For six years, Tai Deacon has made it her Valentine’s Day tradition to bring home chocolate delights to her husband and their children.
Her go-to spot for that is Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory in Spruceland Mall, where she knows she can pick up huge strawberries dipped in homemade chocolate. Her daughter doesn’t care for chocolate so Deacon bought her a caramel apple.
“It’s the quality that we like,” said Deacon. “We started buying the strawberries and the caramel apples six years ago at the (Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory) store in Nanaimo.”
This is the busiest day of the year for the Prince George store and there was a steady stream of customers Wednesday morning, which franchise owner Trent Derrick knew was going to grow into a long lineup as the lunch hour neared.
It happens every year on Valentine's Day and Derrick and his staff were prepared for the onslaught. Normally he has two staff members on each shift but it was all hands on deck with a full crew of 14, half to deal with customers and half engaged in making those delightful strawberry sweets, made in small batches to be sold the same day.
“The chocolate-dipped strawberries are our most popular item on Valentine’s Day and we’ve gone from 30 flats to about 100 flats,” said Derrick. “We’ve set it up so quite a few of our orders are pre-ordered so that’s made it a lot more efficient and the lineups are quite a bit shorter. They can just show up with a receipt and walk out with the berries.
“Strawberries and caramel apples are our two big things going on. We’re one of the few places that sells ginger chocolate, you either love it or hate it.”
The long-stemmed strawberries come specially-ordered from a Vancouver supplier and Derrick says the large size of the berries is what sets them apart from the competition. Valentine’s Day is the one holiday of the year in which there aren’t many pre-orders and that adds to the crush of customers.
Derrick has been running the store for eight years and it’s turned into a thriving business in a great location, a few doors down from the Save-On-Foods supermarket. On Wednesday he was there at 4 a.m. preparing the strawberries and he planned on being there until well after closing.
Derrick admits it hasn’t been easy dealing with rising prices and supply chain issues that complicate his business decisions. In the past year, due to constraints on sugar supplies but mostly due to a bad production year for cocoa caused by drought, the overall cost of ingredients has spiked a whopping 34 per cent. Strawberry prices also tend to fluctuate, depending on the rules of supply and demand.
“It’s made it very challenging, balancing raising the prices and trying not to go up too much,” said Derrick. “The big thing is the cocoa shortage this year and I think we’re going to continue to see a rise in chocolate (prices). We’ll just have to monitor it really closely.
“We get ethically-sourced cocoa and it puts a bit more pressure on it is you’re conscious where you get your cocoa from.”
