Retiring engineer living his Chocollor chocolate dream
CARL SHARPE considers himself a late arrival to the world of entrepreneurship. AT 61, the father of five adult children and a mechanical engineer, who is about to retire from a 40-year practice in that profession, is building a promising chocolate-making business and fulfilling a long-held dream to be a manufacturer. Over the next year, he intends to move full time into his new vocation, with plans to expand the small enterprise, which he and his family started as a hobby seven years ago. “I wanted to make something value added with Jamaican raw materials, and after looking around, I figured agro-processing was the best bet,” said Sharpe, recalling the genesis of the business idea. He admits to being a chocolate lover, who for some time has been toying with the idea of chocolate-making. The nudge into realising his chocolate dream, after years of hesitation, came down to his health. “I had settled on chocolate-making for some time now and had been researching the topic extensively for years. However, in 2012 I was diagnosed with cancer and I decided that I was not going to die before making chocolate,” Sharpe told the Financial Gleaner in an interview at his Kingston office. He enrolled in an online chocolate-making course and spoke with a former employee of the defunct Highgate Chocolate factory in Jamaica ,who shared information how to set up a chocolate-making plant. The businessman also had a lot of encouragement from family members, with his 18-year-old daughter, Jamaica’s top-ranked national cyclist and triathlete Llori Sharpe, for whom Chocollor is named, leading the pack. In fact, Llori, a sport science student, has been his unofficial publicist and market development officer of sorts, who tested the first rudimentary products – chocolate bites – on her friends in high school a few years ago. “When she told me that her friends liked it and wanted more, I realised I was on to something,” Sharpe said. He registered the business name with the Companies Office of Jamaica in selling the products commercially in February of this year. Big break Beset in the initial stages of developing the idea by a lack of information on the chocolate manufacturing process, Sharpe finally got a break when he saw the product being made elsewhere in the Caribbean. In Trinidad, where he did engineering work, he hit the information jackpot when he discovered the Cocoa Research Centre at the St Augustine campus of The University of the West Indies. The entrepreneur says success has come only after several setbacks. He recalled that his earliest cocoa-roasting experiment utilising a big Dutch pot, was not very encouraging. “In the very early stages using the Dutch pot, I asked a friend to taste the finished product and to be brutally honest with me. She said: ‘Carl, I think you’re trying to kill somebody’,” he joked. Armed with that “encouragement”, he said he went back to the drawing board to find a more controlled method of roasting. Sharpe now makes fineflavoured, premium dark, milk and white chocolate bites and bars from 100 per cent Jamaican-grown cocoa beans at his home-based processing facility in St Andrew. He is now relocating manufacturing from his kitchen to what he says is a modified location at home, with assessment and guidance from the Jamaica Business Development Centre, JBDC. The raw material is bought mainly from cocoa farmers in the Peckham area of Clarendon, Mount Regale in St Mary, and from the agriculture ministry’s export division. His product is differentiated, Sharpe says, from other mass-produced imported chocolates that are made from bulk chocolate sourced from places like Madagascar, Hawaii, and several Central American countries. The small manufacturer accepts that he is operating in a niche market which has significant room for growth, and says he is not perturbed by competition