Peace By Chocolate Eyes Major Expansion In 2021
ANTIGONISH — Antigonish’s Peace By Chocolate could be on the verge of significant expansion as it ramps up sales and distribution efforts in Canada and the United States.
Tareq Hadhad, the company’s founder and CEO, says the company has refocused in the wake of Covid-19 and is planning for big growth in 2021.
Hadhad and his family came to Canada in 2015 after a civil war forced them to flee their home in Syria. His family had owned a chocolate company in Syria and shortly after arriving in Antigonish revived the business under its current name.
Since then, Peace By Chocolate has received national attention, propelled by its positive messages and Hadhad and his family’s story.
Peace By Chocolate products have been on shelves at Sobeys since 2018. They can also be found across Canada at dozens of independent retailers.
But Hadhad says the business is in the middle of an aggressive expansion into “other national markets as well.”
“For the past two years we have been trying to expand our market outside the Atlantic area and we have been trying to find people who have the same core values of our company,” he says.
For a long time, Hadhad was relying on a “network of ambassadors” to spread the word. However, he recently hired two full-time sales representatives to “open new markets” in both Ontario and Western Canada.
“We have been a proud Nova Scotian company and we have a lot of Nova Scotian messages we are sending out. But now we are customizing things for each province in Canada because we are a national company now,” he says. “The national market, that piece is now really interesting how things have been unfolding.”
Hadhad says conversations are now in the works across the country with drug stores, as well as businesses in niche markets like health food, organic products, and fair-trade products.
He says the Canadian expansion efforts are part of a three-pronged expansion he hopes to undertake in 2021.
The other two prongs are a beefed-up e-commerce platform for both distributors and consumers, and an expansion in the United States. The goal, he says, is to eventually establish “mass-scale distribution” across North America.
Much of the plan came together, he says, because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We spent a lot of time on planning instead of continuing to grow [haphazardly] because we believe that in 2021 when the economy is restarting, we believe it can be a big year for us,” he says.
Between 2017 and 2018 Peace By Chocolate experience significant growth. Since then, Hadhad says he’s been so busy he hasn’t had the time to properly take stock of things, build key relationships, and deliberately plan a strategy.
In some ways, he says, the company felt a little “stuck.”
“I didn’t have time in 2017, 2018 because I was flying all the time. I was living in airports. [Because of Covid-19] we have a lot more time as a team and we’re focusing more on finding new connections,” he says.
Hadhad says his family felt a similar “stuck” feeling during their time as refugees and, in a way, the experience prepared them to thrive during the pandemic.
“We have lived through a lot of challenges. My family came from a war-torn country and we lost everything. We felt stuck as well when we left Syria because we couldn’t go back home, we couldn’t go anywhere in the world, we couldn’t leave Lebanon,” he says.
“We have learned the tricks during a crisis about what is the best way and what is the best mindset to face a crisis. It’s to turn these challenging times into ways to grow.”
He said they did exactly that at Peace By Chocolate in March and April.
“When everybody was like, ‘ya this is the end of the world,’ we were like no, this is the start of a new phase. We were like, the world has shaped us in a more beautiful way. And the crisis we are living through right now, the pandemic, is going to shape us to a more beautiful way – as a family, as a company, as a community, as a province, and as a country.”
Trevor Nichols is a reporter for Huddle in Halifax. Send him an e-mail with your story suggestions: [email protected].