
So we just make it seasonal.
For example, the cinnamon truffles, it's only here in Christmas.
Of course, we have to do pumpkin pie.
Yes, you do.
I agree with that.
So yeah, we kind of follow what the trends are.
And like I said, we need to, the special flavors we do because of the young people, they expect something different.
Caramel is always a good seller, no matter what.
But yeah, we do sometimes the chili pepper.
We do black tea, green tea, which is put in chocolate bars, things like that.
But I don't know many people that do that.
Incredible.
Because I can do small volumes.
We know that you've trained as a pastry chef and a chocolatier in your native Switzerland.
Before we hit record today, you were telling me that you started your apprenticeship at age 16.
Yep.
But you've been here in Oxford for 35 years, Oxford, Pennsylvania.
Why Oxford?
Well, I started going abroad.
I was in Asia for a while when I was done with all the school.
And then I ended up in Canada.
Well, I was first in the Middle East, and then I ended back in Canada.
And the company there wanted me to come and straighten out a New York store.
And then I looked around and I saw that nobody imports chocolate.
Well, everybody imports chocolate ready made from Europe.
But you have the time delay that makes the truffles two weeks older.
So I figured nobody's doing this.
We're taking the chocolate from Europe, from Switzerland specifically.
We make it here and we'll always be fresher.
So because a truffle is like a pastry, it's got to be fresh.
I'm wondering about the size of your business operations.
This is an impressive factory that we're here standing in right now.
And you mentioned, you know, your capacity.
You can scale up and scale down to do very small batches or very large batches as you see fit.
But I'm wondering if, you know, you're the lead chocolatier, I would assume.
Is there a sous chocolatier, if that's even a word?
And how many people work for you here?
Well, it's very seasonal.
Right now, I always have Gabby, that is my right hand.
And then I have some ladies that work part-time in the store,
and then we work with college or school kids.
And, you know, we end up being like, I think I have 10 people on my payroll right now.
And then we scale up for the holidays.
But the production, I handle so far.
Yeah, I'll give a big shout-out to Gabby.
She was instrumental in getting this organized and just wonderful to deal with.
Yeah, she is. She's good.
Gabby, if you're listening to this particular episode, thank you.
We appreciate you.
Albert, for many years, you've served as a judge at the Chester County Community Foundation's Sweet Charity event.
For those listening, that is a big fundraiser for the Chester County Community Foundation,
where all sorts of different dessert makers,
everything from cupcake specialists to chocolate dessert folks
to restaurants to culinary schools, you name it.
If they make delicious desserts,
they'll come to this event and it has a competition to it.
And Albert, you've been a judge of that for years.
So tell us about your experience for that.
Yeah, it's pretty interesting.
And they have, I think, three categories.
The people that attend, they have the judges.
And I think it's one more.
I don't know who or what that is.
But anyways, it's pretty interesting to see what they come up with.
But it's also good for me because I see what people are going to judge versus me.
So that gives me an idea of what is popular still, you know.
It's a great fundraiser for the Chester.
or friend raiser, I should say, friend raiser for the Chester County Community Foundation.
As I say this, as the new chair of the Chester County Community Foundation.
So Albert, thank you for participating in that over the years.
And I will tell our audience members that one of the benefits of attending,
Albert's often kind enough to leave us with a little dessert tasting, a little to-go chocolate for everyone.
In case you haven't had enough of the dessert eating contest, you can go and sample some of his chocolate on the way home.
Personally, I always save it for the next day because it is worthy of its own day, I find.
But next question here.
Do you work with any local farmers or producers when you make your chocolate and truffles?
So I'm curious if you could tell us about some of the local suppliers you use
and how you decide which local products are the right fit for your chocolate.
Well, it has to be consistent.
So, for example, the cream from Maple Leaf Dairy.
I know those people.
They're good people.
And their quality is great.
And I have a guy that makes them bother.
And he has Jersey cows.
And a really good bother, you know, higher foot content, just the way it's in Europe.
And we have one specialty that we only do this time of the year.
It's the chocolate covered blackberries.
And they're local.
There's a guy that used to own it.
He lived up to 95.
great friend of mine, and his daughter is now continuing the blackberries.
And whenever she has berries, brings them here and we cover them and we sell them.
Wow.
When is blackberry season?
Now.
Right now, yep.
Outstanding.
Save some room in that belly, Liam.
Save some room.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
I think when I was here the last time, you talked about a honey maker.
Yes.
Do you make honey, honey grower, honey producer?
Can you tell us a little bit about the honey producer?
Yeah, this guy is in Chester Springs.
And yeah, I always used honey to a point,
but then he was interested in the product,
so he brings me his honey.
And then we do the honey bee,
which is the bee has a dot of honey in it.
And that's really modern technology as its best.
We have a piece of chocolate,
little dot of honey like the size of a bee. The bee doesn't get harmed. And I'll tell you from
personal experience the ratio of chocolate to honey on that that you have done the mathematical
perfection to figure out exactly what that needs to be. It's absolutely a delight to let it
melt in your mouth. But yeah he also does those honey with the bourbon barrels and
I use honey.
No matter what, I use a lot of honey because I don't want to use corn syrup a lot.
You know, so I replace a lot of the corn syrup with honey everywhere, even in the truffles, just because it's better.
Albert, can you share the name of the honey maker that you use?
Yeah, it's Extract and Box in Chester Springs.
That is excellent. Extract and Box.
Folks listening will be sure to link to their business over on our show notes page at startlocal.co.
At startlocal.co.
Albert, this is a sales question for you.
What's your best-selling chocolate of all time?
And a related question then is how long do you keep a new chocolate creation on the shelf in the store before you decide it's not going to sell?
Well, if I make something new and nobody wants it, yeah, then we just, they become seconds.
And I admit, the first place I go in your shop when I walk in, I always make the left, and I look at your second shelf, and I fill my basket, and then I look to see what's new, and I grab that, so yeah.
So I'm going to interject because Joe's first time at New Chateau is here today.
And when Joe and I walked into the shop before we were recording,
Joe and I go in, we stand in the middle, and I say,
Joe, I'm going to direct your attention to right over here where the seconds are
because this is the best value for money, and they're outstanding.
You just load up on them.
So what is the best-selling chocolate then of all time if it's not the seconds?
No, it's definitely the plain milk and plain dark chocolate truffles and the caramels.
Those are the, by far.
And of course, I didn't really want to do toffee, but now I do.
That's right in there.
Caramel and toffee and so on.
In a previous conversation, you shared how chocolatiers tend to support one another,
even though you're essentially competitors.
I always like to call that coopetition.
So share an example of how you have helped a competitor or how one has helped you.
And maybe tell us why you think that chocolatiers are supportive of each other.
I believe, and that might be my only, I might have the only belief, that the market is big enough for everybody.
So if somebody else needs help, no problem.
And, you know, one example is my people in Baltimore, my friends, their machine broke down a week before Valentine's.
And I didn't have time to go and help them fix it.
And I said, just come here.
After five o'clock, we'll run your stuff.
So they came here.
I had to program a little bit differently because their project is a little bit different.
And we ran from when they got here like 5-ish to 10, 11 o'clock.
And they packed their stuff back in the car and they did the rest in their shop.
Or the other guy that needed, his machine was down too.
Machines are great until they don't work.
And he needed 30,000 truffles by the next day.
And, you know, we got it done.
So I'm curious, and this is a descriptive question here, but I'm curious.
When businesses help out each other, it's not uncommon to send a thank you gift of chocolates, nice chocolates.
What do chocolatiers get each other when they help each other out?
Frankly, they just pay their bill.
They're older more than welcome to eat anything they want here, but you know.
So you've shared previously that you read trade magazines, flavor magazines.
You're always trying to pay attention to new flavors that are coming.
But once you have a few ideas, tell me a little bit about how you go about testing to see how much honeysuckle is the right amount.
What's the right volume of honey?
How much tea do I put into that?
Well, I just have an idea.
I try it out.
If it doesn't work, seconds.
But, you know, we're pretty, there's no other choice.
We have to try the chocolate.
So, you know, I will typically try it if it sounds good to me.
You know, pretty much that's how it goes.
And we know that we can buy your chocolate here, as we've done many times in Oxford.
And you can also buy it online.
And we've also seen it at the market at Liberty Place in Kennett Square.
There's a lovely display case there for Neuchatel.
So two questions for you.
Where else can local Chester County buyers find your chocolate?
And how do you decide where you want your chocolates to be sold?
Well, the main issue is if we let somebody retail it, we need to have control.
So in Kennett, we can go anytime.
We can exchange the chocolate.
If I see one truffle was there for a month, we will take it out.
We'll not let it there.
If I don't have that control, I don't want to do it.
They can have the ChocoEve product, which has a longer shelf life.
But yeah, we're very peculiar about that.
We don't like stuff to sell that we wouldn't eat anymore.
And how did that partnership with the Market at Liberty Place come about?
Well, we started with somebody else, a winery.
They changed location and they went out.
The new owner there was interested in keeping the chocolate.
And so that's how we did it.
And basically, we bring the chocolate.
They sent me a picture of the case.
We know what to bring.
We bring it.
That's it.
So it's a good situation, you know, because we still have control of the stuff is fresh.
So when you and I were chatting before we recorded, I came to understand that Neuchatel works with a number of local businesses, local customers, where you send out your chocolate gift boxes to their customers.
So they send you names and addresses and then you mail them out, maybe as thank you gifts or holidays and the like.
So that was really new to me and very exciting for me.
And for LB Design clients, if you're listening,
you can expect to probably see some chocolate coming your way in the coming holiday season.
But Albert, tell us a little bit about how businesses and nonprofits
who might want to take advantage of that service, how do they learn more about that?
Is that on your website? Is it somewhere else?
Where should they get in touch to learn more?
Yeah, those are because it's so individual.
We usually want to talk to them because we can have a chocolate mold with their name on it.
or just a box.
So it's basically whatever they want.
We have a box that has a thank you and so on.
Or, you know, like I said, their business card can be in the center
or printed on the chocolate.
So, yeah, anything is possible.
We just, when we do, we get a list and then everybody gets a box.
You heard it here, folks.
With chocolate, anything is possible.
Was there a local business or nonprofit organization
that more folks should know about?
But personally, I like Silo here in Oxford.
They are really good people, and they feed a lot of people.
And one of the workers in charge is an Italian guy.
Great guy.
Very good.
We'll be sure to put a link to them on our show notes page
at startlocal.co as well.
Albert, we've been enjoying the smell of your factory floor.
We've enjoyed the outputs of your chocolate making.
And it makes us all wonder, are you hiring?
Actually, not right now.
You know, come October, yes, we always look for people by then.
And what's the best way for folks who are interested in coming on in those holiday seasons or in those part-time roles?
Should they visit the website?
Should they call the shop?
Should they stop by?
The easiest way is to start out with an email off the website, and then usually that's how we progress.
As a regular customer here, I don't want to see you go anywhere.
I want to see you stay in business here at Neuchatel Chocolates for a very, very long time.
How can the community support Neuchatel Chocolates other than coming here to the tasting room in Oxford?
That's pretty much the way it works.
Albert Lauber, founder and owner of Neuchatel Chocolates and ChocoEve.
Where can listeners connect with you and learn more about all your wonderful chocolate creations, including where they can get their next chocolate fix?
The best way is, the easiest website is Swisschips.com or Neuchatelchocolates.com.
So this chips.com, of course, it leads to everything else, but that's our, by all means, best-selling product, which are the Herr's potato chips covered in chocolate.
Albert, thank you so much for all the time and effort you've put into welcoming us here and sharing with us and talking to us.
Really, really appreciate that.
This has been fantastic.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Indeed.
We really appreciate it, Albert.
Thank you so much.
And thank you also to my co-host, Liam Dempsey, as well as Joe Casabona, who's running the board here right next to me.
I'm Erik Gudmundson.
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