Choc factory expands
Touch of Toowoomba: Metiisto Artisan Chocolate, February 26
TUCKED way on Croft Crescent, a team of dedicated chocolatiers is busy creating award-wining treats.
The folks at Metiisto started an expansion that will increase production, launch factory tours and extend trading hours.
Trevor Smith
We will be open from 1-5pm from Wednesday to Friday and on Saturdays we will be at the Cobb and Co markets.
We are also looking at running tours where we can take groups of people through the factory, talk to them about our chocolate and have them try our chocolate.
We are at the stage of scaling the business up and we have some pretty serious machines arriving soon.
We have to buy a roaster, a winnower, a grinder, the tempering machines, the packaging and the coco itself.
It is to do with demand in a sector that we cannot currently compete in.
We have big customers who buy our chocolate to use in restaurants, gelato shops and patisseries, but to go after those customers seriously we need to produce large volumes to drop our unit price.
It is a case of putting the cart before the horse.
We must get bigger so we can compete with the imported chocolate that everybody is using, and so we can get more people using Australian chocolate.
There is a 50/50 chance we will be successful.
Everything we do here is from the raw ingredients to the finished products and that requires a lot of investments.
The banks are wary of chocolate factories because they do not understand our business, and chocolate is a high-risk industry.
They won’t help us so we will be crowdfunding, though IndieGoGo.
Sarah Mengel
This is the second time I have been to Metiisto.
I live in Highfields but work nearby, so I thought I’d walk over and buy some chocolate.
I think the idea of a chocolate factory tour is cool.
When I was younger, I would visit my family in Adelaide and do the Haig’s Chocolates factory tour.
We would see the whole chocolate-making process and taste the coco beans.
It is the stuff you miss when you go the shops to buy a chocolate bar.
I like that the Metiisto chocolate is super smooth.