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Purdy's Chocolatier turned a 107-year-old recipe into one of its top sellers today with a few simple, but brilliant, major hit.
They say there are no new ideas under the sun.
That may be so, but old ideas tend to do better with a little bit of a makeover for modern sensibilities. Kriston Dean, vice-president of merchandising and marketing at Purdy’s Chocolatier, knows this to be true. The company’s Himalayan Pink Salt Caramels, introduced in 2009, have become a marquee product; more than 10,000 boxes of the salty-sweet chews are sold each year. Here, Dean explains how the firm turned a 107-year-old recipe into a major hit.
The origins
“Our head chocolatier, Gary Mitchell, noticed a trend in the sweet and savoury category, and so he took a vanilla caramel recipe from 1907 and started to play with different salts and textures. He tried grey smoked salt and Cabernet salt, but landed on pink Himalayan salt, partly because of its story: It’s from the oldest salt mine in the world, it has 84 trace minerals, and it’s pink!”
Early trials
“He applied the salt in different ways: baked in, infused, topped. Then he presented the caramels to our product development committee, which includes me and our chocolate scientist and president, Peter Higgins. If it passes the taste panel, we do a full batch in our test kitchen.”
Moment of truth
“We put it into local shops to get customer feedback. We normally do a full costing and market evaluation to see whether the customer is willing to pay a price that will give us an acceptable margin, but ultimately, it’s the customer who decides.”
We have a winner!
“Gary comes up with more than 150 recipes a year. Only about six of them get to market. The Himalayan Pink Salt Caramel was unusual in that we had a product right away. It was an instant hit. We were ready to launch it in the fall of 2009.”
Roll it out
“Manufacturing in Vancouver is key to what we do. Because we use no preservatives, our product has a short shelf life. We can make everything here and have it shipped it to our 70 stores across the country the same week. If we manufactured anywhere else, we’d have to change the model completely.”
This story is part of the package in the October 2014 issue of Canadian Business.
This column focuses on business problems and how to solve them. Andrew Gregson, BA, MA , M.Sc.Econ is an economist, author and a Senior Partner in iNTENT Financial Inc, a Kelowna based finance and consulting company. The 4 partners specialise in finance, pre-determined profitability, sales and marketing. If you need further information, please contact us through the website at www.intentfinancial.com.
This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
