Chocolate producer keeps low profile

The manufacturing complex on Suckle Highway in Pennsauken looks as though anything could roll out its doors - carpet, wooden pallets, automotive distributor caps.

But step inside and enter a chocolate fantasy. The smell assaults you. Vats and vats of chocolate in various stages of production. Dark chocolate. Milk chocolate. White chocolate.

"Whatever the customer wants, that's what we'll give to them," the eager-to-please Bill Hayes, Pennsauken site manager for Swiss chocolate giant Barry Callebaut AG, said during a walk around the clean and industrial two-building complex.

Noted his colleague, Mark Adriaenssens, a "food engineer" and director of applied research and development for Barry Callebaut: "We want to be the motor of the chocolate industry, to make the wheels turn. The others can polish the outside of the car."

Barry Callebaut, a company that one cocoa-bean importer called a "sleeping giant," takes the chocolate business very seriously. The company, born from one named Cacao Barry and another named Callebaut, grinds and roasts tens of millions of pounds of cocoa beans a year at a plant in Eddystone. The raw chocolate ingredients from those cocoa nibs could top 19.2 billion doughnuts with frosting.

At the Pennsauken complex with the white-painted vats across the Delaware River, Barry Callebaut ships chocolate by the small pail, the 55-gallon drum, or the 45,000-gallon tanker to candy companies and commercial bakeries within a several-hour drive.

The Pennsylvania-New Jersey region has been a U.S. leader in chocolate production for many years. Cocoa beans are delivered to Delaware River ports. Several companies, among them the Hershey Co. (in the eponymous Hershey, Pa., of course), the Blommer Chocolate Co., of East Greenville, Montgomery County; and Wilbur Chocolate Co. Inc., of Lititz, Pa., produce chocolate goodies. A smaller company is Lyons & Sons Inc., of Camden, where a worker died last month after falling into a vat melting bricks of chocolate.

Barry Callebaut is part of this group but, for the most part, it is less recognized because it does not have a big-name brand. There is a reason for that. The company would like to avoid competing with its customers, which it supplies with chocolate as an outsourcing company.

Barry Callebaut says its outsourcing business is booming as U.S. manufacturers embrace outsourcing business models. Revenue grew 23.1 percent in North America in its most recent fiscal year, which ended last summer.

The company bought the Eddystone roasting plant in 2007 and said at the time that it would double the plant's capacity to 100 million pounds of cocoa beans a year. In 2008, the company added a chocolate-innovation lab to help customers develop new products at the Pennsauken complex. Between Eddystone and Pennsauken, Barry Callebaut employs 200 workers.

Harvey Weiner, owner of Dependable Distribution Services Inc. on Philadelphia's Pier 84 on the Delaware River, annually handles 175 million to 330 million pounds of cocoa beans, many of them headed to Barry Callebaut's roaster in Eddystone.

"People don't know Barry in the United States because they don't see a candy bar on the street," said Weiner, who called the company a sleeping giant. Globally, Barry Callebaut has operations in 40 nations and $4.5 billion in revenue.

The Swiss company is part of an overall trend of expanded cocoa-grinding capacity in Pennsylvania, Weiner said.

Chocolate producers and bakers find that outsourcing of their operations to Barry Callebaut or its competitors, such as Blommer, boosts their economic efficiency and allows them to focus on other operations, Barry Callebaut officials say.

"We can fill our lines with multiple customers, while their lines are just filled with their own," Hayes said.

Most candy companies and bakeries also lack the sharp focus on processing raw chocolate and cocoa beans. Barry Callebaut claims to have 1,700 recipes for chocolate for its customers. Among its U.S. customers is Hershey, which has an outsourcing contract with Barry Callebaut at its new plant in Monterrey, Mexico.

Barry has other U.S. operations in California, Illinois, and Vermont.

Adriaenssens opened the innovations lab in Pennsauken to put an "American spin" on new products for the U.S. chocolate market. Many say the U.S. mass chocolate market is not as sophisticated as the European market.

One recent day, Adriaenssens laid out on a counter two new products: cinnamon-flavored chocolate chips and a dark-chocolate nugget for Hershey. Other areas ripe for innovation, according to Adriaenssens and a colleague in Chicago:

Infusing chocolate with probiotic cultures that make it beneficial to digestion (in other words, making it good for you).

Reducing calories, or fats, in chocolate.

Jazzing up chocolate with specific fruity, nutty, or acidic tastes from cocoa beans from different parts of the world, similar to coffees or wines.

Adriaenssens, who translated a Belgian saying into English, said, "Chocolate is in our clothing."