The attempted murder on children was pretty bad, but at least he had good marketing!
Sometimes truth is better than fiction!
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SOURCES
https://www.firstalert4.com/2025/10/15/we-people-st-louis-chocolate-legacy-continues-family-merges-two-historic-companies/
https://www.chocolatechocolate.com/pages/about-us
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/charlie-vs-the-chocolate-factory-release-date-photos
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
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TRANSCRIPT:
One of my favorite novels as a kid, and one I read over and over and over again, was Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If you’ve only seen the movies and never read the book, it’s basically the same story – little Charlie Bucket is very poor and lives in a ramshackle house with his hardworking parents and elderly grandparents who all share the same bed and who put a strain on the family’s meager finances.
When the fabled local chocolatier Willy Wonka decides to open up his secretive candymaking process to winners of a contest who’ve found a golden ticket inside their Wonka bars, a very lucky Charlie Bucket and his Grandpa Joe are invited along with four other winers and their families to tour the chocolate factory.
In the story, all of the other winners are rotten children with variously indulgent parents, and each is dismissed from the tour after giving in to their worst impulses. Charlie is the good-hearted boy who is deserving of become Wonka’s apprentice and heir.
The original movie adds in a subplot where Charlie steals an everlasting gobstopper and proves his character by returning it, but in the book, he’s the stand-in for the reader, simply amazed at everything he’s seeing in a chocolate factory full of sweet candy grass fields and edible flowers and, of course, a flowing river of molten chocolate.
It’s a great book, but it’s also obviously a fantasy. Real chocolate factories don’t have Oompa Loompas working on secret projects and singing whimsical songs. They don’t have rooms filled with squirrels who crack open nuts or television antennas that beam product samples into home TVs. And they definitely don’t have great glass elevators.
How do I know this? Well, because here in St. Louis, there’s a factory in The Hill called The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company, and they offer free tours to the public multiple times a day.
I went on one recently, and it surprised me, because the entire experience got me to do something I haven’t done in awhile.
Buy candy from a candy store.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company is a St. Louis brand that’s known for its retail stores, often in the same upscale shopping centers where you might find a Dierberg’s grocery store. At the factory, they make their own brand of chocolate candy as well as their fairly recently acquired Bissingers brand, which they acquired in 2019.
Bissingers traces its heritage back to confectioners 350 years ago in France, but moved to St. Louis in 1927 to provide high-quality European-style chocolate.
The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company has also been around for awhile. It was founded in 1981 by the Abel Family and moved to The Hill in 2012. Their current facility is still being developed – they just opened a Chocolate Café last fall and they have a full retail store in their front office to also serve as a reception area for their tours – but it’s a busy factory churning out thousands upon thousands of pieces of chocolate a day with multiple production lines and handpicking lines to process those creations.
I’ve bought plenty of candy from The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company over the years, but I really didn’t have any concept of how it was made or where it came from. The retail store workers are generally nice but not super knowledgeable about what they have in their cabinets, and the prices reflect the quality of the fair trade, premium chocolate that the brand is known for.
Likewise, I’ve indulged in Bissingers chocolate from time to time. They used to have a dessert place in the Central West End that was really neat, and The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company has been expanding the brand to have a broader retail footprint outside of St. Louis with locations in Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Tennessee.
Bissingers is most famous for its classic recipes that include confections such as chocolate-dripped candied fruits, European truffles and gummy Pandas.
Under The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company, the brand has also been re-releasing old recipes from “The Vault” – a wonderful idea that Disney’s often used to re-release its classic movies – and some of their best items now feature in the new Chocolate Café at The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company’s factory location.
I tried some of their Chocolate Gooey Butter Cake while I was there – if you’re a St. Louisan, you know why adding Bissingers to that already great dessert would be a big deal – and it was pretty incredible.
But you know, I probably wouldn’t have gone to that Café if it weren’t for the fact that I was already scheduled to go on the free factory tour next door to it. The tours have been one of those things people have talked about for years – take a tour, get some free chocolate! – but the location of the factory is in an industrial area, and the building itself faces the Interstate 44 highway up above.
You also have to place a reservation to go on the tours since they limit how many people can be on the floor at one time. And everyone has to wear a hairnet or paper hat. After all, they workers are busy making chocolate, and the FDA won’t let tours happen if proper hygiene rules aren’t being followed!
The experience of touring a chocolate factory isn’t nearly as exciting as visiting Willy Wonka’s fabled factory, because it’s largely just people in white coats and face and hair coverings sorting, decorating or boxing chocolate pieces that travel along long conveyor belts. Some of the machines are designed to coat the candy with chocolate seals on the top and the bottom to help preserve their freshness, and others are designed to make it easy for the workers to add toppings or decorations.
The tour itself was really just walking about an L-shaped chained-off area on the side and getting to peer into the Candy Kitchen and also watch the factory workers go about their business, but The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company also has an area with some of their historic mixing machines – some of which still work! – as well as older candy-making equipment like marble tables and a copper bowl with a wooden spoon.
At the end of the tour, you’re rewarded with a sample piece of chocolate, and then off you go back up into the attached retail store to, hopefully, make a purchase now that your curiosity has been sated and your appetite has been whetted.
And that’s where it really hit me how good these tours are as a tool for marketing.
First of all, let’s mention the obvious – The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company’s higher-quality product isn’t as low-priced as, say, a candy bar you’d buy off the impulse rack from a major brand like Hershey’s or Nestle. People who just want to buy candy can get it just about anywhere. The old days of having to buy candy from an actual candy store are long gone, and most candy stores you see are in crowded places like malls or airports and focus more on bulk bins and variety than they do on quality.
It’s actually quite interesting that pretty much the only style of boutique candy stores that still exist are chocolatiers with fancy truffles, crèmes and fruit-filled confections. Most are European-style and emphasize purity and quality of ingredients, and what they have for sale tends to be focused on gifts and special occasions, not daily indulgence.
So the market for The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company, and especially for the more luxurious Bissingers brand, is occasional purchases. I’m sure there are some regular customers who just really, really like chocolate, but they don’t need to go to one of the branded retail stores to purchase these products – the tour guide told us their products are now carried in over a thousand retail partner stores at this point. They have distribution down.
The second problem is that chocolates aren’t exactly novel. It’s not hard to buy candy or even make it at home, and you can go just about anywhere and find higher-quality European-style chocolate on the shelves. One of the best places, by the way, is Aldi, which carries European-style milk chocolate at unbelievably low prices.
So The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company has to stand out by offering flavors and forms that aren’t something you can get jut anywhere. One of the things they’re known for is making chocolate molds that allow them to have some cool gift items for birthdays, get well wishes, anniversaries and so forth. My kids like buying the chocolate letters for initials.
They also offer chocolate bars made from numbered original recipes with flavors like Blood Orange Caramel, Cannoli Truffle and Root Beer Float Truffle along with more conventional flavors like Pecan Caramel and Sea Salt Caramel.
And then of course they have seasonal items like Pumpkin Pie Truffles, Hot Chocolate and holiday flavors.
Even so, a lot of these are still primarily targeting special occasions and gifting, and while you can build a sustainable business around that, what you really want is repeat customers who are coming to you for as many of those opportunities as possible as well as perhaps to purchase a treat for themselves when they’re out shopping.
And that brings me back to the tours.
If you examine what consumers are looking for in packaged goods these days, low cost or value always come up, and yet studies have repeatedly shown that people will spend more on brands that have some sort of experiential extension.
Being able to engage in a fad driven by visibility on social media, for example, will get people buying silly things like Labubu dolls.
Being able to go to an experience like a Cardinals game or the St. Louis Zoo or the Science Center and then shop at a gift shop will get people to spend extra money on items they might have insisted on paying less for elsewhere.
And being able to see how something is made before you buy it will inevitable get people to think about the quality of what they’re buying and to become better-educated about the reasons they might want to spend a little more for something as simple as a piece of chocolate.
The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company’s tour allows potentially hundreds of consumers a day to come in to a very clean factory, understand all of the human work that goes into producing these chocolates and then understand how the finished products aren’t being churned out of some machine, but made in batches by people who are highly skilled at the process. They can also learn from the tour guides about the quality controls in place, the ingredients that are being used and the heritage of the brand.
And now that The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company owns Bissingers, they’ve wisely incorporated that into their tours to talk about the hundreds of years of expertise and experience that go into making their products.
I don’t know exactly how many people take a tour each day, but I can guess. They limit you to 20 people at a time and limit the volume of tours, and that means that there are probably somewhere around 500 to 1000 people per week. Tours are open most days because the factory’s being operated, and so I’m presuming somewhere between 2,000-3,000 people take a tour per month, or maybe around 25-000-30,000 a year.
And they have a map on the wall showing where people who’ve taken the tour are from. It’s really a great attraction for tourists and locals alike and helps to build up a target market for not only buying their chocolates during the tour, but also online.
That’s a really smart way to grow and enhance their brand, especially since The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company is now expanding into other markets with Bissingers retail stores. By demystifying the process and showing just how passionate they are about making great chocolate, they can reach an interested and engaged group of people who very likely reward them with onsite spending during the tour to help cover the costs. And all it takes is having a chained-off area and some tour guides to shine a light into what they’re already doing.
This is so different from Willy Wonka’s approach of being mysterious and secretive, and while he’s very successful in the books and movies because he’s a candymaking genius, his competitors are also constantly trying to find ways to replicate his process and his recipes. His factory’s also quite dangerous to pernicious children.
The Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company, by contrast, has nothing to hide. Their chocolate is already great and people will buy it for that reason.
And those Willy Wonka references? They’ve embraced them. They have a sign up on the factory floor letting you know the Oompa Loompas are sleeping, and they have a bunch of handmade “golden tickets” hanging up behind the candy counter that children no doubt handed them when their parents brought them in for a tour.
Marketing doesn’t always have to be glitzy and glamorous, and it doesn’t always have to scale to millions of people with every effort. Sometimes, slow, steady, focused growth is your best friend, and these factory tours are one very creative way to turn a packaged good from an occasional gift item into something people are glad to indulge in because it brings with it the happy memory of a great experience!
By the way, fun little side note about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Apparently, there’s a new movie coming out in November called Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory where Willy Wonka is going to be held responsible for his crimes and sent to prison. When he gets out of the clink, he has to face another kid named Charlie who’s this time leading a group of rotten youth determined to steal from his factory.
Thank goodness actual chocolate factories aren’t so dramatic!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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