Collaboration for Chocolate Makers, part 3: Working with Other Craft Chocolate Makers

This is the third in a four-part bonus series called Collaborations for Chocolate Makers. In the series, we'll walk through different types of possible collaborations and how craft chocolate makers should go about them.

Today we’re going to talk about an opportunity for collaboration that I think is wildly underutilized in craft chocolate: Craft chocolate makers collaborating on products with other craft chocolate makers. 

In this episode, we talk about the untapped potential of collaborations within craft chocolate. We discuss the unique advantages of these collabs, examples of how these chocolate collaborations can work, how to approach them, occasions for collabs, and particular things to consider before embarking on one.

Collaboration for Chocolate Makers series:

Podcast Episodes
Why Do It, and General Considerations
Collaborating with Beverage Alcohol Producers
Collaborating with Other Craft Chocolate Makers (you're listening to it)
Creative Collaborations to Consider (coming soon)

Blog Posts
Why It’s Worth It, and Things To Consider
Collaborating with Beverage Alcohol Producers, and Drinks-Based Collabs
Chocolate-Based Collabs with Beverage Alcohol Producers
Collaborating with Other Craft Chocolate Makers (coming soon)
Creative Collaborations to Consider (coming soon)

Check out David's book Pairing Beer & Chocolate: A Guide to Bringing the Flavors of Craft Beer and Craft Chocolate Together.

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Sign up for host David Nilsen's beer newsletter for regular beer musings, and the Bean to Barstool newsletter for pairings, collaborations, and maker profiles.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 1:00

Hey everyone, this is part three of my collaboration for chocolate makers series. Welcome back. In part one, we talked about the benefits of doing collaborations with other businesses, financial benefits, cultural, and institutional benefits. We also talked about things to consider before partnering for a collaboration. You can go back and listen to that or read the summarized version on the Bean to Barstool blog. Then in part two, we looked at collaborations with beverage alcohol producers, and we talked about how those specific benefits from part one apply here. We talked about the forms those collaborations can take, how to approach them, things to keep in mind before getting started. And then on the blog, I broke that into two separate parts. One that focuses on drinks-based collaborations and one on chocolate-based collaborations. So you can find those on the blog as well. Today we're going to talk about an opportunity for collaboration that I think is wildly underutilized in craft chocolate. Kraft chocolate makers collaborating on products with other craft chocolate makers. We see this prolifically in craft beer. This is baked into craft beer culture. Collaborations between breweries on a single beer are super common. In fact, there's an entire prestigious collaboration festival that is nothing but collaboration beers. Wandering Monsters, who we had on being to barstool a couple months back, they do a mini collaboration fest every winter where all of the beers poured at the fest are collaborations between them and different breweries. In addition to some of the benefits we've discussed previously, collaborations between breweries build camaraderie within the industry. They prevent some of the uncomfortable realities of the fact that both businesses are theoretically competing for the same customers in a crowded market. Brewers can share institutional knowledge and learn how to do things in different ways from their colleagues. And they're just kind of fun. One of the biggest benefits we've discussed for any kind of collab is gaining access to another company's customer base. And this is potentially even more helpful for craft chocolate makers than it is for breweries, because alcohol producers are bound by a lot of complicated and at times archaic and contradictory laws around where and when and how alcoholic products can be sold. This does not apply in any way to craft chocolate. People can order your bars pretty much anywhere. So if they find out about you because you collabed with one of their favorite chocolate makers, they can immediately order your chocolate as well. And their existing craft chocolate fans. So the initial education component is likely already taken care of there. In artisan food and beverage, uh, fandom and curiosity are driven as much or more by a company's story and stories as they are by its products themselves. People who are dedicated fans of your chocolate company obviously love your chocolate, but the fact that you make good chocolate should be a given at this point. Those folks are fans of you because they have connected with your brand story and with the individual stories you continue to tell. When you collaborate with another chocolate company, you are now bringing those stories together. And it's like when an actor from some movie franchise does a cameo in another movie from that universe. It's like fan service and it gets people excited and reminds them about uh the other things that are out there. Collaboration also cements to your audience, both new and established, part of what makes craft chocolate different from mass-produced chocolate. Collaborations are celebrations. They're about camaraderie, creativity, about doing business differently, about creating a craft business so you can create amazing flavor experiences and focus on something beyond just the bottom line. Major corporations that are about profit at all costs are not collaborating with their competitors. Now, make no mistake, collabs can definitely help your bottom line for all the reasons I've already shared, but that's not all they're about. They flaunt the way capitalism is usually expected to work and reaffirm that a rising craft chocolate tide will lift all boats. So let's talk about some examples of types of collaborations you can do with other chocolate makers, occasions for these, and some special things to consider. Let's start out with talking about some examples. Lots and lots of different options. Basically, all of the options that you have for making craft chocolate bars exist for collaboration, but with some added opportunities. One of the easiest things you can do is for you and another craft chocolate maker to make the same bar concept in your own separate spaces and then either sell them alongside each other, sell them in a pack together. Both of you just market each of yours so people can see that both are there. This has the fewest moving parts. It's the easiest lift when it comes to collaboration. All it requires is a creative conversation with the other maker and then figuring out the timing and the marketing. And this type of collaboration is really for the chocolate nerds. You know, who wouldn't buy a pack of two favorite chocolate makers both making the exact same dark chocolate bar from the same origin at the same percentage? So it's just highlighting the impact of the maker and how their different processes lead to different flavor expressions. As craft chocolate fans, we are often assembling this kind of tasting ourselves anyway, whether it's for Instagram posts or for group tastings or for professional tastings, we're often taking bars that are very similar and just highlighting the differences between them. Wouldn't it be cool if two esteemed chocolate makers decided to do that formally and release two bars that are theoretically the exact same thing, but allows us to see the difference in their processes and uh encourages us to get both and taste them together. If you actually want to collaborate on a single product, there's a ton of options for how this could work. You could both roast part of the cacao for a bar that you're going to make at one or the other facility. Uh, you could both provide some of the inclusions for a bar that's going to be made at one or the other. This provides a really cool opportunity for bringing together different cultural and geographic elements. So if you wanted to work with a chocolate maker who has a different cultural or ethnic background and brings that into their chocolate, or you're from two different geographic areas and you have ingredients that are common to your local region, you could figure out a bar that brings together those different elements and each of you provides the inclusions that kind of tie to either your geographical area or your cultural or ethnic background or whatever it might be and kind of celebrates both together in that way. You could do variants on existing bars. So if you have a best-selling bar, you could do a variation on that bar that brings in maybe an additional inclusion or changes the percentage or something like that, and release that as a collaboration with another maker, but it already has the built-in popularity of that brand name. You could do these collaborations with more than two makers. There are collaboration beers between multiple breweries. Now, one thing to understand with collaborations, and we don't always get the full information about this. Sometimes collaborations are more in name only than they are a reflection of actually getting together and doing this work or uh, you know, creating, building a concept together. Sometimes it's more about just like celebrating that we're all friends and there's not actually a whole lot of actual work that goes into it. And you know what? That's totally fine too. Sometimes that can happen, but uh you could actually do any of the concepts we just talked about with more than two makers, even though it gets more complicated, and then all of the benefits that we've already talked about get extended beyond just uh two makers. There are tons and tons and tons of options for the types of products that can be made here. So if you think of more, by all means share them with me. Let's talk about how this can actually work, collaborating with another maker. The easiest way to do this is going to be locally. So if you have another craft chocolate maker in your town or city or region to where you could actually physically go to one space or the other and do these collaborations, that is going to be an easy way to do this. But again, because craft chocolate can be ordered pretty much wherever and shipped uh wherever, you're not quite as much bound by local geography as on the beer side, where if both companies are really going to benefit from this beyond the actual collaboration product, it makes a lot more sense for them to be in a place where customers could actually get to both of them. You could also travel to wherever another craft chocolate maker is, or vice versa, and do the collaboration at one place or the other. Now, this obviously increases your expense because there are travel costs involved, but it also increases the storytelling opportunities. And that journey and that travel actually becomes part of the storytelling of the collaboration itself. And then finally, you can also do these collaborations entirely remotely. So the creative conversations and all that kind of stuff happens remotely, you know, Zoom, phone, whatever it is, and then one or the other ships the products to uh the other maker and it gets made there. Or if you're dividing this up and each making a version of it, you know, you can work out the logistics of that. But really, any of those options are available. Let's talk about some of the possible occasions for doing a collaboration. Now you can always do these just because there doesn't have to be something that it is tied to. If you're friends with another maker or you have a cool idea, at any point you can do a collaboration and release that. But often on the beer side, these get tied to specific occasions. So things like business anniversaries. You know, if your craft chocolate company is celebrating its sixth anniversary, maybe you reach out to another craft chocolate maker to release a special anniversary collaboration bar. You can also do these for charitable causes. Maybe uh, you know, you do a collaboration with another maker and a certain part of the proceeds go to a nonprofit or uh a local or regional disaster relief if there's been some kind of recent hardship, anything like that to benefit a cause that you care about. These can also be tied to craft chocolate festivals. We see this a ton on the beer side where beer festivals are often an excuse for breweries to release collaborations, specially tied to the festival. This can be a really cool thing to do in the craft chocolate space because there is an element of exclusivity. And, you know, if you did a limited batch and it's only available at that chocolate festival, that's an incentive for people to come. It's an incentive for people to buy that bar when they're there because they can't get it anywhere else. That can be with a maker who can't make it to the festival. It could be with another maker who is at the festival, uh, whatever you wanted to do there, but you can tie those to those craft chocolate festivals. Um, I've talked on a number of episodes about the Midwest Kraft Chocolate Festival in Rushville, Indiana. I have uh spoken and tabled there the last couple years, and I just found out a week or so ago that they are gonna be organizing a collaboration bar for the upcoming 2026 festival. So look for information about that. I am super excited to see them doing that because again, I almost never see this happening on the craft chocolate side. So I think that's an awesome opportunity. And that is an example of one that's gonna be done between multiple makers. So I think any of the makers who are coming to the festival have the opportunity to be involved with that. You can also release collaborations for any kind of local or regional event, whether it's a town festival, uh music festival, historical event, any any kind of thing like that, you can release it for those. I know where I am here in Ohio, all of the small towns around us have their own little, you know, summer festival. And maybe it's got some specific tie to the town. Maybe it just 80 years ago they decided to start such and such festival, and now it's just kind of its own self-running machine, even if there is nothing, you know, no specific tie, whatever it is. Uh, you also have cultural festivals. You know, here in Dayton, Ohio, we have a German fest every summer and a Celtic fest and a Greek festival and any kind of local or regional event like that, you could uh opt to release a collaboration bar, and that could even be in some way themed to the theme of the festival. So we have a town here that does a strawberry festival. So, for example, a craft chocolate maker, if it were in the area, could maybe release some kind of strawberry collaboration with another maker and sell it at that fest or uh in connection to it. Depending on the success of the collaboration and what it's tied to, these can be one-offs, they can be periodic releases, they can become annual releases where you can expect it for such and such festival or just at a certain time of year every single year. That's totally up to you and your collaboration partners. A few things to consider if you're looking at collaborating with another craft chocolate maker. Uh, the basic steps of how this is going to work, we've talked about with the other types of collaborations already, but I want to look at how these might be specific when working with another craft chocolate maker. First thing you obviously need to do is reach out. If you have a craft chocolate maker you'd like to work with, pitch them the idea, explain some of the benefits. Uh, you can even share this podcast episode and uh a collaboration series with them and help explain a little bit of why the this is a benefit. But let them know that you love what they do and that you'd love to work with them, and you guys can talk out what the idea for that is gonna be. Make sure that your values align. You're gonna be sharing space on a label, you're going to be uh together on social media, your names are gonna be linked, your craft chocolate audience, a certain part of that, kind of knows what's what around craft chocolate. So make sure the company that you are uh prospectively working with is a company that you feel comfortable being aligned with and working together with and having your names associated. Plan everything in advance. This is one I've come back to time and again. What is the recipe going to be and what ingredients are going to be needed? Who is ordering or providing those different ingredients? Which facility is going to host the actual making of the collaboration, or is it going to be both? Who's designing the labels and what will those labels look like? Is this an equal collaboration? And so that is going to be equal credit on the label and the logos are going to be the same size, or is this primarily one maker's project and another is helping out in that collaboration? And maybe you agree to a slightly different uh division of uh how that is going to be displayed on the label. Um, who's paying for what? Who reaps what benefits from it, who will host the release event, how is marketing gonna work? I know that's a lot of lists of questions there. Uh it doesn't have to be overwhelming, but make sure that you do all this in advance. You do not want to wing this, both because it can lead to misunderstandings and even uh you know soured relationships if there is a misunderstanding or one of you thought the other was going to be responsible for something, but also because you want to be able to maximize the benefits of the collaboration. And so planning everything in advance allows you to do that. And you do want to maximize those benefits. You want to make sure you know how to market this, what's going to go on social media, make sure you've got all the photography and video and storytelling to go along with it. Uh, you can even potentially uh reach out to local media or chocolate uh specific media. Collaborations are often a great opportunity to do that, both because they're unique, but because they're often tied to one of the seasonal or annual or local uh events or festivals or anniversaries that we talked about a little bit ago. So there can be a specific tie for media to pay attention to. Once this collaboration series wraps up, I am going to be putting together a series on media relations for craft chocolate makers. So we'll talk more about that stuff at that time, but definitely maximize all of the opportunities of doing the collaboration in how you're telling that story. And then I would recommend after the collaboration that you do a post-mortem with your collab partner. So once the product is out there, it's been released, it's been selling for a little bit, whether or not it's still available, get together either in person or remotely with the collab partner and just discuss how it went. What did we learn from it? Do we want to do this again? What could we do differently? How did the division of labor work? Just kind of talk out what worked, what didn't, what you'd want to change to make sure that, you know, if you're going to do it again, that that you're in the best position going forward that you can be, but also just so you can uh you know reaffirm that relationship and also both learn from the experience, whether you collab together again or with other makers. Please do this. I would love to see craft chocolate makers collaborating with each other more. If you do this, tell me about it. If you see a collaboration, tell me about it. If you have other ideas within these collaborations that I haven't shared, uh share those with me. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I want this idea to catch on. It's such a fun part of craft beer culture, and I think it has so much promise for the craft chocolate space as well. In the final uh entry of the Collaboration for Chocolate Makers series, which will come out in a couple weeks, we'll be looking at creative collaborations beyond the obvious of beverage alcohol or other makers. Like, what are some unexpected outside the box collaboration opportunities that craft chocolate makers can be thinking about? So you can think about some of those on your own. And if you have some ideas, you can share them with me. Thank you all so much for listening to this bonus episode. Today, I will have a blog post up shortly that summarizes a lot of things that we talked about on here, and I will see you on another episode of Bean to Barstool soon. Cheers.