Chocolate and Social Media

O, chocolate. You stole our hearts the day we met you (in Mexico, about 3,000 years ago). Since then, royalty and aristocrats have feasted on goblets of you, armies have sustained themselves by snacking on you, a whole town in Pennsylvania was built for the milk version of you, and copious lovestruck teenagers have swooned over heart-shaped boxes of you. The world has a deep, lengthy and curious history with chocolate.  As a result, chocolatiers and chocolate-makers have the luxury of commanding an audience that is undyingly passionate about their products.  

In a world where communication between brand and consumer continues to become more and more personalized, conversational and transparent, chocolate companies have a unique opportunity to connect. Most of those discussed here, which are smaller, artisanal brands, simply don’t have a ton of marketing spend at their disposal. Obviously, social media is a critical and powerful marketing tool. So the big question is, how do these companies maximize the fan love? 

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Neighborhood Darlings: Engaging Your Local Community

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Bean-to-bar chocolate companies — as in those that make pure chocolate from scratch — are few and far between. Though the number of American artisanal chocolate makers has grown exponentially within the past six years, having a chocolate factory in your hometown is a pretty sweet and special treat.

The folks at Missouri-based Askinosie Chocolate work with a local baker to create special cupcake recipes using Askinosie’s chocolate. Then, every Tuesday (known at Askinosie as Cupcake Tuesday), the baker makes around 200 special cupcakes. According to Lawren Askinosie, whose official title is “Pursuer of the Passionates,” local residents get wind of the week’s latest flavors on Twitter, storm the Askinosie shop and the cupcakes sell out every week. During this past summer’s “Hide and Eat” campaign, the company hid chocolate bars inside the storefronts of other local businesses, posted clues on Facebook () and Twitter () each day and incited local residents to rush the different stores to discover the bars.  

Strategies to engage the local community are in a whole different realm than those focused on national or international fans. Neighborhood companies can offer their local fans something that no one else can have. It’s all about creating something really special, narrowing down the channels through which people can find out about it, and mixing things up a little by partnering up with other nearby businesses. Part of the allure of any artisanal food company is that engagement online can, with a little effort, lead nearby fans directly to something delicious that can be eaten on the spot. 

We can learn a lot from the raging food truck obsession that’s taken over our big cities. Scharffen Berger, a leading American chocolate maker who is in a very different place in the chocolate market than the smaller companies included here, recently partnered up with New York City bakery Sweetery’s dessert truck, Street Sweets, to promote a Scharffen Berger chocolate cupcake recipe contest. Thousands of Scharffen Berger chocolate cupcakes were given away during two days in late October, with Twitter updates offering the truck’s whereabouts around the city.