Chocolate News
Dallas chocolatier Kate Weiser fields biggest order ever: 50K chocolate bars
Kate Weiser chocolate bar for Omni Hotels & Resorts
Dallas chocolatier Kate Weiser recently fielded the biggest order in her chocolate-making career: 50,000 chocolate bars - stat.
The mega-order came from Dallas-based Omni Hotels & Resorts, who have an ongoing holiday promotion with a chocolate component.
Famous for her artisic hand-painted bonbons, Weiser says the typical customer at her three stores in Trinity Groves, NorthPark Center, and the Shops at Clearfork is more likely to buy a box of 10 or 15 chocolates, or maybe the large 35-piece collection if it's a splurge.
The hotel chain's request was unprecedented and required Weiser and her team to stop everything else they were doing to fulfill the order.
"We weren’t expecting an order of this magnitude, especially during the holiday season which is our busiest time," she says. "We start planning for the holidays in January, and this request came in September, which gave us only two months to turn it around."
Called Ticket to Wonder, the Omni promotion involves a giveaway where guests receive chocolate bars when they check in. Out of thousands of bars distributed, 50 have secret hidden tickets that can be redeemed for a free five-night stay.
Omni being Dallas-based wanted to use a Dallas chocolatier to produce an initial run of 45,000 chocolate bars to be manufactured and shipped to Omni locations across the U.S.
All by the beginning of November.
Weiser gamely took the assignment, and ultimately produced a 3-ounce milk chocolate bar made with 42 percent Madagascar vanilla, with chocolate sourced from a Swiss company called Felchlin.
"Getting the chocolate was the first hump," Weiser says. "But I had just been treated to a trip to Felchlin to tour their facility. We usually use a French brand, but we loved their chocolate and were trying to figure out a way to incorporate it into our day to day."
Weiser hosted a tasting of the Felchin chocolate for the Omni team, who loved it. But the order required 10,000 pounds.
"At that time, I didn’t think about the logistical nightmare of getting 10,000 pounds of chocolate shipped to the U.S. on such short notice," she says. "My distributors from whom I get my chocolate were all, 'Are you nuts? We might have 50 cases, and you’re going to need 1,000'."
But one reached out to Felchin's CEO and the company shipped over their entire chocolate supply.
“We basically sold them out and they had to send more,” says Weiser. "Felchlin is an incredible premium chocolate brand. They’re a little bit of a smaller company, but they are really up and coming."
The next big step: the physical production of the bars.
"Sometimes I feel like I have someone watching over us, because the timing couldn't have worked out better," she says. "Just a few weeks before, I had installed an insanely expensive automated bar-making machine that we'll be able to use to do some of the production on our bonbons. We put it right to work. This Omni order was the first thing we used it for."
Even with the automated process, it still took two weeks at full capacity, 10 hours a day, to get the job done.
The label design and the secret hidden tickets were handled by the Omni team. One of the tickets has already surfaced at their Omni Oklahoma City property, a spokesperson says.
The promotion has been such a success that the Omni has already placed a follow-up order for another 5,000 bars.
“We’re going to figure that out,” Weiser says.
