2021 Can Only Be Sweeter For McGuire Chocolate
This story is part of a series on Maritime chocolate and candy companies gearing up for Valentine’s Day.
ST. ANDREWS, N.B. — After an unusual first full year in business, things should only continue to get sweeter for St. Andrew-based McGuire Chocolate.
The company that set up shop at 174 Water Street in St. Andrews in the summer of 2019 makes chocolate out of fermented cacao grown by small farmers/profit sharing co-ops, organic cane sugar and cocoa butter.
Owners Mark McGuire and Victoria Myers were expecting 2020 to be their first full, normal year in business.
“It’s been an interesting year because it was really our first full year in operation. In 2019 we did the move across the county and we opened the store and we were really just getting our feet under us,” says McGuire.
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“Then 2020 was to be our first year of having time to stabilize what we were doing, build up some staff and products and get to know our customers. That was our year to really come out as a business.”
Though Covid-19 caused a lot of disruption for businesses everywhere, McGuire says the company faired well and even grew over last year.
“Even though Covid happened and everything was different than what we were expecting, it was still a good year for us,” he says. “Everything changed completely, but St. Andrews itself was a pretty good destination where New Brunswickers that couldn’t travel elsewhere, St. Andrews was a bit of a vacation close to home.”
They got what they considered to be a lot of foot traffic, with people stopping by their storefront to buy chocolate, ice cream, also coffee, sandwiches and alcoholic beverages they added to their menu for the summer.
“We don’t have anything to compare it to. It’s hard to know what a normal year is actually like because we were only open for the later-half of [2019]. We don’t really know what ‘normal’ is,” says McGuire. “We just take it as it comes, but we found the chocolate business itself continued to pick up momentum and we’ve been shipping chocolate regularly without break.”
McGuire Chocolate’s wholesale orders came to a complete halt during the pandemic’s onset in March 2020, but things picked back up significantly in the fall when stores reopened again and were making their wholesale orders for Christmas. They saw their existing stores reordering, along with new retailers in Atlantic Canada and Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.
“We’ve added new stores across the county, grown our monthly subscription list, increased in-store sales. It’s been, all things considered, pretty good,” says Mcguire.
“That said, we’re super looking forward to an actual normalized state where we can then carry the momentum into the business that we initially had designed and thought of.”
As Valentine’s Day approaches, some would assume it’s would be a busy time for a chocolate company. But for McGuire Chocolate it’s actually the Christmas holidays that are the busiest.
“We have never seen an uptick at Valentine’s. It’s never really suited our company, I suppose. We’re more of like a Christmas company,” says McGuire. “Valentine’s Day is a little bit smaller. A traditional purchase on Valentine’s, you buy one thing and it’s one day for one person and it’s pretty small overall. Whereas Christmas, you’re buying for a week or two of family gathering and lots of functions.”
“Then we found since we don’t do truffles, or boxes of chocolate, those can go really well on Valentine’s Day. We’ve never had a tonne of flash in our products.”
But that doesn’t mean they’re not creating something special to help people celebrate. The company is putting out heart shape chocolate lollypops that use freeze-dried strawberries and dragon fruit.
“The colour with the white chocolate makes a pink chocolate and a purple chocolate,” says McGuire.
The special coloured chocolate lollypops will be sold at their St. Andrews storefront, online, and at the Tipsy Muse in Fredericton.
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