South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Business is hoppin’
Delray Beach chocolate factory is a wonderland of bunnies and eggs
The first showstopper to greet customers at 5150 Chocolate Co. in Delray Beach might as well be the factory’s Easter ambassador: a 300-pound chocolate egg sculpture named Edmund, a sack of cacao beans wedged inside its gap-toothed mouth.
Next to Edmund is a four-foot-tall chocolate snowman, a white-and-dark chocolate Fabergé egg, and a sculpture of spike-covered balls that looks suspiciously like a coronavirus.
“It really does,” chocolate-maker Tyler Levitetz, whose Instagram handle is @ the real willy wonk a, says with a laugh .“But it’s abstract art. I swear I made that before the pandemic.”
Confection-lovers aren’t just here for Levitetz’s eye-popping artisanal sculptures. It’s Easter crunch time at his multimillion-dollar chocolate factory and the shelves are adorned with dark-chocolate egg cartons and white-chocolate bunnies, chocolate bark and hollow pastel eggs adorned in spring flowers. Hundreds of Easter gifts have
flown off his shelves at one of 5150’s most profitable holidays.
“It’s one of the busiest times of year apart from Christmas and Valentine’s,” says Levitetz, whose factory is named after the police code for a mentally disturbed person. “People buy dozens of bunnies. We can’t keep the pastel eggs stocked long enough since we put them on Instagram.”
He does it all from scratch: At his
5,000-square-foot factory Levitetz,
31, turns sacks of raw cacao beans imported from small farms in Uganda, Peru, Guatemala and Ghana into bars of artisanal chocolate. At least a dozen chocolate-making machines, each thousands of dollars, are responsible for shelling, roasting, grinding and smoothing cacao beans before they are melted into liquid and molded into solid chocolate.
The chocolatey transformation from bean to bar can take days, sometimes a full week, he says.
“There’s a crazy amount of science to chocolate,” Levitetz says during a tour of his factory. “You can shape it as a liquid, or when it’s soft and clay-like, or as a solid. Right now we’re making chocolate with date fruit sugar.”
Levitetz is the scion of Purity Wholesale Grocers, a wholesaler in Boca Raton founded by his father, Jeffrey, that distributes specialty goods to 48 states. He cut his teeth at Chicago’s French Pastry School, one of few places in the country teaching the art of molded chocolate, followed by an apprenticeship under chocolate-maker Norman Love in Fort Myers.
With seed money from family, he spent five years building his chocolate factory at 1010 N. Federal Highway, a half-mile north of Atlantic Avenue near the FEC tracks. He bought a house a few blocks away and, though he owns a car, Levitetz skateboards to work every morning.
“For me, when I first opened, it was all about shock value. I was literally a kid set loose in a candy store. But what I learned is that fancy gimmicks and what people really like are two different things,” says Levitetz, whose factory is staffed with chocolatiers and pastry chefs. “And the classics are what people want.”
When Levitetz opened his chocolate factory in late 2019, he proudly experimented with confectionery gimmickry: Chocolate-shaped smartphones, Rice Krispy Treat “nugz” spray-painted green to resemble marijuana, and $1,000 chocolate bars studded with edible gold leaf. Once, a $100 Valentine’s Day Survival Kit contained a chocolate vibrator.
“Our Instagram once got shut down for selling drugs. People thought I was running a silk road out of my chocolate factory,” Levitetz says. “But I’ve been a little more reserved since the pandemic. I like to say we went from a chocolate party into a real business.”
That’s because Levitetz, in 2020, struck a massive partnership with Whole Foods Market to stock his single-origin chocolate bars at all 31 Florida locations. He also supplies bon bons and truffles to the Ritz-Carlton Fort Lauderdale and the Mondrian South Beach. And this month, Levitetz’s chocolate sculptures are on display at Delray Beach’s Old School Square.
The 1,200-square-foot gift shop inside Levitetz’s factory is a chocolate steampunk wonderland with bronze gears on the ceiling, exposed duct work and cocoa-brown brick walls. There are chocolate sculptures of the Incredible Hulk and Captain America’s shield underneath glass.
Pastry chef Carlos Coronado’s bonbons are particularly glossy, delicate half-orbs of chocolate airbrushed with color swirls and filled, often, with multiple flavors, like blood orange and pistachio, lychee and chai tea.
“Chocolate is such a noble product,” Coronado says. “And it always has a cool story, from the farm workers doing manual labor to harvesting beans to the process of turning it into chocolate.”