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No. 68 Chocolate |
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From Bern to Courtelary: on the winding road to success Camille Bloch, the firm’s founder, moved his small enterprise into an empty paper factory in Courtelary in 1935. He had become a chocolate manufacturer in 1929 when, after selling chocolate for Tobler, he bought up machinery from A.W. Lindt in Bern, who were closing down. But rents in Bern were high, and so, with his son Rolf – the future director – in the back seat, he drove up into the countryside looking for new premises. His choice also fell on Courtelary because the Swiss watch industry, which is largely based in the canton Jura, had been strongly hit by the Depression, and many of the region’s inhabitants were out of work. A chocolate factory was a welcome, if not quite usual, source of employment. In 1935, the firm had a turnover of about CHF 0.5 million. Seventy-five years later, the annual turnover is CHF 50 million (USD 40 million). The company today employs 150 people and annually produces 2700 tonnes of chocolate. Making chocolate: an ancient craft Chocolate begins with the cocoa bean. And, in contrast to all other Swiss chocolate firms of equivalent size, Camille Bloch still purchases and roasts the beans itself, rather than buying the partially prepared chocolate paste from an outside source. The beans usually come from Ghana and Ecuador and are stored, refrigerated, on site before they are processed. After quality control checks and cleaning, the beans are roasted: for dark chocolate for longer periods and at higher temperatures. They are then crushed and the husk is blown away by air. The beans are then ground finely to form the cocoa mass, and other products are added: additional cocoa butter, sugar, and, for milk chocolate, milk powder. This mixture is refined to a flaky powder in a roller mill. Next comes the process of conching, which transforms the powdery aggregate into a fluid, shearing the chocolate mass with rotary blades to aerate and homogenize it. This takes time, but brings out the full flavor of the cocoa, and is where the mouth-melting properties of chocolate are created: the longer the conching, the smoother the chocolate – so it’s said. Conching once took as long as 72 hours! Today, many firms have cut this down to 12 hours. But at Camille Bloch conching still lasts 24 hours – to reduce it further, the company believes, would impair the quality of the chocolate. After conching, the chocolate is ready to enter the various production lines for different products – e.g. solid bars, bars filled with liqueurs and, at Camille Bloch – Torino and Ragusa.
Ragusa — an invention born of necessity As World War II wore on, Camille Bloch, like all other European manufacturers of chocolate was faced with a shortage in his basic raw material – cocoa beans. Chocolate firms tried all sorts of ways to make the chocolate go further, like adding fruits and nuts to their bars. Camille Bloch, however, came up with an idea that wasn’t merely novel but laid the foundations for the firm’s survival and prosperity in a very changed postwar consumer landscape. He replaced part of the chocolate mass with a hazelnut mass, i.e. a smooth praline paste made from the nuts, whose supply had not been interrupted by the war. Not only that, he changed the form of the chocolate, from a flat bar to a “branche,” a 50-g bar with a squarish cross-section, the soft filling containing – the third innovation – whole hazelnuts, surrounded by a darker-chocolate coating. Wrapped in foil and then placed in a cardboard tube. Sales of Ragusa during the war were modest, but its unusual taste and texture clearly found a following. After the war, the market for chocolate slowly recovered, but a new player had entered the field – the American snack bar, like Mars and Hershey. In Ragusa (and Torino, a 46-g praline bar created shortly after the war), Camille Bloch not only had a competitor but could build on the preexisting affection Swiss consumers had already developed for the products. With strategic and dynamic publicity and marketing, Ragusa and Torino became, and remain, unreplaceable household brands. Each today represents 30% of the total production of Camille Bloch chocolate products.
Recipes for survival – quality and niche products How has a small, family-owned firm managed to survive, persist, and grow in a highly competitive market now dominated by a few, large corporations? Irreplaceable products are part of the story, but there is more to it than that. As the current CEO, Camille Bloch’s grandson, Daniel Bloch, told us, such a company must acknowledge what it cannot do, identify its strengths, and cultivate them. Here, the two key words are quality and specialization. By buying the raw cocoa beans on the market, and testing samples before purchase, Camille Bloch can exert a high degree of control over the quality of the raw materials that go into the chocolate. And such quality control accompanies all the stages of the manufacturing process. Camille Bloch makes its chocolate in batches, and Daniel Bloch emphasized that this again means that the company can guarantee the quality and consistency of its products. Specialization is the second pillar of success. Camille Bloch could not possibly hope to compete successfully with larger firms if it produced the same kind of “faceless” products – flat bars of milk or plain chocolate for example. Although, it does indeed produce a small quantity of chocolate for the tourist market, wrapped, predictably, in Swiss Alpine scenery, or famous landmarks like the wooden bridge in Luzern. A focus on special niche products is the only phenotype for survival. In addition to Ragusa and Torino, Camille Bloch is perhaps best known for its bars of kirsch-filled chocolate. And, at about the same time that this issue of the Karger Gazette is released, Camille Bloch will be launching a new line of “mousse” chocolates: more dark seductions for its devoted and, the company obviously hopes, new consumers.
Kosher chocolate Twice a year, Camille Bloch produces Kosher chocolate, which comprises 5% of its sales, half to the USA, the rest going to Israel and Europe. What makes chocolate Kosher is not the manufacturing process, per se, but that all the stages of production, from the source of the raw ingredients right through to the end product have met the rabbinical standards of food hygiene – for example, the absence of contact with pork (e.g. at the farms producing the milk), and, for Passover consumption, no cereals in the end-product. The future: continuity and expansion A challenge for manufacturers of any product is to attract, and hold, each new generation of consumers: it cannot rely on parents passing on their tastes to their children. This requires a judicious balance between modern marketing strategies for existing products and the introduction of new brands for a different consumer awareness. It is noticeable, for example, in this era of health- and weight-consciousness that dark and bitter chocolate are gaining on milk chocolate, and chocolate products are increasingly available in smaller portions, so we can indulge our sweet sins with a little less guilt! Market expansion is another way forward. The burgeoning markets in East Asia are not an option for Camille Bloch at the moment – other, larger corporations must, perhaps, first melt the barrier of different eating habits and tastes among, say, the Chinese. New markets nearer home are more attractive. Eighty percent of the company’s production is currently sold within Switzerland – countries of the European Union, like France, Italy, and Germany, with similar patterns of chocolate consumption and good purchasing power, are appealing new markets to try to enter. Following in his father’s footsteps, it was Rolf Bloch who steered the firm from the 1950s onwards, through all the lows and highs of employee shortages and consumer booms. In 1998, his sons Daniel and Stéphane (as Marketing Director) took over the driving seat and will steer the company into the 21st century. Whether they in turn will be followed by their children remains to be seen. As Daniel Bloch pointed out, for them, Camille Bloch is a company name, not a blood-and-flesh personality as he was for their fathers. But they like chocolate – and that’s a start. (ab) We would like to thank the firm of Camille Bloch for its time and hospitality, in particular Sandra Biedermann-Bigai who organized our visit and provided documentation and photographs, CEO Daniel Bloch for granting us an interview, and Liliane Scheidegger who gave us a fascinating guided tour of the plant and production process.
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