Why Australia’s oldest chocolate maker is ‘not about short-term profits’
Millard said, “There are customers who love our product outside, but this doesn’t just open a tap,” he said.
“When you are a real craft manufacturer like us, we cannot only say that we will sell more. In fact, you should develop skills in people who make chocolate and this is too much education and skills.”
A team of 200 chocolate teams working in the chocolate factory for more than a decade will receive cocoa from certified farms in Ghana and Peru, and then in small parties, clean, frying, soil, anger and mold chocolate, “like you will make in your kitchen, Mill Millard says Millard, hand -packed, sealing and sold.
“People really held their skills firmly. ‘I don’t want to educate you, because then you can do my job.’
“But this time takes time, takes confidence, takes culture.
Chocolate prices have reached record levels at the beginning of the year and have been lightened since then, but the general manager, but remained about three times higher than the long -term average. Nevertheless, wages are not cocoa, this is the larger factor behind the company’s price increase, 25 percent for four years.
When Lockdowns ended and everyone returned to work, Haight factories were pushed to capacity and asked Milllard to invest $ 130 million in a new production facility designed for two -fold sales for the next 10 years – without increasing and fantasy new machines.
Millard said, uz We want to buy things that can do as we use to do this. We had to buy really simple and really flexible equipment, ”he said.
The new $ 130 million dollars in Salisbury in North Adelaide is 36,000 square meters.
“We don’t want to reach there in a day. We want to reach there for a few years, because we can’t leave the talent we bring behind.
“We belong to a family that continues to say ‘we are in the long run’. This is not about short -term snow.”
Grow slow
This is what Haigh makes them interesting or will not. John Haight, the father of Millard’s predecessor Alister, decided not to sell it through supermarkets to maintain control of his products and escape the knotted price negotiations decades. You will not find Haight anywhere else at airports or other than senior retail stores or websites.
Haigh’s senior retail stores are only in Australia.
The chocolate manufacturer does not rush to make a name abroad. Despite a slightly open -hearted chocolate diplomacy Two years ago By the Foreign Minister Penny Wong, trying to give some haighs to Ignazio Cassis of Swiss counterpart, the growing growing in response to some Lindt is not really on the agenda.
“We see ourselves as one of the best chocolaters in the world,” Millard said. However, there are much more spaces to grow in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
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Uz We don’t think we will be a global brand. We will be a great Australian brand until we take out our border.
“If we want to make ourselves 10 times larger, this will lose something. We must be careful, we must be stable.”
Millard, for decades, said that the supermarket corridors have become more crowded and the competition has become more violent, but that Haigh’s legacy will be rejected to endanger the handmade process.
“Twenty years ago, the product you will buy in the supermarket was much closer to the product you can buy in Haight… I think they are more separated,” he said.
“We want to make sure that there are people in Australia [have] I bought a guest from Switzerland, ‘Well, you can come and see our chocolate shop and quite special.’ “
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