Willy Wonka, eat your heart out!
Tony Wadley, md, The Chocolate Factory (Michton)
There is never a dull day when you're running a chocolate factory! I wouldn't say I planned a career in chocolate exactly, but after three years studying accountancy in South Africa, I knew I didn't want to be an accountant - so I decided to move to the UK and set up my own business - and confectionery seemed like a good idea at the time!
When I started the company in 1991 with my sister Michelle, we were based at a tiny rented place in Enfield designed for start-up firms. At first we just imported unusual confectionery products from Holland and Belgium and sold them on, but after a bit we started to make them ourselves. It was all trial and error - trying things out in the kitchen and seeing what worked. It's never that simple though. Things that work in the kitchen don't always work in the same way on an industrial scale, so we had to learn from our mistakes.
By 1998 we were bursting at the seams and we found this site in Swansea - which at 3,344m2 was a huge step up from our 465m2 site in Enfield. We were rattling around in the first few years, but it was just what we were looking for.
At first there was a mammoth amount to do, and no one else to do it. When you're running your own business, if something needs fixing - you fix it yourself, whether it's ensuring compliance with new hygiene legislation or allergen labelling laws, dealing with health and safety issues or equipment failure.
It's taken a few years, but today I can take time out of the business for holidays or travel and feel confident that the place will be run efficiently in my absence. I guess that could make you feel a bit redundant if you've been used to managing the day-to-day operations of your company for so long - but it's crucial because it frees me up to think more strategically about where to take the business in the future.
There is so much we want to do - but you have to focus on one or two major things a year so it's manageable from a cash flow perspective. In the last two years, turnover has grown 200%, but then we've also spent a lot of money on equipment, wages and so on.
One obvious opportunity is to really step up what we do in terms of building the site up as a tourist attraction. Children and adults love seeing how sweets are made. There are so many ways we can capitalise on the Willy Wonka theme in the way we handle our tours of the site: explain how products are made, and give visitors the opportunity to buy them, which is not something that would work in many manufacturing plants!
Take Easter eggs. We have moulds with liquid chocolate that are put on a chocolate spinner, which also vibrates, to ensure that the chocolate is evenly distributed in the shell. It's amazing for children to watch! The difficulty with this is eliminating risk and ensuring that visitors cannot compromise food hygiene at the site. Ultimately, we'd like to build a viewing platform, but in the short term we're going to revamp the front of the building to make it look more like a visitor attraction.
The other big project at the moment is switching to making our own marshmallow. We've just installed a marshmallow extrusion line that should be operational in three to six months. Making marshmallow sounds easy - you just heat sugar, glucose and gelatine, aerate it and extrude it onto a starch belt. Getting it right is going to take time though.
The chocolate's a bit easier. We buy it in as pellets or liquid from France or Belgium and when we're ready to use it we put it in kettles to melt it down. After that the molten chocolate goes to a tempering machine, which stops it from blooming - that nasty white effect you can get on chocolate - and then it's pumped to our depositors, which deposit it into moulds.
What sets us apart from the competition is that we make all the moulds ourselves. This basically means that we can turn bespoke products around for customers incredibly quickly because we're in complete control over the entire process. Today, we're making arrowhead-shaped dark chocolate dippers with plastic stems for a coffee chain. We talked to the customer on Monday, designed and produced the moulds Tuesday and started manufacturing and shipping them out by Wednesday.
At the other end of the scale, with a supermarket own-label product for Christmas, we'll start working with the customer months in advance, coming up with the concepts, drawing out the mould designs using CAD (computer aided design), producing the moulds, creating the product and packaging and sending over prototypes.
Juggling balls ...
We've always got 50 or so products on the go at any one time, from santa lollipops to gourmet chocolate products drizzled with cranberries for top end department stores. This can add a lot of complexity and inefficiency because the runs are short and you have to manage so many changeovers. It also means that we are running a pretty labour intensive operation, which is tough when wages are rising.
Like most manufacturers, we've done a lot of work on environmental initiatives, and now recycle more than 70% of our waste. We're also looking at installing a combined heat and power unit next summer to cut the utility bill.
Obviously, we're not making massive margins on the supermarket own-label business, but it brings in the volumes. Besides, apart from some specialist retailers and department stores, there isn't much of an alternative. There just aren't many independent chocolate retailers in the UK anymore, so you have got to try and build up good relationships with supermarket buyers and hope they don't switch them around too often.
Having said that, we do want to build up our own brands: The Chocolate Factory, Fred Holt and KoolKandy. We also want to develop a fair trade range, move into more export markets and drive the foodservice business. The catalogue ordering business is also going online, which should save money and create some new opportunities.
The fun bit is all the product development. I always try and go abroad before Christmas to do some competitive shopping and see what everyone else is up to in key markets like the US and France. The difficult bit is knowing what will be commercial!
It is a hard job when you're under pressure and things go wrong. But I have to remind myself that I'm running an expanding and profitable business as well as doing a juggling act. It's such a varied job. One day I'll be at an event in London talking about marketing and the next day I'll be back in Swansea fixing a machine!
INTERVIEW BY ELAINE WATSON
FACTORY FACTS
Location: The Chocolate Factory, Kingsway, Swansea West Industrial Park, Swansea, SA5 4DL. Tel: 01792 561617
Products: Moulded chocolate confectionery, mallow products, lollipops, novelty candy and chocolates
Operating hours: 8am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, but can ramp up to meet large or last minute orders
Employees: 35 production staff, seven office staff
Customers: all of the leading supermarkets, independent stores,department stores and the foodservice market
PERSONAL
Name: Tony Wadley
Age: 36
Career highlights: "Probably the thing I'm most proud of is handling the move from Enfield to Swansea without anything going disastrously wrong. After that, I'd say reaching the £1M sales mark was probably up there as a big achievement. We cracked open a bottle of champagne that night!"
Domestics: married to Rebecca. Just had baby Elliott (five months)
Outside work: looking after Elliott! Walking around the Gower peninsula
