The little chocolate factory in Almonte has run out of chocolate on the heels of its extraordinary success.
Bars of Hummingbird Chocolate are literally flying off the shelves as demand outstrips supply. It's a good problem to have, to be so popular that everyone wants a piece of you.
And why not? Hummingbird Chocolate was recently voted the best bean-to-bar chocolate in the world.
And now the world wants it.
The sign on the door says it all: “Out of Chocolate” and for Louise Rozon, that is one sugar letdown.
“We’re from Gatineau and we drove from Gatineau to come here,” says Rozon, “and it's closed.”
The storefront is closed, but the factory is still running, now 7 days a week, trying to keep up with the incredible demand for this liquid gold, an award winning chocolate that has garnered this little company international status and business.
“It’s just crazy,” says Drew Gilmour, the founder of Hummingbird Chocolate, along with his wife Erica. “We've tripled our staff, we've raised our production fivefold but we could raise it twentyfold easily, and that's just for Ottawa stores.”
This spring at a ceremony in London, England, the Academy of Chocolate awarded Hummingbird’s Hispaniola bar the “Golden Bean” award, beating out other world chocolate heavyweights. Since then, Hummingbird owners Erica and Drew Gilmour have gotten calls from across Canada and around the world including Japan, the Middle East and Norway.
“We are making it as fast as we can but we can't keep up with demand,” says Erica Gilmour.
Part of the problem has been getting enough Hispaniola cacao beans from the Dominican Republic to make the chocolate. The Gilmours say they basically had to beg and plead for the last bags of these award winning beans from a company out of the Boston area, probably the last beans, Erica says, in all of North America, until the next harvest is ready.
This supply should last them another month, helping them supply all the Farm Boy stores and other local shops.
“These are good problems to have,” says Drew Gilmour, “We are overwhelmed but it is a great feeling.”
The Gilmours make their bars all by hand, importing cacao beans directly from farmers in the Dominican Republic and several other countries, paying them more than fair trade prices. The two were both international aid workers before starting their own chocolate company.
Back to Louise Rozon: a little hummingbird told us that the Almonte coffee shop called the Equator Coffee Roasters had a recent supply of the bars so we sent Louise Rozon there, only to discover yet another sign on the door of the coffee shop announcing it, too, was out of Hummingbird chocolate.
Amber Hall owns Equator Coffee Roasters, “It’s just as soon as we get it on the shelves, it's gone. So we had an order come in yesterday morning and it's gone by the end of the day.”
So, the Rozons leave empty-handed, but not upset.
“It’s good (the success of this company), good for the region,” says Louise.
The Gilmours know they've got to ramp up production, maybe expand their space somehow. They'll figure that out once they get a chance to come up for air.
